Appreciation post: hand tools on the firebox versus a mag drill, and I know which one I'm grabbing now
Spent 3 days drilling out staybolt holes on a 60 inch boiler in Gary last month, and I started with the hand drill because that's how the old guys on my first crew did it. By the second day my arms were shot and I was off by about a 16th on two holes, which meant reaming them out and doing it all over. My partner finally handed me the mag drill and we knocked out the rest of the pattern in under 4 hours with dead straight holes. The old timers weren't wrong for their time, but there's no prize for doing it the hard way when the plate doesn't care how you got the hole there. Anybody still running all hand tools on jobs like this, or did you switch over too?