remove sound of hammering (nail driving) in background

I have an outdoor recording of a singer recently transferred from reel to reel to Audacity 2.0.3. with the .exe installer on Windows 7 Ultimate. Unfortunately, a neighbor was building a deck or something and his hammering is heard in the background. I have tried- DELETE, (de)AMPLIFY, SILENCE, AND POP MUTE (not sure I understand how to use it correctly) on every “wham” of the hammer but I am not satisfied with the end result in any of these fixes. I would appreciate any suggestions. Thanks, Mike.

I have an outdoor recording of a singer recently transferred from reel to reel to Audacity 2.0.3. with the .exe installer on Windows 7 Ultimate.

Let me read that back to you. You have a clean recording of a singer on reel-to-reel and you transferred it to Audacity in a way that picked up hammering?

Koz

The hammering sound was part of the original reel to reel recording.

Then you’re dead. The hammer is now a performer in your show. Past going in to each one and silencing it, I don’t believe there is any other way, and that is going to leave holes in the show. I think all the click and pop removers are going to leave trash behind. The hammer isn’t a classic vinyl record pop.
Koz

Thank you for advising me. Yes, I had located each individual ham-er event and tried various fixes as mentioned in original post. Yes SILENCE leaves very short gaps of no sound which I may decide are preferable to the hammering (the guy took 5-6 strikes for each nail!). I wonder if I could introduce some generic noise (white, pink, brown) into those gaps at the same db as precedes them and mask the “harsh” transitions from sound to silence back to sound?

It would be a very time consuming process to fix each nail bang, but a reasonable repair is possible using the EZ-Patch plug-in available here: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/ez-patch/22093/1

This short repair (less than 2 seconds of audio) took me about 5 minutes:

Thanks Steve, I utilized your (Are you Steve Daulton named in the plug in?) EZ Patch. Yes it is quick and effective. I had figured out I could copy/paste adjacent sounds to make a good fix, obviously you made the task very easy. Mike.