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
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Pascal Bertossa
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Stephen Lemon
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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:
/ mymechanics