Make a Hammer from Leaf Spring...?

[Urthman]

So, just like the topic says

I have some fairly heavy truck leaf spring.  I want to cut it into chunks to make some small planishing hammers for use on sheet metal.

Is leaf spring a suitable material?  Hard enough?  Any tips to heat treating/etc?

I'm sure there's probably already a good post about doing this, but all my searches turned up leaf-spring-knives, but no leaf-spring-hammers (other than power-hammer builds...)

Thanks!!!

-Jeremy

[VaughnT]

If it will work for a knife, is will work for a hammer.  Heat-treat is up in the air because you're dealing with mystery metal and don't know the alloy.  Could be air-hardening or brine-quench.  

[ThomasPowers]

However a good start is a warm vegetable oil quench and a  fairly aggressive temper.  We of course don't know how hard *YOU* like your tooling and the exact work you will use it for--- "sheet metal": for sheet silver, gold and copper; normalized will do fine; for sheet stainless you will want it harder.

 

Perfectly good alloy and generally available and sometimes in quite heavy sections, (dump truck and train springs for example)

[Urthman]

Thanks folks!  The hammers will be for armor smithing- mostly 18G and 16G mild steel. . .

 

[ThomasPowers]

No real wrought iron?  (I have a 4 digit membership number in the SCA starting with a 2...)

[Urthman]

Wrought Iron?  I'd certainly try it if my local metal supplier stocked it.

I never did SCA myself.  But I'd be tempted to join if I were 20 years younger...

 

[781]

Leaf spring should be 5160 which is .6 carbon many hammers are made from  1045 which is .45 carbon so as long as it is not tempered too hard should be fine. 

[ThomasPowers]

Last time I was in Manassas VA, USA visiting kinfolk I walked over to where they were converting an old farm to a housing subdivision and along the old fence row there was all the old junked farm implements and *hundreds* of pounds of real wrought iron going to the scrappers.  My "steel supplier" is *everywhere*!

[Frosty]

I don't know what you have in mind for "hammers" but leaf spring makes excellent "slappers." I don't know if it's an official term but some of my old body and fender friends (back when it was worth doing some metal work rather than just changing the body part) they had the usual tool box of hammers, shrinkers, dome peins like a turning hammer, creasers, plannishers, etc. but they had a selection of slappers which were basically a polished pill shaped casting from 3/8"-1/2" thick and maybe up to 1 1/2" wide or round on a thin whippy handle. The profile of the faces were different from domes, creasers, straight and cross, shrinkers, plannishers, etc. They were used inside the body with a dolly on the outside and with the springy handles a quick snap of the wrist like casting a fishing lure would get them up to speed in a few inches instead of swinging they slapped.

I don't know if that has any utility for you but seeing as body and fenders on autos came out of the old armor shops maybe.

Frosty The Lucky.