"He who has never raised a BFH in honest anger, has not done much work on these old trucks, or is heavily sedated, or is a big fat liar. A prerequisite to working on these literally economically pointless money pits is to be marginally unstable. That picture captures that emotion succinctly."
Carl,
When I was young and unskilled I would have agreed with you. I'm a geologist and that all changed for me one day when I was out doing some exploratory drilling and the drill rig broke down in the middle of nowhere. The driller had a portable stick welder on his chase truck and some scrap metal. Using what he had on hand he made a temporary repair that allowed us to get the job done.
When I complimented him on what he had done he said "Ray, this drill rig is an inanimate object and I am not going to be outsmarted by an inanimate object". That was decades ago but his words stayed with me.
From that point forward the big hammers around here are used to pound stakes into the ground or to break up rocks. Some of what I read, like using a big hammer to remove a stuck differential pinion pin or pushing a vehicle with a "stuck" engine down a steep hill, seems completely Neanderthal.
I know that's not a view held by everybody, though. Recently I saw a guy use a big hammer to try to install a harmonic balancer. All he succeeded in doing was to deform the front of the hole the crankshaft is supposed to go through, ruining a perfectly good part. A simple piece of threaded rod screwed into the crank snout would have pulled that balancer right on. Oh well, at least it was amusing to watch.
Ray W
