We were on vacation in Murphy NC. Beautiful place. On one of my early walks with the dog, I saw a wood handle in sticking out from brush at the base of a utility pole. I pulled it out and found an old 24oz ball peen hammer. It was in pretty bad shape with rust and had ants crawling all over it, so I left it in plain sight so its owner might claim it. Four days later it was still there. I took a closer look. The flat face had been crudely scored with an angle grinder cut off wheel for more traction. I thought this was kind of odd. Usually people don’t want traction on a ball peen hammer. Then I looked up and down the pole. There were no nails within standing reach, but 7 foot up there were some climbing spikes. This ball peen hammer was somebody’s makeshift lineman’s hammer. The traction was for driving climbing spikes and other large things into utility poles. It has been lost by a lineman and was unclaimed, so it came home with me.
The problem. I don’t need a ball peen hammer, I have several of varying sizes and two the same size as my newly rescued hammer. However, I do need a straight peen hammer for blacksmithing. A straight peen hammer has the peen in line with the handle. As opposed to the cross-peen being at a right angle to the handle. A straight peen is used to spread red hot metal left and fight from the peen. I wasn’t sure, but I was hoping there was enough mass in the ball to turn that into the straight peen and then keep the flat head for flattening. It is a common pattern to switch back and forth between the peen and the flat. I scoured the internet to see if anyone had already done this, but found nothing… so I was thinking this might not work.
I used a hack saw to cut off the handle, then put the head in the forge to heat.
The tongs I have weren’t big enough to hold the hammer head so I had to use some light duty crucible tongs to get the head out of the forge and to the 30Kg anvil. From there I grabbed it with some self-adjusting pliers. The pliers are well suited to odd forge work because they can quickly grab odd shaped things and are just long enough to keep your hands away from the heat.
With the hammer held securely, I could hit the round head with my cross peen hammer and flatten it out.
It took a few heats to work it down to the peen shape. It was pretty cool to see the hammer head red hot in the propane forge.
Eventually it took shape. I also hammered on the flat face to remove the lines cut in it by it’s previous owner. Fortunately they pounded out pretty easily. While it was hot from its last heat, I quenched the peen side and the flat side in oil to harden them. After that I cleaned up the faces with a flap disk on my angle grinder.
I originally thought the handle it came with was too far gone, but on further inspection, it was in pretty good shape once I removed the overly weathered layer with a card scraper. So I cleaned it up before mounting it back on the hammer it came from. Gave it a few coats of pure tung oil and called it done. It has a decent weight for the task and the peen came out to a good size for peening work. So it answered my original question of can you make a straight peen hammer from a ball peen hammer. Yes you can.
Previously
- Sun and Tung Oil
This is a simple project of making a live edge shelf for my son. I had nicely prepped a piece of Cypress with a plane. When I asked what color he wanted it, he said “Black, let’s torch it.” So we burned it with a weedburner, brushed it off with a blue nyalox drill brush, […]
- Bottlebrush Unicorn
My son had a project he wanted to make as a gift, so I turn this blog post over to him at this time. I went online to find a good picture of a unicorn. I found this one that was not too complicated to cut on the band saw. I cut a 14 inch […]
- Bottlebrush Tree
In October 2021 my neighbor wanted a Bottlebrush tree cut down and I was interested in the wood. So I offered to cut it down. As you can see, it had quite a lean to it. I was not concerned about hitting the house because it was fully leaning away from the house. I was […]
- Charcuterie Board – Planche?
Back in May 2020, my son made a serving tray as a gift for his teacher and wrote about it here. Fast forward to December 2022 and we get a call from his past teacher offering him his first commission for another one. Only now we can’t call it a serving tray, we have to […]
- What most Tung Oil articles get wrong
I have been using Tung oil as my go-to finish for a dozen years or so. As far as I am concerned it is a great finish for more things than it usually gets credit for. Thankfully its virtues are getting shared more often now in recent years. In my experience it is far […]
- A great woodworking weekend with Roy Underhill
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- My favorite screwdriver
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- Rustic corner shelf
My mother is a bird fan and several years ago she started collecting some very nicely carved birds. She is moving into a new place and could use somewhere to display her birds. I selected a section of a large limb that came from my neighbor’s gigantic ficus tree. I used an old chisel […]
- Pelican Salt Lamp
Christmas time brings a hunt for project ideas for something for my son to make for his mom. We started tossing around ideas including things she likes. She really likes Pelicans. We’ve been in Florida for over a decade now and they still make her smile. So we came up with the idea for a […]
- Kerfing a live edge joint
I am in the middle of working on a live edge table, but I have the live edges interior to the table rather than at the table edge. So I have one live edge that needs to join up to another piece of wood. A lot of woodworkers solve this with a river of epoxy. […]
- Forged knife
A few years ago, my son went on a school trip to St. Augustine FL. One of the things they visited was a blacksmith shop. He was intrigued, so we entered into adding some ironworking to our shop. Back in March 2019 we decided to make a propane bucket forge and then make a knife. […]
- Mountain Wall Light
As my son has gotten older, his homework time has stretched later into the evening when light is fading. He clearly needed more photons. We had a few requirements: It had to look good with his custom desk, and book cabinet. His desk is in our family room, so it had to look good. It […]
- Sliding Dovetailed Book Cabinet
My son has been schooling remotely due to COVID so we needed a place for him to stash all his books and papers that would normally be in his locker at school. The river desk we built back at the end of 2018 serves him well, but is has no storage either so I decided […]
- Easy Sliding Dovetail Jig
As a result of my constant fascination/challenge to make furniture without metal fasteners, I often turn to using sliding dovetails. Generally making sliding dovetails is a little finicky. Too tight and you can’t slide the joint together. To loose and the joint is wobbly. Recently I came up with a solution that makes the process […]
- Australian Pine Live Edge Mirror
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- Cypress Stump End Tables
I wrote a while back about the Cypress Stump Console I made from one of the two Cypress trees I had removed in my back yard. The second stump… the butt really, was a bit shorter. I thought it would make a good coffee table but we don’t need any more of those. However we […]
- Sawdust in the Wind
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- Heart Bar Stool
I had this idea kicking around in my head for a barstool made from a log with a built in footrest. My original thought was for a square seat, but used on a diagonal like a diamond. Then I was looking for ways to reduce the weight and realized that the back corner of the […]
- Cypress Stump Console Table
Back in May 2019 we had two large Bald Cypress trees removed from our back yard. Steve’s Tree Service did a great job and they obliged me in my request to have the trunks cut as close to the ground as possible so that I could have some nicely flared stumps for creative woodworking. This […]