[TheForge] Wooden Hammer Handles

[Peter Fels & Phoebe Palmer]

A very interesting analysis Mike. Wish we could run differing styles of 
hammering through the same imaging process.
As i recall, Beau Hickory was an advocate of dropping the hammer head 
straight down and only varying the tilt of the hammer face,
I've been messing with a more ballistic stroke and thinned handle necks.
EA Chase has a favorite hammer with no thinning of the neck and the 
faces smeared laterally..heavy body english at the point of impact, 
looks like...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? :-)
>