1918 Aircraft Rivet Hammer - Restoration

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In this video I'm restoring an aircraft rivet hammer.

This pneumatic rivet hammer was sent to me by one of my subscribers from Germany, thank you for that. It's a very cool and unique looking tool, I've never seen this tool before and that's why I decided to restore it and make a video for you guys. I was told that this tool was stored in the basement when they had a flooding, that was probaly the reason why it was rusty and didn't work anymore. I had a few ups and downs during this restoration. The cast of the aluminium handle was very porous and a lot of tiny holes appeared after fine sanding and polishing, also the welding didn't work quite well. I first tried to TIG weld, but that didn't work at all. For the visible steel parts I decided to make them black, for the optic and also as rust protection. My idea was to sandblast those parts to make a nice and even finish, but because I'm using very fine glas bead all the small damages in the surface from the rust were still visible. So I had to sand them all away. The bluing worked very well and it makes a nice contrast to the polished parts in my oppinion. The old air fitting was put together out of three different pieces made of brass to get the right thread size. I didn't really liked that option and decided to make a new one. I really wasn't pleased during the restoration just because of the porous cast of the handle and I thought about it for a long time to not even publish the video because of that. But as soon as I tested it after the restoration I had a huge smile all over my face, this is a very cool tool and it ended up working perfectly fine. I hope you don't judge me to hard for my very bad welding abilities and the bad outcome of the aluminium handle.

I hope you like my work and the video.

Timestamps:

00:00 preview
00:25 pre-testing
00:33 disassembling
02:22 showing all the parts
02:39 cleaning the parts with the parts washer
02:57 removing rust with MC-51 rust remover
03:26 restoring the aluminium handle
06:43 making a new pin for the trigger on the lathe
07:07 restoring the front piece (hammer head)
07:31 restoring the adjustment screw
08:00 making a new air fitting on the lathe and mill
09:35 roughly cleaning all parts for sandblasting
10:56 masking for sandblasting
11:14 sandblasting the visible steel parts
12:04 sanding the sandblasted parts
13:00 restoring the small pin
13:16 bluing the visible steel parts
14:09 cleaning the mechanical parts
15:43 showing all the parts before reassembling
16:10 reassembling
18:23 showing the finished product
19:08 final testing

Time of this restoration:

This Project over 2,5 weeks

My camera:
Panasonic HC-V180

If you have any questions about the process, machines I'm using or other stuff, just ask me in the comments. I read them all and I try to reply as soon as possible.

Sorry for my bad English, it's not my language. I try my best to improve my technical English.

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Thank you for watching :-)

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