The Art of Blacksmithing: Creating a Hammer from Scratch

When it comes to blacksmithing, one of the most essential tools in a blacksmith's arsenal is a hammer. A good hammer can make all the difference in shaping and forming metal into its desired form. In this article, we'll take you through the process of creating a hammer from scratch, from choosing the right materials to tempering and finishing.

The Process Begins: Selecting Materials

To start creating our hammer, we need to select the right materials. The head of the hammer will be made from high-carbon steel, which is known for its strength and durability. We'll also use a flat face, or "dom," on one side of the hammer to facilitate striking and shaping. The handle will be made from wood, specifically hardwoods like ash or hickory.

Heating and Forging

The next step in creating our hammer is heating and forging the metal. To do this, we'll heat the steel to a high temperature, typically around 2000°F (1093°C), until it reaches its critical point. At this stage, the steel will be soft and pliable, allowing us to shape it into the desired form.

Using a blowtorch or forge, we'll heat the steel to the desired temperature and then shape it using tongs or a hammer. The flat face of the hammer can be shaped by heating one side and then quenching it in water. This process is called "quenching" and helps to create a hard surface on the metal.

Tempering

After shaping the hammer, we need to temper it to reduce its hardness and make it more flexible. Tempering involves heating the steel to a lower temperature, typically around 500°F (260°C), to remove excess carbon and create a balance between hardness and flexibility. This process helps to prevent the hammer from becoming too brittle or prone to cracking.

Finishing Touches

With the hammer tempered, we can move on to finishing touches. The first step is to grind the flat face of the hammer using a shop grinder with a 48-belt sanding drum. This helps to smooth out any rough edges and create a sharp surface.

Next, we'll apply a layer of beeswax to the handle to increase its lubricity and prevent it from becoming too slippery. To attach the handle to the head of the hammer, we'll use a metal wedge that is placed crosswise to the wooden wedge. The wedge helps to secure the handle in place and provides additional support.

Sanding and Oiling

With the handle attached, we can move on to sanding and oiling. Using a sanding block or file, we'll smooth out any rough edges or burrs on the handle. Finally, we'll apply a layer of oil to the entire hammer, including the head and handle, to protect it from rust and corrosion.

The Finished Product

After several hours of hard work, our hammer is finally complete. We've created a tool that will last for years to come, one that will help us shape and form metal into its desired form. The process of creating a hammer from scratch requires patience, skill, and attention to detail, but the end result is well worth the effort.

A Special Thanks

We'd like to extend a special thank you to our young apprentice who helped us with this project. We're glad to have him on board and look forward to working with him again in the future.

Getting Involved

If you're interested in learning more about blacksmithing, be sure to check out some of Cor's work on social media. He creates a variety of knives and tools, including barrel knives that are known for their unique design and functionality. You can also find Cor on Facebook, where he shares tips and techniques for creating your own blacksmithing projects.

Fixing a Panel: A New Project?

