WHERE CAN I BUY THIS AIR IMPACT SCREWDR?
This really confuses me – if you google search “air impact screwdriver” you’ll get the wildest bunch of listings. This tool looks like the air equivalent of the new cordless impact driver drills – it’s 69.00$ I can’t find it anywhere but on a New Zealand auction/trading listing (NZ Trade) with several hurdles to pay/ship. Does anybody know where this can be purchased in the US?
Replies
Probably someone who sells to the manufacturing trades would carry something like this.
DanH, no, something about this tool seems unusual. Who am I to say but I think this sort of air impact screwdriver is going to be the next big thing in the trades - it appears on the web to be related to line manufacturing, maybe just emerging to the construction level. (I could be way off on this)I have a cordless impact but I don't want to beat it to death with 2000 screws in a deck if I can switch over to air impact. If this tool is available in the US I'd like to see the listing. Anybody know?
I've got two of them by Ingersoll Rand. Paid $15. a piece a couple years ago. How bad do you want them?
Or, you could try Sioux Tools.
People's dreams are made out of what they do all day. The same way a dog that runs rabbits will dream of rabbits. It's what you do that makes your soul, not the other way around.
- Barbara Kingsolver
Mike, They have the impact and the 1/4 click chuck?
Try Tech-tools and Contact East. A google should find them.
Don't know if they have that kind of style, but they all all kinds of power screw drivers with adjustable torgue used for assembly.
I tried both of those. I couldn't find anything on Tech Tools. On Contact East it looked like there were possibilities - there is a chuck adaptor on the opening page (though you can't even find out a price without joining "alababa") and there were 0 results for "air impact screwdriver"
Edited 5/21/2005 7:23 pm ET by Fonzie
that looks like an Harbor Freight tool.
Don't drive yerself nutz; pick up a reasonably priced ½"-drive impact gun and buy a ¼"-hex X ½"-sq. adapter for it so you can run all the screw bits you probably already have.
Dinosaur
A day may come when the courage of men fails,when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship...
But it is not this day.
Dino,
It would be less wobbly though and soooooo much more convenient to have that chuch built in.
It would be less wobbly though and soooooo much more convenient to have that chuch built in.
Granted...but one thing you gotta remember is that driving any kind of screw except a Torx, Allen, or Robertson with a dedicated air-impact motor is kinda looking for trouble. Thirty years ago when I worked as a mechanic, everybody had a gizmo called an impact driver... which was not a pneumatic tool, but a hammer-swatted screwdriver with a torquing mechanism built in. The harder you swatted it, the more it torqued...but it drove into the screwhead as it torqued. So the bit stayed in the screw. This was often the only tool aside from an EZ-out that could get the crankcase screws out of Japanese motorcycle engines in the years before they switched over to Allen screws.
Didja know that the Phillips cross-head pattern was developed at the express request of Henry Ford I, when he was searching for a way to prevent over-zealous but unskilled assembly line workers from overtorquing them and stripping the theads? The Phillips screw head pattern was specifically designed so the bit would spin out of the head before the threads stripped.
I find my DeWalt gyprock screw gun more than adequate to run in anything short of lag bolts; I even use it to drive Tap Cons. There's enough light-duty 'impact' shock in the release mechanism to drive home even 3½x#14's into bone dry studding when I install new doors in old houses.
So, I guess the point is, I don't see the point of a dedicated pneumatic impact screwdriver except perhaps in an assembly-line setting where you'd be driving appropriate fasteners all the time. For the rare occasion in carpentry when you need more beef than a good gyprock gun can deliver, get out the full-sized impact gun and use an adaptor. Just my two bits worth....
Dinosaur
A day may come when the courage of men fails,when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship...
But it is not this day.
Dino, That is great counsel - thanks. And when you think about it there are several companies that are aware of how many screws are spinning these days. They probably know the impact is like killing a gnat with a bazooka. I'm thinking the only problem with running screws with my air drill is the high rpms- the gearing. I notice there are air screwdrivers (in the shape of a drill) with much lower rpm, around 1800. I have a bid on one on Ebay now. Thanks again.
If I'm not mistaken, the reason they use pneumatic tools on assembly lines is two-fold. First, is durability. A couple drops of oil every once in awhile and a pneumatic drill will run forever. Second, is cost. An air compressor can run a few dozen air tools at a fraction of the cost, compared to individually powered electric tools.
Forgot to add, neither of these apply to us. Running at most a couple hundred screws a day.
Edited 5/22/2005 9:41 am ET by dustinf
I can assure you that the cost of the tool has very little to do with it. Even the lowest-paid assembly line workers cost $150 a day, once you pay taxes and insurance, and add on bennies for a higher-paid worker and you're up in the $500 range. An increase of even 1% in productivity is worth a several hundred dollar investment in tools, especially if the tools will be used on other shifts.The main argument for air tools is probably reproducibility -- the torque on an air tool can be controlled much more accurately than with a standard electric tool.Beyond that, weight is a major factor, both in terms of productivity and in terms of reduced workman's comp costs for repetitive injury.Size is also important, both to allow the tool to get where it's needed and to allow several tools to be available at a workstation.
I think you're right about tool durability in assembly line applications, generally, and especially for something like a pneumatic drill. Impact guns, however, do have a tendency to eventually fail due to chipped anvils. It makes sense, after all, for something that is designed to smack itself metal-against-metal a couple of hundred times per second to eventually do some damage to one part or the other....
Another reason for industrial applications to use air tools used to be the fact they were less likely to be stolen by assembly-line workers, since very few people had compressors at home to drive them. This isn't as true as it used to be, though....
Dinosaur
A day may come when the courage of men fails,when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship...
But it is not this day.
Yes, but it does apply in a year and a half when the price of one replacement battery is over half the cost of the original package. I checked at "Batteries Plus" on the price to "rebuild" a battery, and it's not a cost advantage.'It's getting to where the air is almost always out on our job. I'm looking into it. Like you say, air tools are very friendly and durable.