Thread: Being the Bevel Up Plane Guy with an Anvil

Estwing sells a 4 pound cross pein hammer here with a hickory handle (wood is 90 degrees off, though) - a whopping $20 or so off of amazon and the head is actually hardened and will take and keep a polish. It's not the equivalent of a really good hammer, but really good forged blacksmiths hammers are really expensive.

While whacking the guillotine today at lunch to establish the gap between bolster and shoulder (as in, the tang), the head flew off of the hammer.

The issue? Two fold - the hammer has the double taper eye, the head is surprisingly decent (but should be, despite the cheap price, there's no reason it should be cast junk like the junk of yesteryear), but the top part of the eye tapers out drastically and some wise guy probably encouraged by a lawyer figured it would be a good idea to make the taper on the bottom small and the top really large so that the head couldn't fly off of a hammer.

Another lawyer who wears two belts and a pair of suspenders set up a process where the handle is glued, then wedge, and then two more circular metal rings are installed. I hate that stuff. I think it weakened the handle in combination with the taper and broke some of the hickory fibers. I broke the rest. this hammer has only had perhaps a thousand swings in anger and maybe a little less.

Estwing 4lbs Blacksmith Hammer with Hickory Wood Handle, 14" EBH-414W | Zoro

it looks like this. At some time in the future, I will hand make some seriously good forged hammers, but if they're that hard, they will actually dent my anvil with errant strikes. My daughter put a little dent in the anvil when I asked her if she wanted to two hand the hammer and hammer orange metal - first swing not flat to the face and completely missed the steel. Miscalculated that one!

I don't keep hickory on hand and not even sure I have ash. the handle that came in the hammer is overly long and could be used through three or four more of the same break, but I got the bright idea to see if gombeira or katalox would be suitable for a hammer. i can't think why not - they're stronger than hickory in every measure by a lot, but one never knows if woods like that get brittle by age. A quick search says no, so the only real issue is sizing the hammer from a turning blank given it's now a couple of years old and really dry, and still on the order of about 1.2 times the density of water.

I have much of it left around here because I think it's just too hard for chisel handles, and too dense. The handle will be musical (translate too much information to the hand - maybe violently), but I typically wear gloves to prevent blisters and on the off chance that I have a mind slip and touch hot metal. Black heat with just a quick touch still makes your fingertips smooth and no fingerprints.

Mexico and central america here are a trove of interesting stuff - gombeira, of course cocobolo, kingwood (sublime, but expensive), snakewood, katalox, wamara - probably makes kingwood look cheap, and so on. None of these are used for high quality hammers probably just because they're a pain to work, but I can belt grind them to shape if workholding is an issue.

one of the things I hadn't even thought about is the safety issue of a hammer head actually separating mid strike and flying. Lucked out and this one didn't go far and landed harmlessly on the floor.

And no, the handle had never been struck.

When I insert the handle, since the fat part of the taper is on the top, I'm going to flip the hammer upside down. I need not breaking more than I need safety from flying off.

Hate those round metal rings and overdoing it with hanging handles- too much of a good thing is only wonderful when liberace declares it.

I'd guess gombeira is actually about a 4000 dent hardness wood. it's harder than wamara (3700, actually tested), stronger and denser, but somehow the formula estimate for gombeira is 3400.

I know you guys have a lot of twisty woods there that are super hard. The nice thing about katalox and gombeira is they may be a little interlocked here and there, but they generally are straight and relatively inexpensive and even turn nice aside from the feeling that someone is pushing the edge out of them a little (cut resistance).

"Hard" & "tough" are very distinct properties when it comes to hammer handles, I think. I put a blue-gum handle on a splitting axe a few years ago, it's one of the hardest, if not the hardest wood round here. It lasted less than half a cord of wood's worth of splitting & broke clean at the head - way too brittle for a handle! I replaced it with a handle made from a less-hard wood but with a reputation for toughness (spotted gum) and it's still going strong some years later. Hickory is renowned the world over for being the #1 handle wood so there must be something to the legend, the old axemen of my father's generation certainly swore by it & would have nothing less on their workaday axes...

