Removing chin cup on FM 480 cage?

[SipHockey 1]

These chin cups appear to be permanently fastened to the cage with rivets. Does anyone have any tips on removing the chin cup? I am guessing once it's removed it wouldn't be that hard to re attach to another cage with something from the hardware store. 

[Neal 41]

You'll have to drill out the rivets to remove it.  Your best bet will be if you can clamp the strap to a block of wood to keep it from moving.  Then to attach it to the new mask you could use new rivets or maybe re-purpose some bolts & nuts from a helmet.  They would be short enough, I think.

[colins 246]

 

I've removed them before without having to drill them out. A pair of pliers should be able to squeeze/deform them to separate the pieces.

To replace them you could use short screws / helmet nuts, but I was a little uncomfortable having any metal with edges/ridges that close to your face. Most Bauer and some other CCM chin cups use plastic snaps, which can be removed and reused if you're careful. Like the ones in this pic:

I've checked some dept stores to try to find similar plastic snaps but with no luck, but I'm sure they can be sourced from somewhere if you looked hard enough.

Instead - you could get a cheap plastic rivet gun and some short plastic rivets at a place like Harbour Freight. I ended up using a rivet gun (metal not plastic) and putting new metal rivets on one of my masks - worked well, and pretty much looks like it came that way from the factory. Key was using the right sized rivets in the gun.

 

colins

[SipHockey 1]

Thanks for the tips guys. It really makes no sense to me that they would make these cages with fixed chin cups.