I recently updated my thread about my new lathe, and while it's an awesome machine that I'm really happy with, it, oddly, doesn't excite me quite as much as another item I got at the same time from Hare and Forbes.
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It's a soft faced hammer. I've never had one. Anything I cared about hitting, I'd use a steel hammer and a piece of jarrah decking or lump of random pine, or just the bit of wood by itself. Or just the steel hammer. Don't judge.

So now I can hit things the proper way. But if you look at the picture carefully, something interesting is apparent. There's one hammer with a plastic and copper face, but there's also 3 other faces - more plastic, aloominum and steel. That's, potentially, 1.5 more hammers. Could I go from zero soft hammers to not just one, but some number more than one hammers?

Reading another thread, it was mentioned that making a hammer was a common project for learning lathe work. I never did that. My lathe experience at school extended as far as making a centre punch. With poor knurling. It's not a very good centre punch, and I certainly never graduated to higher-level projects, such as hammers or acetylene balloons.

Maybe time to step up?

The diameter of the yet-unused faces was 46mm. I had nothing remotely near that to make the body from. The biggest on hand was 30mm hot rolled round bar, so I went to look over the secondary steel rack:

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From where I was able to pick out a couple of pieces of precision tubing with the aim of laminating them into a >46mm dia lump.

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A quick trip to the "yes it's carbide, but still is a cold saw" gave me these:
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They'd just need their preservative coatings peeled off, the parts pushed together and I'd be on my way to 2nd hammer!


To be continued...
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