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I Forge Iron

Are my hammers to beaten up?


RDSBandit

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I think  that with the amount of chipping on the edges that there may be cracks all around.   I think they could be salvaged for top tools by annealing and sawing off the first half inch below the deepest chip.    That is what I would do.  I bought a bunch of ball peens a long while back and did that with a couple of big ones which were chipped.  There may be a better solution. 

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Those are pretty questionable in my book, they're probably been used on something really hard long enough to work harden and begin cracking. I doubt you want to spend the money to have them magnafluxed and that's to start. If you grind them past the failures and anneal them they'd make good striking hammers for top tools and such. I wouldn't put them to use for "normal" work.

Frosty The Lucky.

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Eseemann posted an article about a hammer that chipped and took a kids eye. Search for "lost eye"  . Good reading and gets technical. After I read that you should probably just throw them out rather then trust a repair. Ebay has hammers cheap 

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Mr. Bandit,

Just last weekend someone gave me a large aluminum bronze sledge that was badly chipped and cracked. I chucked it up in the lathe and turned out all the chips and cracks that were propagating and finished it out nice like a 5lb ball pein sledge. I re-handled it Saturday along with an 8 pound sledge someone gave me. I put short handles on them for driving drifts and not tearing up my forging hammers. They turned out well, and I don't fear using them. It depends on your resources and what you are going to do with them. I certainly would not use them as is. Chips and cracks need to be removed for safety and for not marring your work.

D

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A wise man once said that when you are buying used hammers, you are buying an eye with two potential faces. If the eye is serviceable without too much effort, you can take the time you want to reshape the faces anyway you want. You are going to have to cut the handle off to do much anyway.

There was an article in the "Hammers Blow" years ago about all the things that you could do with a used hammer, and I will bet that there is something on the FABA how-to archive site.

My suggestions: tomahawk blanks, diagonal peen forging hammers, dead soft chisel & drift drivers, weld a face on for a flatter, profile for fullers.

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On 1/14/2016 at 5:08 AM, John McPherson said:

My suggestions: tomahawk blanks, diagonal peen forging hammers, dead soft chisel & drift drivers, weld a face on for a flatter, profile for fullers.

Just curious how would diagonal pein work. Is it possible to heat up the cross pein and then just turn it 45 degrees? Can you do that without messing up the eye?

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Do you have straight peen and cross peen hammers?  Look at how you hold your hands to use them.  Many people find it's easier to use a diagonal peen hammer for certain tasks.  I have seen a double flat face converted into a diagonal peen hammer in just a couple of minutes using a hydraulic press 2 bites as I recall. Twisting a cross peen diagonal will be a lot harder as the part you need to twist is the heaviest part of the stock.

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11 minutes ago, ThomasPowers said:

Do you have straight peen and cross peen hammers?  Look at how you hold your hands to use them.  Many people find it's easier to use a diagonal peen hammer for certain tasks.

Aye, that's why I was thinking I might like to convert one of them to a diagonal pein. (The pein on both hammers look to be in good shape, from what my very limited experience tells me). I'm just not real sure how to go about doing it.

And no, no straight or cross pein. Well.... I have a cross pein sledge... but that doesn't seem real useabe.

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