1918 Aircraft Rivet Hammer - Restoration

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. Huge thank you to all of my Patreon and PayPal supporters and specially to: Paulina Zamora sunniva thingstad SA Graver Joel Miller Joan Casanovas afreeflyingsoul acemaclace Zachary Grimes Mohammed Ali Al Juboori Allan Mckenzie audi4444player brian Boots Clément BERNARD Conor Fowler Dave Ahern Dawson Mertz Harrison Hughes Ian Hutchinson Jake Joel Margolis Julie Smith Kersten Rienow Llewellyn Schubert Lucy Lole Mark Anderson Martin Kunz Matthew Ruediger Moeparker Mr Lee Webb Pascal Bertossa Rybread Sasan Hezarkhani Sheepless Stephen Lemon terry day Thibaut Hiegel Wambaquamba XxJonathXx Yitch 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 and costs of this restoration: I was working on this project over 2,5 weeks $30 flex hone $10 steel wire brushes $20 dinner for my friend who helped me welding :-) 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. Subscribe for more of my content. I’m uploading videos about mechanical stuff, as new creations and buildings and also restorations. Thank you for watching :-) My Patreon Page: