Rivet advise please

On Aug 25, 5:23 pm, Orval Fairbairn
wrote:

That is a sure way to booger up a rivet! Use the proper tools! The cheap
"air hammers" available from Harbor Freight, etc. do not work well --
they have the wrong stroke.

I'm not sure I understand. I'm whacking a steel drift with a hammer of
the steel-head-on-handle variety, there are no pneumatics involved.
The hammer at hand was a claw hammer of the sort on every carpenter's
tool belt, but I've also used machinists hammers, ball-peen hammers,
dead-bow mallets, and also the back side of the odd monkey wrench. It
was all good, or at least good enough.

I imagine that if I did have my HF "heavy duty" air hammer handy, a
good whack on the drift with its barrel would have done the trick. As
you point out, its binary trigger and rough action sure enough make it
pretty worthless as a rivet-driving tool of the pneumatic variety.

And yeah, your point about using the proper tools is well taken. But
we're just exploring the boundaries of what constitutes good-enough
tools.

Thanks, Bob K.