tapometers, percussive tweakers, and swing presses

 In other words... hammers.

Such a simple thing, a hammer: just a hard weight on the end of a handle, also known as a rock tied to a stick, also known as a club, and if you take away the handle, you've got the very first tool ever used by a proto-human.

 The expressions in the title line are just a few of the many fun phrases we humans have come up with to describe our favorite tool, the one used for one of our favorite activities: bashing stuff.  Here's a few more...

• bash-driver
• thumb detector
• jeweler's x-ray
• micro-adjustor
• attitude alignment tool
  

 I'd be tickled pink to hear of any others my readers might know.  Feel free to comment with others.

 Ever since I was a kid, I've found it amusing that we humans need more than one kind of hammer.  I think at some early age, I had the notion that being able to hit one thing with another thing was a problem easily solved using whatever was handy, and that hammers were sorta glorious luxuries which one would use if one happened to remember to bring it from the toolbox.  If one forgot, a nearby adjustable wrench, or the meat tenderizer from the kitchen, or a brick - seemed perfectly adequate.

 My epiphany - that bashing stuff could be a craft in itself requiring specialized bashing instruments - came when my mother decided that we were going to tear up the driveway behind our house, to plant a garden.

 Said driveway was, at the time, 80 years old, six inches thick, and laid down by people who really cared.  That concrete must have taken a year to cure, because despite having zero reinforcing rods or wire in it, it was un-cracked, as solid as bedrock, and as hard as a bad day.  The solution to this inconvenient mass was an eight pound sledge hammer and a twelve year old boy who had read Tom Sawyer.  As a hormonal, frustrated, abused, slightly mental teenager, I had anger and other emotional issues to work out, so I thought that being given the opportunity to destroy something with a hammer was a fine opportunity, and I set to work with gusto.

 I mention Tom Sawyer because I hadn't been breaking cement for more than ten minutes when a small crowd of curious kids gathered around.  Destroying things is one of the natural passtimes of children, so once they got the idea that I was being allowed, nay, even encouraged to obliterate part of my family's  property with a hammer, well... that made me seem to them like the luckiest kid on the block.  Presently, one of them asked if he could have a go, and the rest you can easily guess if you have read Mark Twain.

 That unforgettable afternoon left an impression, I think: that specialized bashing implements are even cooler than regular bashing implements. (and also that other people are easily manipulated into doing your work for you - how then did I ever fail to go into management?)

 Some time after I left home and moved into an apartment, I bought my first hammer - a claw hammer with a fiberglass handle.  I bought one more - a short handled heavy "drilling sledge" with a steel handle - all one piece - at some point during my first marriage, in order to poke a hole through the foundation wall for an electrical conduit.  That seemed to suffice until my second marriage and my second house, when I accidentally started a collection.  I haven't gone nuts with it, but the other day it occurred to me to wonder how many hammers we owned, so I went through the house and shop and collected them all:

...and yanno, seven doesn't seem like all that many, even to my wife, because there are no extras and each has a purpose.

from L to R:

•  small ball-peen used for metal-working, one of three frequently-used hammers which hang on my workbench
• small claw-hammer that my wife owned when we first met, lives in a toolbox in the house
• the fiberglass clawhammer I mentioned above, it also lives on my workbench
• orange soft plastic "dead blow" hammer, the head is filled with steel shot so it has no rebound - mostly used to seat work in the mill vise
• a "heavy hammer" or "club hammer" - 5 lbs, also lives on my bench
  
• a "drilling sledge" - 5 lbs, originally used for hand-drilling through masonry using star drills
• full-sized long-handled eight-pound sledge - I bought it to break up part of a concrete sidewalk. The wooden handle it came with broke when I got tired and missed something with the head, hitting the object with the handle. The yellow handle is a fiberglass-reinforced plastic handle claimed to be unbreakable which epoxies into the head. It's held up amazingly well with a tremendous amount of use

 This seems to be about all the hammers I can find a use for.  There are a hundred other specialized kinds, from hammers used by blacksmiths to hammers used by geologists exploring for oil or uranium.  Here's a guide showing fifty-five different kinds: https://www.engineeringclicks.com/types-of-hammers/