I also have an aversion to metal wedges in handles. They have a tendency to work loose no matter how carefully I install them. A well-placed wooden wedge seems to stay put more reliably. I guess a large hammer used to beat metal against metal would have to be one of the severest tests of hammer & handle & fixing methods one could devise, so it could take you a while to figure out the best solution here...

Cheers,

You're probably right about the hammer duty. My only blacksmith hammer is 2 1/2 pounds. It still has its original handle, but I bumped up from it when it was apparent that it's not enough to establish tangs with a guillotine or make good use of a heat to move metal.

100% agree on metal wedges, and in this case - the gross circular type driven in by machine. I think they sever fibers and crush stuff and start the problem.
https://ofhandmaking.files.wordpress...4517267913.jpg

I also suspect you're right about the standardized tests not being that useful for hammer handle guessing. As in, gombeira is stronger in every way including bending tests, but maybe shock type work is not well described.

There's plenty of hickory around here. If the gombeira breaks, I'll find a reasonable shagbark green branch and fit it.

handle woods makes for an interesting topic here. Hickory when it is straight can be nice working, though the wood database doesn't agree - compared to dry gombeira it's a walk in the park.

When I was a kid, hickory was the one routine tree in the US that would send us out to rent a wood splitter, but our residential forest hickory didn't really look like the handle types. It caused a splitting axe or maul to bounce and even when the wood was 4" separated from end to end, you still couldn't physically pull the crossgrain strands apart sometimes.

BUT, it's added to oak here in the states as one of the woods that is better to have second growth or fast growth with widely spaced rings, and probably ash is included in that. my older hammers with extremely old ash handles all have widely spaced grain, but the broken handle here suffers from rift hickory handle stock with very compact rings. Everything was against it other than wood species.

* harsh user, though no real abuse
* too many wedging appliances
* too steep of a drift in the hammer head
* narrow rings with too many pores

I've handled a couple of handles in persimmon, too, which wood database also says is very shock resistant. It's a little harder than hickory and harder to plane, but it profiles easily on a belt grinder. Gombeira doesn't even sand easily on a 36 grit ceramic belt - it sands slowly and the wood gets hot enough to burn your hands.

'Tis said that ring-porous woods make the best shock-resistant handles. Intuitively, it makes sense, you've got those regular rings of little tubes running between the harder material to absorb the stresses & allow flexing, which no doubt adds to the comfort of the hand holding the handle. But not every good handle wood I know is ring-porous, and in any case we have very few such woods down here (the only ones I can get my hands on are introductions from the northern hemisphere).

Most handles I make are for mallets & less demanding applications , & woods that suffice in this role would not necessarily survive long in a smithing hammer. I have a very crude 'test' for a potential handle wood for a mallet or light hammer - take a sliver & bend it 'til it breaks. If it snaps clean like a fresh carrot, forget it, but if it breaks like this, it's worth considering:

Mallotus snap test.jpg

It also needs to shave nicely to a non-splintery surface, of course.

Whether or not my "snap test" has much merit, I can't be absolutely sure, but I've never busted a mallet handle made from woods that passed "the test", but I have busted quite a few heads, mostly by using them in inappropriate ways, like bashing out the large dings in my mower deck, caused by running into hidden stumps in long grass...

Cheers,

interesting issue comes up wedging the handle - normal woods in the 1500-2000 hardness range don't spread the gombeira. it literally strips and splits the wood. I don't care for metal wedges but may need to make one for this hammer if it loosens.

I kid you not, the only wooden wedge I could get to spread the gombeira is macassar ebony, and it's really to hard to compress and grip and be a good wedge. I'll have to keep an eye on it if the wood turns out to be durable enough.

Bummer!!

Are you sawing wedge slots before driving the handle on like this?: 7.jpg

Most of the handle woods I use are too hard to drive a wooden wedge into without a pre-cut slot. I was shown this as the "proper" way to wedge a hammer handle at an early age & have always done it so. It takes a bit of judgement to size the taper on your wedges so you get a good length into the slot to hold & spread the handle end & compress it against the taper. You won't get a complete 'fill' on the sort of oval/rounded eye of lump hammers etc., but you should be able to spread it enough to get a very solid grip...

