Forge your own HAMMER - Blacksmithing

good morning and welcome back as promised we are going to make a hammer today I'm going to use this hammer as an example this is a commercial hammer a German pattern hammer I'm just going to use it to discuss some of the details that we need to know what we make our hammer in general you want a hammer to be balanced and that means that the peen and the face need to be relatively centered on the handle and that's centered weight wise not centered physically this looks like it's fitted centered physically on this hammer but this is two and a quarter inches from the dead end turn it so you can see the ruler so the face is two and a quarter inches from the the center of the the handle but it's a little almost 2 and 3/4 from the peen so it's sort of an optical illusion that this is centered physically there is more material because this is drawn out it's not going to be perfect if you put that up and balanced at it that's going to tip the head first but it's it's pretty close to balanced and that makes it much easier swinging otherwise it's hard to control a hammer on its way down especially if you flip the peen over and it's head heavy you're gonna throw it off-center all the time so that means when we take our hammer blank we're going to want to put the eye dead center to start with and that's a good plan for cross beam hammer straight peen hammer rounding ham or whatever you want to make try to get the eye centered and then deal with the rest of it this started off I've already cut this I didn't think you needed to watch me cut this was only about eleven and a half inches 4140 I buy it as 12 inch pieces but unfortunately I got shorted a little bit so the the hammers may not be quite as big as I would like I like to start with about four inches this is inch and a quarter or excuse me an inch and three-eighths square bar so I have cut off here three and a half inches and that's going to be the the hammer we're going to make today currently this piece of steel weighs one pound thirteen point eight ounces it will not weigh that much when we're done this will be closer to a pound and a half hammer maybe a hair under by the time we're done we're going to lose material punching we're going to lose material to scale and we're going to lose material in the final grinding and dressing of the hammer so it's just been evitable but if you take note of that and you need a heavier hammer then you have an idea how much material it takes and and where to go so let's mark our center point and get ready to make a hammer eye and I'll explain everything we're doing as we go now why did I choose to put these marks where he did that are actually three-eighths of an inch shorter than the width of my punches but to say which is what the thickness is it's about 3/8 of an inch thick and they're shorter than that the reason for that is I'm going to drill 3/8 holes in there now that seems to be a cheat to do a little bit of machine work but blacksmiths have been drilling holes for thousands of years and I learned this technique it was demonstrated by Francis Whittaker who was a huge advocate of traditional work and this is his recommended technique so I feel it's a valid technique will discuss punching without drilling the holes first but if you have a drill press and you can drill these holes first this is really going to improve your accuracy especially if you're not used to punching holes in big thick material like this this is a big thing to punch it's a lot of work it's hard to do by yourself by hand especially if you haven't developed the strength to swing a bigger hammer if you're swinging a 2-pound hammer this is going to be a big project to try to punch this hole by drilling first we eliminate a lot of the material and we provide a path of least resistance for this punch to then clear out between the holes now if you don't have a drill press but can find one of your friends that has one and borrow it to do this I would really recommend it otherwise you're stuck punching it all by hand which isn't certainly doable but it's just going to be a lot more work so try to find a drill press drilling it with a hand drill probably not such a good idea [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] okay we've got our our hammer blink drilled now you can see that the the outer edges then of those holes line up pretty good with the the edges of the punch and that's the ideal is that the outer edges are all lined up and that's why you make these short by the diameter of your drill press or your drill bit again you can do this entirely by hand we'll probably do another video on hammer making that doesn't use this technique but I think your first hammer make it easier on yourself guarantee good results you'll learn more about hammer forging and less about how to deal with a crooked eye and then if you try to do it the other way so we've got that we've got our punch we've got our drift let's go light the forge and make a hammer okay we've got our hammer blank ready to go we have our our punch that we made and I've got a bucket of water here or ten hand full of water so I keep a bunch of cool I also have a little bit of coal dust and will explain why the coal dust comes in handy it's not vital but it's handy and I also have a little bit of punch lubricant that is a commercial product that I buy that also helps and will explain these and we get to first thing we want to do is just establish the line of the punch here take your time to line that up the ends of the holes and make sure you're punching where you want to a few good blows from one side by turning every so often any error you're imparting with your punch is canceled out because you're going to do the same thing each time but your your blank is turned it also should turn it the other way this is a little bit too cool on this side so we're going to put it back in the fire remember to cool your punch off every now and then it'll keep it from deforming it'll last a lot longer and when it starts to cool off get it hot again but you can see we've established the beginning of the the punch the holes were a little close together so we're cutting just a hair outside of them and that's okay it's better if they're perfect [Music] no reason to keep working after it cools awesome you're just making it harder for yourself I'm gonna put a little bit of that punch lube on there and that helps keep it from getting stuck makes it easier to come out to say didn't have to knock that off that time carlos is the old way of doing that fortunately this is kind of lumpy coal and not dusty once I hit it coal dust is particularly useful in a closed bottom hole that you haven't drilled like this because it starts to build up some pressure as it burns it helps to pop the punch back out again I don't know if you can see this in the camera or not but I'm actually moving that slug it's pretty much punched free it's shared clean you can also see I'm swelling on the outside a little bit and that's all a good thing punching a hole does it take out as much as if that was entirely machine since that punches slug is moving in there I'm going to go to the side that it's closest to and give it one last share all the way through and when it's closed come over the hardy hole punch all the way through my poncho off so there is why I it's nicely Center it's straight through it's as accurate as our holes we punched