Wort des Tages
19 March 2026
buck
To press a heavy, shaped bucking bar against the bucktail of a rivet, while the opposite end (the rivet factory head) is hammered by a rivet gun, to upset the bucktail into an appropriate shape, most commonly a pancake-shape.
Warum dieses Wort
Riveting takes two hands that cannot see each other: the gun works one side of the skin, the bar the other. It is the mass of the bar, not how hard you shove it, that upsets the tail.
In use
You buck it, I'll shoot, and sing out if the bar walks off the tail so I'm not driving a smiley into that skin.
Written by our editors to show how the term is used, not a recorded quotation.