making a texturing hammer

[redd1981]

Has anyone made a texturing hammer? Im going to attempt a tree bark pattern. Is there a better way than just taking an angle grinder to it and making a pattern of inconstant lines? any advice and/or pics would be appreciated. I am also concerned about the safety of cutting into a hammer head. Thoughts?

[Frosty]

Yes I have. It's a wood grain pattern rather than bark but the technique I used will work for other textures. when I hit garage, yard, etc. sales I only have a few things on my buy list anymore and ball pein hammers are near the top. My recent texture hammer is made from about a 4oz. ball pein head. I just heated it to high red, low orange temp and rapped it repeatedly on my hardy cross the eye. I'd crowned it a bit more so the texture is on a rounded face allowing me to alter the pattern slightly in use and not have to deal with getting a flat face to strike an uneven surface.

I tested it while making it by striking a 2" x 4" while hot. A quick rap before putting it back in the forge left enough impression to help judge but wasn't so hot as to burn the texture out. I tried it hotter and it didn't work as well as when it was getting too cool to forge on. I quenched the face to harden and let residual heat draw it down to a dark straw.

The attached pic is textured with it before I put a little more texture on it. I'm sorry I don't have a pic of the texturing hammer but it just looks like a messed up hammer face. Wow, I need a better example than that one, this was really early in the hammer's life. Deb wanted a cross NOW.

Frosty The Lucky.

                                                             

 

[redd1981]

Thank you for the reply. My idea was to buy a cheap HF hammer and hit it with a combo of cutting and grinding disks to make an irregular crosswise pattern. Would it be not safe to do this? I have read warnings about messing with hardened hammer faces. Of course who knows how hard a chinese made HF hammer hear really is lol. and I guess I didnt really mean "tree bark" but just something that makes the eye think of a tree.

 

[Frosty]

You bet you can do that, if you don't run temper colors with the grinder it wont affect it's heat treatment. Some guys run welding beads to make texturing dies or to use as dies to make texturing dies.

One I've wanted to try for a while is to braze BBs to a plate and use it to make a pebble or scale texturing die or hammer.

If you're using the die on hot steel it doesn't need to be hard unless it has sharp features, say the chisel center of a rope/cable die. Even then I use mild and it holds up well enough.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Chinobi]

Forbidden test?

Yes, cut off wheel in an angle grinder will work on a harbor freight ball peen, got one in my garage right now!

[Chinobi]

[Quarry Dog]

There are 4 very important things that I can think of that you don't want to do with hammers:

1) Don't hit hardened surfaces with your hardened hammer faces.  Striking a hardened piece of steel will at the very least mark your hammer face up.  Worst case scenario is that it might shatter the piece, or chip the face off of your hammer, and the flying chips are usually fast and sharp.  This is also why I dress any mushrooming off of my struck tools, as I've had a mushroomed chisel nick my earlobe and it did not feel good.

2) Don't let your handle get loose.  Keep your wedges tight.  Nothing worse than the head going airborne while your six year old is helping you knock down a termite eaten fence.  There's no telling where it will land.  Just ask my dad, it's been 24 years, but I'm pretty sure he still has a scar right on his crown.  He taught me how to rehandle a hammer immediately upon regaining his composure.

3) Don't set your hammer next to the fire pot.  It will rapidly dry out the handle and shrink it, making it loose, and possibly causing number 2.

4) When modifying/dressing the hammers faces with a grinder/belt sander/etc., don't draw the temper.  It's pretty easy to prevent, as it is a sizeable chunk of metal.  Just cool it off with a soaked rag every couple of passes.  Drawing the temper won't really cause anything dangerous, but it will make the hammer face more easily marked during mis-strikes (they happen to the best of us), which will show up in your work.

All of that said, modifying hammer faces is perfectly acceptable practice, and abrasives are pretty much the easiest and most accessible way to go about it.  One of my favorite hammers is an engineers sledge that I took to the belt sander and put 3/4" radii (1.5" peins) on the faces, one cross and one straight, although I wish I had put the cross "pein" at 30 degrees clockwise so that It isn't so awkward when drawing stock towards me.

Hopefully I've been helpful, and not too loquacious.