So I picked this 3lb hammer up today at the local flea market and I need some help. I put a new handle in it and took down the mushrooming and indentions down with a flap wheel. Now should do any heat treatment to the faces and if so what should be done to it? Any and all comments would be appreciated!

It should already be heat treated unless you removed it before grinding it...

Bit late to heat treat it if you have rehandled it. If its a hammer of moddern make it will be a bit softer than ideal (note the "mushrooming") but serviceable. You might consider profiling one end. You could radius it either in line with the handle or acros from the handle or both. Makes for a more versatile hammer.

So you dont think heating the faces up to purple and quenching would improve the hardness enough to keep the mushrooming at bay? Keep in mind I have no idea what I am talking about so if I get my terminology wrong forgive me. But please set me straight!

heating to purple will soften it too much to be usable, Read the heat treating information before you heat it.

Heat it to red and quench to harden. You will need to then heat it, to temper it so it doesn't shatter. Realy, unless its dead soft, like a hammer ment to drive stone carving tools I'd just go ahead and use it. Other wise you have to strip out the handle, normalize it, do way ever cold work you want. Then reharden and temper.

I think i will just use it till I know what I'm doing with the heat treatment process. I had looked through the forums first but I could find much info specifically about treating hammers. Thanks for your input and the info though!

Brian makes rounding hammers and he or one of his students can give you a good idea how hard you want a hammer. The other side of the coin is you give a bit of efenceincy up, but for a beginner its better to redress a hammer than chip the edge of your anvil because you missed.

If you have ground mushrooming off of the hammer then make sure that you have ground the splits/ cracks away as well.

 Some of my favourite hammers are old re dressed hammers for 50p or less.

 all the best Owen

I did the best I could to get the faces down to a clean finish I was just concerned that I might have to harden the surface to make it work. I used it today and it did ok it might be too soft though!

When you get better hammer control, and have garners mor knowledge either revisit the hammer or make a new one and save that one for students so the don't jack up your anvil.

I like that idea Mr. Stevens!

Seth, bring it with you next week and we will give it a look and you can check out the hammers that I use.

An old timey hardness test is a file test. A new file will not cut fully hardened steel; it will just skate across the surface. A tempered hammer head will file "with reluctance." I borrowed the reluctance bit from Wallace Gusler's movie, "The Gunsmith of Williamsburg."

 

Sayings and Cornpone

"The drowning man is not troubled by rain."

     Old Persian proverb

One of my favorite hammers is an old MOD hammer used for dressing stone with chisles. It had a curve along the hammer head arc axis that I suppose was meant to compensate for the arc of the swing and make the hammer face strike the chisel square. I reforged it straight with straight peen but left it untreated as it came out of the fire, basically normalized. Back when I re-purposed this hammer I was doing some forging at public events and wanted a relatively soft hammer to assure that a shard would not come off of the hammer and injure a spectator. The file test confirmed that it was only modreately hardened, probably a result of the alloy rather than any thing that I did. The hammer has served me well over the years I just dress it occasionally. However if you are polished anvil sort of smith I doubt that it would meet your needs.

Some times a soft hammer is a good thing to have. I suspect that since your hammer was mushroomed that it was originally used for stone work and had never intended as a hard face hammer. If it had been hardened it would most likely had chipped edges rather than mushrommed. I would use it for a while before doing any thing.

I recently purchased an actual blacksmith hammer, but I will continue to use this one as advised. Thanks for all the advice!

Seth, lets see your new hammer. If you bought it from a smith it's probably ready to work, if you got I from a box store or a tool dealer it probably needs dressed. There are articles about dressing hammers in here some where, but it's worth revisiting.