After completing our hammer, we were brainstorming some new project ideas. One idea we tossed around was fixing a panel on someone's new car. We're not sure if that's something we'll tackle next, but it sounds like an exciting challenge. Stay tuned for more updates on our latest projects!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enno matter what it is that you do whether you're playing with cars playing with wood playing with metal or even just doing farming tools are required aren't they Mar tools are required and all over the country Australia in our case there's people making stuff now it's not all happening in mega factories a lot of this is happening in back sheds Garden sheds small sheds people just love making stuff the feeling of achievement you've got a thing in your hands now obviously there's a lot of tools that people need at home whether it's screwdrivers drills and other things but one of the most commonly used tools that anybody needs is a hammer now you could just go and buy a hammer couldn't you Martin absolutely you could go down to the shop and what would you say you'd go give me a hammer and it'd be five bucks yeah and they'd give you a hammer and it would work for like three goes and then it would break possibly Martin or you could go and make one but that would require finding a machine shop and a blacksmith and that is exactly what we've done so we are down here in pton which is about an hour and a half south of the CBD of Sydney and we're going to make a hammer today m stuff I love making stuff I like making I what it is I like making fences to put plants on and now we'll have our own Hammer to do you need a hammer for fencing yeah to to do stuff anyway so come with us and we'll take you into the machine shop and we'll make a hammer so everybody we are down here at um Bunnings in pikon which is not really Bunnings but um this is kin how you doing mate good as go thank you very much for having us down so sent us an email and said hey I make um oh that's nice nice and toasty uh you make knives you make you're a blacksmith yeah sure what what do you do down here so blacksmith knif maker tool maker um I've made things for uh for a satellite I've made things for um the last thing was a blade for an antique pencil sharpener and today I hope you guys will be interested in making some hammers so yes we're going to make some hammers Forge some hammers unreal man Forge some hammers with fire with fire with heat with fire and metal can you give us a quick tour of your of your Bunnings down here okay so this is a filing machine called a die Filer and um this will file all shaped holes that's literally a machine that's made to simply fire a job in life that's a fridge that keeps the beer cold fantas power hack here Cuts any size metal this is up to sort of 150 by 150 mil that'll that one actually pneumatically HS like this right yeah yeah that's right it's mechanical but that's cool um swage block this is used for shaping metal will you be using that today this is um this is filed on the die filer so that's um but this is a striking Anvil um we got the small power hammer it's a 9 kilo falling weight power hammer and this one here is the bigger one 25 kilo we may or may not use those today we've got a Rolling Mill here which is for flattening and elongating steel this Anvil is how much does this one weigh 250 kilos wa yeah we're bench pressing that later weren't we Martin no and um we've got the uh got the fly press uh which um does a whole variety of jobs and again we will be using that one today we've got the digit digitally controlled toaster oven Y which um we'll be using for tempering heat treat part of the heat treat process we got a um Artis supplies Paragon Kil here this is the Pro Series Kil U may or may not be using that today probably use the forge and this is where you would like youd stick knife blades in there right yeah absolutely that's a hardness tester we'll use that later on we've got the lathe the milling machine disc grinder cleaning buffing sanding sharpening various lishes we've got three lishes here today um we've got the surface grinder with a belt conversion variable speed band saww Cuts metal of wood and um this is awesome and you got this as a little Dusty space so that you can kind of got this so you can kind of close it down keeps the dust out of the machine shop yes good job you run to this stuff yeah I've got you'll see on my lawnmower and everything is all roobi so you be happy about that and it's all good stuff and they've been very supportive when I've had an issue so can only speak unlike the people you bought your engine off they've been fantastic to me robt been great we've been using it for years so well before they were sponsor as well so not my sponsor but it's all right OB gear and except for the drill presses which are all strain made um and antiques really n so these look vintage like the design of that but in really good condition uh it's fully restored by me yeah so I do my own gun bluing here so all the parts have been reblued this one here is a um a tapping machine it's mt1 tapping machine this will tap 1 mil Taps it'll run a 1 mil tap W no trouble at all up to 5 mil and um yeah that's pretty much it we're just going to enter into the oh we got a little Parts washer there and a worm farm because why not yeah great yeah awesome man and well what a great space you've managed to fit a lot into what is picked and Bunnings excellent there's a here course I got all my nuts and bolts and screws and everything all nicely ordered and and aine with a man cave up there I hope yeah yeah yeah well actually a train set but we won't half on too much yeah nice everybody's got to have their Vice right so um yeah that's basically it thanks so much for having us down today and thanks for sending us an email inviting us down I've never made a hammer I've used a hammer but I've never made one so I'm pretty excited yes yeah I hopefully uh you're going to show us what to do right yeah we we'll figure it out first step the heads of our hammers are actually made out of secondhand trailer axles first we chop them to size on the hacksaw then after a quick clean up on the linisher we can mark the center and then stick them into the forge the forge is gas fired and we'll get our metal up and over 1,000° C this isn't a quick one-step process unless than a minute outside the forge the steel Billet will cool down making it harder and harder to shape the first part of the process is punching the middle of the Hammerhead out to make room for the handle of course there are machines that that can make this whole process easier but we're going as analog as we can for the full smithing experience this is heavy and hot work requiring hundreds