[TheForge] Wooden Hammer Handles

[Peter Fels & Phoebe Palmer]

At a CBA demo years ago, Rick Smith drew out a billet of fancy pattern 
welded steel in one or 2 heats using a big hammer ( 6-7#s? or more). He 
struck so many hard blows for such a sustained period that the 
spectators started rubbing their arms and shoulders unconsciously.
He was not a real big fellow and i was amazed.
It looked like  he didn't begin lifting the handle at the moment of 
impact like i usually do, but rather, waited while the rebound rotated 
the handle to a nearly  vertical orientation. So when he began his lift 
the hammer head was oddly  close to his chest, balanced atop the handle. 
Then he shoved it straight up as high as he could reach on his tip toes 
before jerking it back down to start the down stroke. Almost seemed like 
he was hanging from the handle at the apex.
He moved a very impressive mass of steel...

No Jerry, it wasn't Handel's 4th movement...he did that in private..pf

Mike Spencer wrote:
> "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? :-)
>