Cheers,

Originally Posted by IanW

...... You won't get a complete 'fill' on the sort of oval/rounded eye of lump hammers etc., but you should be able to spread it enough to get a very solid grip...

Cheers,

For many years now, I have been using 2 part epoxy to coat the inside of the hammer or axe head, and the section of handle that gets inserted before driving the wedges in.
It keeps the moisture out, and the handle never comes loose, it seems to result in far fewer rehandling jobs.

Originally Posted by IanW

Are you sawing wedge slots before driving the handle on like this?: 7.jpg

Most of the handle woods I use are too hard to drive a wooden wedge into without a pre-cut slot. I was shown this as the "proper" way to wedge a hammer handle at an early age & have always done it so. It takes a bit of judgement to size the taper on your wedges so you get a good length into the slot to hold & spread the handle end & compress it against the taper. You won't get a complete 'fill' on the sort of oval/rounded eye of lump hammers etc., but you should be able to spread it enough to get a very solid grip...

Cheers,

Yes, pre sawn of course. The wood is just too hard and won't be spread. I guess it is kind of predictable as the sawzias have the highest stiffness of anything on wood database. I didn't think it'd make that much of a difference, though. I did two jobs with the hammer yesterday and the handle hasn't flown off yet. The wood is harsh and hard, though. I'll find some hickory blanks for the next redo.persimmon would be nice but my stock is only big enough for small hammer heads.

follow up on the handle - it's done more work than the original hickory handle at this point and shows no signs of trouble. Not a guarantee that it won't let go at some point, but what I could get for deflection with the macassar ebony wedge was enough to keep the head from moving.

I left the handle simple, mostly straight, and scuffed the bottom with coarse sandpaper (not exactly aesthetic), and then ground the blue paint off of the hammer head.

A surprisingly good hammer for what I'm doing:

https://ofhandmaking.files.wordpress...5394289106.jpg

I'd have thought about ways to make the handle aesthetically nicer if interested in that - reality in this case is that it's just a bludgeoner. Coarse scraping works well on the gombeira, and it's stiff enough that you can just put the hammer head in a vise and scrape more off later. It'd be murder without gloves given the stiffness and how directly it transfers vibration, but I don't work without gloves at the forge for that very reason.

if I'm ever bored, I'll finish the job removing the blue paint and grind the hammer head to a near polish.

if you're wondering what the bessey clamps are doing - the anvil is a ringer. It's not as hard as a turn of the century good quality anvil, but it rings loudly anyway. There's all manner of things to deal with that, but you basically have to do something that absorbs the high frequency vibration. Two bessey clamps actually do a good job of it vs. something more complicated.

I've made some pretty good handles out of branches and also firewood. Branches can be decent stuff, as they are often more naturally flexible, assuming you don't source them out of trees that are constantly splitting and shedding branches - like ornamental pears. It's also got pith, which reduces shock.

Commercial firewood is often a very good choice, as the wood is split vs sawn. Turns out they prize straight grained trees for the splitting operation.

Originally Posted by truckjohn

I've made some pretty good handles out of branches and also firewood. Branches can be decent stuff, as they are often more naturally flexible, assuming you don't source them out of trees that are constantly splitting and shedding branches - like ornamental pears. It's also got pith, which reduces shock.

Commercial firewood is often a very good choice, as the wood is split vs sawn. Turns out they prize straight grained trees for the splitting operation.

Oak and ash were always a treat. hickory always looks straight, but I can't reconcile it with all of the hickory we split when I was a kid. It was the only wood we got where dad would barter something with friends to get a hydraulic splitter for a couple of days.

All of the gumi handles that I have (from japan) as far as I can recall are pith centered and I'd get more tree branches and set them aside if I could remember it. I'd imagine you could experiment with taking branches a little over length and just drilling out some of the pith (just a little, not like a big hole) at the ends and plugging them and not have nearly the issue with end checking that you can get leaving the pith in.

Trees are more plentiful than harvesting here, and one of the lots along the interstate that processes wood looks to have fairly uniform thickness. If they requested limited species, I wouldn't be surprised. Red oak is wonderful to split, and not very interesting -and it's everywhere here.