Uh oh! MOD sporran cantle trouble

[Tobus]

I'm hoping someone here can help me out with some advice.

I've finally gotten around to building a sporran body for my brass MOD "Jacobite style" cantle. I'll be building several 'bags' for it, in fact. This first one was just to test my pattern and see what needs adjusting. Last night I was in the process of un-snapping the new bag from the cantle when one of the 'buttons' popped out of the cantle.

I do not have a photo of the detached button or the inside of the cantle. But those of you who own these cantles know what they look like. There are four of them on each inside face (4 on the front piece, 4 on the back). These are what the bag snaps onto, via a snap that's stitched into the leather. These buttons have a 'shoulder' that lays flush against the inside of the cantle, with a smaller diameter 'dowel' protruding from the shoulder that is simply pressed into a small hole in the face of the cantle. The dowel is the same length as the thickness of the brass plate, so it is flush on the back side. You can see two of them in the photo below (towards the bottom of the cantle; the other two are hidden by the belt):



I guess this one was just loose, or didn't have enough bind to keep it in the hole. I do not see any evidence of anything else used to keep it secure. So how do I fix it?

As far as I can tell, there are probably three options.

1. Press the button back into the hole on the cantle and solder it from the backside (which in this case, luckily, is the back of the sporran, not the front). It would just leave a small ugly dab of solder. I hesitate to try soldering on the inside mating surface and pressing it in, for fear that the button will not fully seat itself to the shoulder. I can see that solder has been used elsewhere inside the cantle, especially near the top where the rim meets the back plate. The main problem with this is that I'm not exactly a whiz at soldering. Every time I've tried it, it turns into an ugly mess.

2. I could try pressing the button back into the hole and then soldering around it on the inside, much like a fillet weld. But again, this might turn into a mess, and I'm not sure how much holding power it would have.

3. Press the button back into the hole on the cantle with no solder, and just use a sharp punch from the back side to 'peen' the dowel, spreading it out and binding it in the hole. This is a common method that I've used in gunsmithing. I just haven't done it with brass before, which is much softer than steel. And this dowel is much smaller than anything I've peened before. I would obviously need to do it with caution.

So do you have any other ideas that might work?