[TheForge] Wooden Hammer Handles

[Mike Spencer]

"David Childress" <trollkeep at gmail.com> wrote:

> My first blacksmithing instructor claimed that handles should not
> matter.  If the hammer head was below your shoulder you should just be
> guiding it.

That's interesting.

I had a very clear notion of just what my hammer and I were doing
during a blow and even wrote up a description for someone once.  I was
really quite sure that I had an excellent intuitive grasp of what has
happening. 

Then I got a chance to shoot some high-speed images of hammering and
discovered that I was completely wrong.  See:

   http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/hammer.html

and in particular:

   http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/vec.html

where measurement taken from the images indicate that the hammer head
is still accelerating below shoulder height.  Those images were made
at a time when I was regularly doing a lot of hammering and was as
much in "top form" as I have ever been.

> when the head hits the only force should be from the
> change of direction.

Allowing a large margin of error for possibly sloppy measurements, the
vector diagram suggests that's true only near the very end of the
hammer's flight path.

I've never been strong enough to work for very long with a 5# hammer
unless I use it very differently from the way I swing my favored
2-1/2# hammer.  At a demo, I was once dared to prove I could do a nice
upset right-angle bend with properly radiused inside and sharp
outside, in 1/2" x 2" and accurately positioned at a predetermined
place.  I did it easily in one heat with a 5# hammer but I couldn't
keep that up for very many heats.

> He believed in heavy hammers and gravity, your strength should be in
> lifting the thing up to drop it again.

There was a blacksmith in Lunenburg, NS, an elderly guy when I met him
circa 1970, who did essentially that.  He used what I took to be a 5#
or possibly even heavier (diagonal-peen on one face) hammer with a
very short handle [1].  He raised the hammer to about shoulder height
directly over the anvil and brought it down more or less in a straight
line onto the workpiece, more pushing it or dropping it than swinging
it.  I thought it an odd and counterproductive style but he was an old
guy, had been doing it all his life and was still getting orders for
knives by the dozen.

Another aspect was that he was forging filleting knife blades --
rather broad and thin -- for the guys at the fish plant, for which he
may have figured out a particular style that worked for him, the
particular material and the product.  I never saw him forge anything
else as he passed away before I got around to paying him another
visit.  He might have done quite differently forging, say, graplin
flukes or ring bolts.

FWIW,
- Mike


[1] Or, for Frosty's benefit, haft or helve.  But only scythes have
    snaths and nibs, okay Frosty? :-)

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^