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I Forge Iron

Forge Welded Hammer


Randy

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In teaching a forge welding class at NESM one of the projects I showed was doing a forged welded hammer.

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I had an old one that was made this way and you could see the lines where the welds were so the process was visable. As often the smiths didn't have readily available material and choice of sizes, they had to create their own. This one was made from 1/4" x 1-1/4" flat stock, hot rolled mild steel. The same process was used with wrought iron. This was folded back and forth as shown in the drawing to make a stack to achieve the desired thickness.

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The one end was left long for a handle. It was then faggot welded together. A faggot is a stack or pile of metal. Then I used leaf spring for the high carbon face and cross pien. This weld is known as a jump weld. In the old days they would cut barbs in the edges of the high carbon pieces and with the hammer hot would hammer the steel in place for forge welding. I used a small tack weld on opposite corners to hold the pieces in place for welding. Then the eye was punched in and the hammer was heat treated. In the photo I'm jump welding the high carbon face onto the hammer.

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Good show, Randy. It reminds me of the late !970's when Simmons and I were researching for our book and we were at Balcones Conservation Lab* in Texas. The conservation team was restoring artifacts from a 16th century shipwreck from near the southeast coast of Texas. One of the pieces was a sledge hammer that you could see was fagot welded of three lengthwise slabs. I couldn't discern steel on the heads, however. Unfortunately at the time, all the material was in litigation regarding ownership, so we couldn't photograph it for our use.

*Now called Texas Archeological Research Laboratory of the University of Texas, Austin.

Reference: "Southwestern Colonial Ironwork" by Marc Simmons and Frank Turley

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good job.
my first favourite hammer had a forge welded steel face on it . I managed to hammer it off! the steel face was held on with a curved steel nail through the centre of it , I would guess as another means of holding the steel to the iron for the jump weld. I still should have it somewhere?
there are still japanese woodworking hammers that use this method .

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Regarding Basher's post, I once had a 4" Iron City leg vise which was losing one of the pivot beams from the fixed leg. It had peeled back enough that you could see a small steel insert in the center. It looked as though the leg and beam were held together that way before the fagot weld took place.

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Most of the hammers used in Colonial Williams burg are still made this way. The steel face almost always lets go after some years of use. I would guess that working mild steel takes a heavy toll on these welded hammers. CW does use lots of wrought iron but they use a lot of mild to. When working steel down to a black heat for planishing at the end of a forging mild becomes pretty hard.

My sweetheat has a little riveting hammer from wrought and steel faces she made while working at CW, probably weighs about .25 lb.

Mr Turley you said you could not see any sine of steel faces on the sledge hammer found from the ship wreck. I wonder if it was actually a large iron mallet for use on ships. If it was just for hitting wood aboard ship then there would be no need for steel faces. Just like the cast iron mallets you see men using for driving wooden stakes into the ground.

Vary neat things, I have been meaning to forge up a small stake anvil from wrought with a steel face when I get some free time.

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I do not know if they fagot welded up bar or not. But the hammers are made from wrought iron with steel faces. I suspect some of them are made from there own wrought that they produce. A few times a year they will have Iron smelts from oar. I know at one point they started a bick anvil with some of there own smelted iron.

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Randy, what did you do for the heat treatment? I had to do one after seeing your post, although I used some wrought iron for the billet and used a horseshoe rasp for the caps on the face and the peen. Just wondering how hard you could leave the face since it is backed up by the soft iron. I haven't heat treated mine yet.

- Bernie

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Bernie, I heat treated it just like any other hammer. One end at a time and then temper drawn from the eye with hot mild steel eye drifts. The one I did for NESM they were going to etch to show the construction, handle it and put it on a board in the office, like they do with all of their instructor projects.

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I recall reading that some areas made their hammers using a jelly roll process before welding on the steel faces as that was supposed to make them take the shock better.

I have two faced WI hammers one I dug out of the mud at a scrap yard in England and the other was a farrier's hammer I bought at a fleamarket in Ohio, USA when I saw the face on it, cost a dollar or two for either of them.

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I'd be surprised if the "jelly roll" process was used just due to how the metal would work under the hammer. Seems like you could have a problem with air gaps and places that would want to open up as the metal keeps pushing around instead of just into its self. (That's why they put the jelly in. It fills up the spaces.) Kind of like when you weld a collar on a bar. It wants to work its way around the bar so it needs an open end so you can work towards that. Does that make any sense?

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Considering how they used to weld up wrought iron fairly commonly to get large pieces, not to mention busheling of scrap I think they managed to do it without problems; shoot I've seen it done with pattern welding of modern alloys a lot harder than a simple wrought iron roll and with a lot higher quality requirement!

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