So the last several days of open forge aka “forge club” at my local folk school I have been building towards my first hand made hammer! First I took an old chipped ball peen with no handle and used its eye to size and shape a hammer eye drift. Then I reforged that same hammer into a hammer eye punch and rehandled it.

Finally, I punched and drifted a 4.5 by 1.25 by 1.25 inch billet I cut from a derelict rock raker tooth. I forged out a cross peen and octagonal facet. Then I quenched it, tempered it, and hand polished it. I fancied up a handle blank of local Wisconsin ash and srained it with aqua fortis (ferric nitrate solution).

All this while, my forge buddies have been joking with me. “Why work so hard to make a hammer, when you can just buy one a the hardware store for $25?”

Well this week I can finally answer,“Because you can’t buy THIS hammer anywhere!”

\~800 gram head, 14 inch handle. The facets are slightly off 45 degrees and aren’t quite symetrical, the peen is short or the head is long, the cross peen is a wee bit thicker on one side, there are a few pits that were too deep to polish out, and I misstruck my make mark on one side (A morel mushroom for “Black Morel Forge”). Other than that it’s PERFECT! Haha!

My first hammer!