and this little thing right there is all the material that was removed other than what we drilled so even with drilling we have saved more material in our blank that if this was entirely machined with a mill or something like that so the next thing to do is going to be to give this a first derivative and then we'll start shaping the hammer now our a punch that we made is still nice and clean and sharp because we kept it cool and it was properly hardened in the first place because this end was left soft so that we don't want our hammer we don't want to leave a bunch of dings in the hammer it's easier to grind this it's actually starting to mushroom just a little bit after about three or four hammers this will need to be dressed on the grinder so you either want to drift over the hardy hole or if it's a small drift of Perl hole but see that gets stucked so you don't want to do that and the drift is drift is not going to just stretch the IDE any shape you're on it you're gonna have to work the piece some and then keep your drift cool although there is some logic to not pooling it too much leave that kind of warm it doesn't cool the hammer off as much but you don't want it to get red-hot and deforming so try to keep it cool enough that it's you're not actually forging the drift to differ from the other side and do the same thing that helps not the drift loose okay so that's our initial drifting when we're through at the Hammerhead we'll drift it all again and try and even that out a little bit mostly we just want to make sure we have enough of an eye at this point now if you were let this cool hardened temperate put it on a handle that is a completely functional hammer it's a lowering hammer not one I'm going to be thrilled to use but it would be completely functional so now it's hopefully you already have a plan of what you're going to make we're going to turn this into a cross peen hammer which is something very similar to this probably simpler than this so one side will be left very much like it is the other side will draw a P now we do that if you just work it flat on the anvil this the top surface and the bottom surface are going to draw out faster and that means you're going to end up with a cold shut across the middle you'll have to go running down we're going to have some of that regardless but if we start by knocking these corners back instead of just forging down so instead of working like this we're going to work like this we might be able to avoid some of that that's what we're going to try to find the best songs you have for holding on to this ideally a pair of hammer ons unfortunately these are a little bit small or a little bit large of in the hammer head is a little bit small and so is this pair these are made for more like three pound hammers so unfortunately that's not the best thing for me to be holding this with what I'm working on it I think these songs as long as I keep the shoulder up tight that's my best rip right there not those corners down you can see that's already starting to lay over there give it kind of fish lips keep the sides parallel no reason for the beam to swell out we're just going to keep doing that another thing you could do is lock the quarters down this way to try and prevent any more cold shot so that's getting there a lot more to go that's about what we want I'm going to clean it up a little bit more in one or two more heats you can see that the the Dean has a little cold shot right at the end really hard to avoid doing it this way that'll have to be ground out we don't want a pain that is too sharp you want a fairly blunt peen it's much more useful I also want to check for the edges a little bit which is not functional I just think it makes a better look at hammer make sure the peen isn't twisted I've made that mistake and one more heat you don't really want a hammer to be a big grinding project so you want to try and get it smooth and even right off the forge of the anvil knocking the chamfers in tends to leave it a little hollow on the flat right through here so make sure you come back and work that down so that end is done this is where a hindsight is twenty-twenty if we had done the face while this was square it would be a lot easier to hold on to this end then it's going to be to work the face but luckily the face just gets very little work I just want to give it a little bit of character so it's not this little umpire so I'm gonna see if I can find a pair of tongs that holds out a lot better of me so we're just going to dress the face up a little just ever so slight a taper we're going right back to the eye so I think that looks better already you know we really should have done the face first and then I want to chant for this you can see how that puckers out we'll see if we can forge that down a little bit but mostly that will be taken care of with part rasping or grinding put the drift back in here we'll have fix these corners that drift is really a nice nice handle hey see I'm working against the step of the anvil that just keeps me from chasing it across here this is kind of a back and forth because now I've just upset the end of that a little bit and that's not what I want so I kind of jam for it back and then draw it out and chamfer it back it may take three or four heats to get that the way we wanted ideally put the drift in a different direction each time if you can tell which direction you were the last time [Music] I consider the for work done on this hammer now at least right now I do sometimes after I examine it called I changed my mind and come back to the fire dig something but I think it's pretty good put the drift in one last time top and bottom this creates an hourglass shape to the eye to help plant the handle in place I want to put this back in the fire one more time and get it evenly hot and then we're gonna bury it in the bucket vermiculite and let that cool I'm gonna leave it overnight we'll come back and work on it some more tomorrow so that's the forging process for our hammer we've cut it we've drilled some holes to make punching the eye a little bit easier we'll do another video a little bit later I think we'll finish this hammer in the next video and then in a third video we will show alternatives to pre drilling punching just straight through with a punch we'll use the same punch to do one and then I'll show you some things that might be a little bit easier but they all work they all make good hammers I have a drill press I really suggest your first one you try it this way it helps guarantee success and nothing breeds future success like early success does so it's it's worth giving yourself a leg up and a little bit of a help if you can and then increase the difficult leavitt level as you go across I appreciate you watching and as always I sure would appreciate you give it a thumbs up if you don't like it well that's okay too please subscribe to the channel share these videos with your friends and we will see you later have a good day

Channel: Black Bear Forge

Views: 169,601

Keywords: Wondershare Filmora, blacksmithing, hammer, cross peen hammer, cross pien hammer, forging a hammer, making a hammer, making, forging, blacksmith, blacksmith shop, craft, anvil, forge, tools, tool making, workshop, howto, how to, black bear forge, john switzer, beginner, begining

Id: giNvt-SKrgM

Length: 31min 47sec (1907 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 04 2017