Chicago Pneumatic Drill. Intended use? (2025)

Terry:

Thanks for confirming my description of an "old man" to buck the feed screw of a drill against. I've got an old man and "boiler ratchet" (ratchet drill with # 3 MT socket) in my shop. It saved our asses years ago when we had to open some holes and line ream them on a hydro turbine. We could not get any kind of powered drill in place and had about 8" of steel coupling flanges with slightly mismatched bolt holes. We opened the holes with a series of bridge reamers and finished with an adjustable reamer. The crew wore out a few pairs of leather driving gloves humping my boiler ratchet on that job. With all the resources of a 1200 Mw pumped storage hydroelectric plant at our disposal and a pretty free hand to buy tools and supplies for that job, nothing on hand in the plant tool cribs would work. I said I'd go into my basement at home and come back with something that would. It was the finest hour for my "old man" and boiler ratchet. We were taking turnings (chips) out by the pailfull, all done by hand labor on the boiler ratchet.

In our neck of the woods, there is a tall tale told, and the fellow it happened to told it to me firsthand. His name is Steve, and he was working as a carpenter. Steve is built about like a small jockey on his best day, not much to him. Steve saw an old 3/4" electric drill in my shop and remarked he hoped he never had to use one again. He told the following story: Steve took a job to install a television antenna (remember them ?) on the roof of some old farmhouse. The house was built with post-and-beam construction. Steve decided the way to affix to antenna was to drill a hole, holding the auger plumb, thru the roofing, sheathing, and thru a timber rafter or framing member. The auger was fairly hefty, large enough so a 1 1/4" or 1 1/2" steel pipe would slip into the hole it drilled. The idea was to pass the pipe thru a framing timber so as to get a solid anchorage against winds for the antenna. As luck would have it, the framing timber centerline was fairly close to the edge of the roof (gable roof with a fairly steep pitch to it). Steve got a 3/4" electric drill with a Greenlee or ship's auger bit and set to drilling. Unbeknownst to Steve, someone had driven a couple of lag screws into that framing timber in the attic of the house to tie something to that timber. Steve said he was sitting on the roof, kind of bracing himself to hold back against the torque of that drill motor, using a pipe handle for more leverage. All of a sudden, the drill jammed against the lag screws, and spun Steve out over empty space, off the edge of the roof. Steve, weighing maybe 110 lbs on his best day, said he let go the trigger of the drill as it was happening. The drill coasted down, taking him another portion of a turn out over empty space before stopping its rotation. Steve said he found himself hanging off the handles of that 3/4" drill, off the roof of a two story farm house. He said the auger bit was flexing a bit, and he found himself wondering if the auger would bend and break and let him fall to the ground. As he pondered the matter, he realized the only way he was going to get back onto the roof was to bump the trigger of that drill and hang onto it. He said that was just what he did. How (or if) Steve finished that job is something he never told me about. All he did tell me was to get rid of that old 3/4" electric drill (the kind with a massive cast aluminum housing and a 1" pipe holdback bar, non reversible) in my own shop while I was still in one piece.

I have discovered from my own experience, that if a power tool such as a drill motor or grinder jams and starts taking my hand along with it, my tendency seems to be to get a death grip on the tool and continue squeezing the trigger. What I have seen on some jobs is the older millwrights and ironworkers would station another man at the plug for a large drill, or at the air shutoff valve for an air drill. If anything like a jam-up and resulting wind-up or pinning of a man's hand (or worse) occurred, the man at the plug or air valve was able to quickly shut things down.

I can see why the old ironworkers called those big air drills "widowmakers". Back "in the day", the fall protection was an unknown topic. No harnesses, lanyards and tieoff points, no handrails with toe boards... In 1972, when I got out of engineering school, there was no fall protection in use on powerplant construction projects. If the ironworkers wore what appeared to be safety belts, it was to hang a bolt back, lining bar and spud wrenches off of. I had ironworkers tell me that tying off with a lanyard was more of a hazard (at least to their thinking) as it led to a false sense of security, or some similar explanation. I can recall going out on what the ironworkers called a "float" type of staging: a wood platform about 6' x 6', hung off the side of the structural steel on 4 ropes. No handrails, no toe boards, just a platform hung out in the air with a long ways down. As a little guy, about 1956 or so, my late father (an inspector) took me on a bridge job to see hot rivetting done, telling me to remember it and it might be the last time I'd see it happening. The crew had the rivet forge up on the bridge deck, and the riveting gang was out over the East River, high enough so a battleship could easily pass underneath the bridge deck. The rivetting gang was on a float staging, and when the heater tossed a hot rivet, the catcher leaned out off the float staging with his tin cone to catch the rivets. The rivetting gang was like a ballet or acrobatic act. I was hooked on it, seeing it as a kid. It was years later that I got to try my hand and drive hot rivets, but working on the ground in a railroad yard. When I got out of school in 1972, I was a cocky and very green young engineer. Soon enough, I was walking some of the open steel with the men, and soon enough, I was "riding the ball" (the overhaul ball on the whipline of a crane) to get up and down from the high boilerhouse steel on powerplant projects. If a few of us need a lift up or down, we rode in a "scale box" or "skip"- a steel plate box made on the job, hung off the hook on a set of "fourways" (matched slings). No fall protection, no load testing of the manbasket made to OSHA specifications... different times. But, in those day, for every so many million dollars spent on a heavy construction project, a man's life was expected to be lost on the jobsite. Now, any injury requiring medical attention, even a sprain or bad cut, is a reportable incident and a whole follow up process occurs. Different times, but I've seen it happen over the past 47 years. Nowadays, if an ironworker needed to make a larger diameter hole by field drilling up on the steel, he'd likely use a compact mag base drill with a hollow-end mill type cutter ("Rota Broach" or "Slugger"). A lot easier and nicer all around, for sure.

I remember the times the jobsite siren would sound and we'd get word a man had been killed on the site. We'd all walk off immediately and not return to work until the next morning. Engineers, supervision, and crafts all walked out that gate when a man was killed. I designed a good bit of work on powerplant sites, and ran some jobs, and am proud I never had a man killed nor seriously injured, either stateside or overseas under really backwards working conditions. The old air drill is nice to look at and reminisce about, but the name "widow maker" had some grim truth to it. I am glad we have moved away from those working conditions, with all the complications, oversight and red tape.