I’ve taken apart quite a few old wooden boats in the process of restoring them to their former glory. I’ve noticed that there are two fasteners that always seem to last forever: bronze through-bolts, and copper rivets. Through-bolts are nice, but they’re expensive and you need a good size hole to use them. Copper rivets can mostly do a similar job but are much less expensive and only need a very small hole to be installed. Rivets are perfect for smaller pieces of wood that need to be joined on smaller boats, although they’re used successfully on big boats as well. The process of riveting is very simply making another head on the pointy side of a copper nail. This is done by slipping a tight washer over the nail, cutting it to length, and ‘mushrooming’ the cut end into a nail head shape using a ball peen hammer. The difference between through-bolts and rivets is that the joint must be securely clamped together before riveting. There are special made ‘English’ rivets that have a square shank and conical washers that work well, but for most purposes these plain copper nails (used for roofing) and washers work fine. Here’s a quick video of the riveting process. In the video, the joint has already been clamped, the holes drilled, and the nails inserted.
I’m backing up the nail head with an actual clenching iron for riveting and clench nails, but you can use any heavy hunk of metal, like a small sledge hammer. These little rivets are actually quite useful around the house as well. I recently repaired a wooden dish drying rack with some small copper rivets, and I think it’s now the strongest part of that cheap thing.