Recently got a nice Condor machete; beautiful wood scales, but it's a little large and round for my hand. Shaping the wood should be easy, but I don't know about replacing the rivets (brass, I think) flush after reshaping, and dont want to fully replace the scales. Sound doable?

It should be easy to reshape the wood scales...rasp & sand paper should do it.  Of course a nice grinder would work a lot quicker.