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I Forge Iron

Our Friends, Our Hammers


Maillemaker

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As blacksmiths, hammers play a crucial role in our hobby/trade/occupation.

As such, do you treat your hammers in any special way, like naming them or decorating the handles?

I do!

My big (big for me -_- ) eight pound is named Tourneach, Irish gaelic for "Thunderer"

My long-hafted 3# is Magni (Mighty), named after Thor's son (who inherits Mjolnir)

My short-hafted 3# is Volun, short for Volundrung, a warhammer in a game I play.

I also burn celtic knots into the handles, nothing too elaborate, but something to do between forgings.

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With nearly all my hammers and lots of other tools I remember the person I got them from every time I use them...Craig, Lloyd,Slim,Jim....Kinda the same as naming them.
I got a nice engineers cross peen at Portabello Rd (London's flea market) in 06, I call that one Brit.....

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With nearly all my hammers and lots of other tools I remember the person I got them from every time I use them


By that measue I think my favorite is Selden. He is the guy that helped me make my first couple forge welds and that small 4 or 5 oz Square faced cross pein hammer was what we used. it is my A # 1, go too hammer for welding.
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Most of my hammers are known by type: Swedish crosspeen, straight peen, etc. However my French crosspeen is known as "Frenchy" as that is a name used by my students who seem to really like it. With over 100 handled tools on my hammer rack having individual names would be a bit hard on my memory *and* I want my students to know the hammers by their types so they can communicate with other smiths in the future.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Like Thomas I just have way too many hammers to give them a name. I have a hard enough time remembering the names of all the dogs and cats. Let's see, Roscoe, Judy, Nala, Kayla, Cotton, Roxann, Jasmine, Wolfgang, Trent, Bridget, Cyrano, Wally, Lola, Whippy, see I've already run out of names and I still have seven more dogs to go and I haven't even started on the cats. Now you know why I don't name my hundred or so hammers. Maybe I should just put a big number on the handle, what about that?

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You want to kidnap some dogs! :blink: But stay away from the hammers <_< Hey! That's a good idea Thomas, brand the dogs with a number, that way I'd have a visual reference and wouldn't have to go through the whole list of names to yell at just one of the danged mutts. Then I could just throw the rawhide hammer at the right one the first time.

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no names just what pattern then are and weight I have the weight burned or stamped on all of them
ohh and the geenies / cold ones are hammers with green paint on the handles they are for cold stuff
and no one should use a non green hammer on something cold or a beating is coming.

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mine have many differant names but mostly just their pattern, my main forging hammer (a 2lb right hand diagonal pein hammer made by rthibeau) is named crunch because the first day i had it my dad tried to drive a nail with it and the face was too rounded, it skipped off the nail and broke his finger (hence the crunch) and every day that i am at the forge for more than an hour it gets a diagonal line burnt into the handle. when the handle has too many lines to hold anymore, i will remove the handle and get a new one, stain and laquer the old one and hang it on the wall of my shop

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  • 2 months later...

Ahh yes---"fetch the FBH and whomp this for me!"

I found some small french crosspein heads, (probably Lynch), at the conference and bought one for each of my students that have a perverse love affair with the larger one I own. I await their naming them "Fifi, Mimi, etc, with trepidation!

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