of strikes with a massive Sledgehammer there is a reason the blacksmith in all your computer games are massive units once we' finished smashing out the hole or the eye of the Hammer with a sledgehammer it's time to get the billets into the fly press so we can start shaping the ends which is called fullering you only get a few swing at this before the Billet is too hard to shape and needs to go back into the forge it's pretty awesome watching metal this thick and strong get squashed like it's made out of plasticine so everything happens really hot and really fast the longer you leave stuff out of the fire the harder it is to work which is why we're sort of rushing around and obviously we're going to end up with something that looks a little bit like that we got these dips in here that we just made in the big press so now we're going to put it on top of these metal round bars there so as we work it this is called the cheek apparently as we work it we don't sort of deform the hammer cuz it's still going to be red hot so the heads of our rounding hammers are in the Forge they're getting nice and hot and from there they're going to be coming out and we're going to continue drifting which is shaping the eye of the hammer then we're going over to fullering which is kind of flattening out and then cupping now I know that forging drifting fullering and cupping do sound like sex moves but it's all part of the actually part of the forging process that's right it is which is what we're doing we're forging and blacksmith and some stuff and I'm learning a lot and I'm learning it's very hard hot work but I'm very excited for the physical work isn't it yeah I'm excited for the out dangerous man yeah yeah it is um but we've got our station set up here so we're just going to kind of keep going round and round and round and then after that we're going to be then temper tempering the steel it's also worth noting that uh the better you are at this the quicker you can do it like the less times you got to reheat it you got to reheat it but if you're really good you can do it in less we've heated it a lot of times that's all I'm going to say but we are learning it's our first Hammer double to Triple the amount of times that other blacksmith may may do and then afterwards when obviously when the metal comes out of the forge it looks a bit scabby so we're going to go through a brushing technique also to kind of make it look a little bit fancy and then when we're working on our cars we can use this to beat the absolute crap out of things it's easy to go to the hardware shop and buy a hammer but somewhere somehow this process had to happen yes and it is happening right now mutt I'm let's let's can you hold that mutton I'm going to get I'm going to get it out of the of the forge right now and we're going to get drifting again mate oh that's H it turns out not all hammers are built the same and the metals you use to make them also vary depending on how hard you want the thing to be we ask Corin for a rundown on why that is steel comes in a whole lot of different carbon contents and um we can get it to obviously Harden now you know about hardened steel right so all your tools are hardened so basically we're taking steel which is a mixture of iron and carbon we've mixed those two um chemicals together carbon and iron and we're going to heat treat them and create a a crystal lattice that's hard okay so to do that we bring it up to a high temperature about 800 830 de C where the steel is red but it's not um it's not got any shadows in in a semi- darkk shop like we've got here so we're seeing a nice glow coming from the steel but not more than that if we call that's an tintic heat and if we cool the steel from that heat the steel will convert in crystal structure to a crystal IR structure called Martin side if we cool it quickly if we cool it quickly if we don't cool it quickly enough it won't form this Martin side it won't snap freeze it in position yeah okay now once we're form Martin site the steel is going to be very hard very hard like glass like we can take it and snap it oh might we might do a demo piece where we do that so we can see just how how it can be break so easily that's why it's super important to temper the steel afterwards tempering is what makes that hardness tough takes away the some of the hardness and turns it into toughness if you have a tool that breaks and you're sure you've had one when when it broke and you look at the brake and you see it's got um we look at the grain structure the fracture pattern we can tell how the steel was heat treated uh from the way that it's broken and normally if something's broken it's because you've either done something with it that wasn't designed to do or it was left too hard and not Tough Enough ah right okay and so the purpose I mean the purpose of all this you go okay why did it all why did it all so Harden the idea is that you want to hit something softer with it and not break the tool I mean like you got to balance up the hardness of it so so and balancing the hardness on a hammer is very important for a blacksmith we'll actually make our hammers a lot softer than you would for an engineering hammer and the reason is if I hit my Anvil um I want my hammer face to dent I don't want my Anvil to Dent so I always want my hammer to be softer than the Anvil it's much easier to go to a grinder dress a hammer than to reface an anvil oh of course so that's where we're at yeah cool all right there's something incredibly calming and almost otherworldly and beautiful about the dynamic way that these hammers are being made we are far from the sanitized air conditioned rooms that we often inhabit and this hot work really imparts a primal experience on all the sensors yes there's more time and work in creating a hammer this way and you could drive down to your local hardware store and buy one for cheaper without the sweat but the Hammer is not just about the result it's about the process something that these days can feel like it's getting lost in an Ever quickening results driven environment all right so we're doing some brushing this is like an aesthetic thing to make the outside look really nice to get all the scale and crap off um and we're also doing another heat treatment while the forge is kind of cooling down a little bit cooler than it was before where he cycling Martin we're heat cycling to normalize it because otherwise what can happen is on the inside of that hammerhead it can just look like salt it can look all crunchy whereas we want it to have nice grain like a delicious wagu steak hopefully we'll never break it to actually see the inside of it but we're just going to know it's done right K often when people think of blacksmithing there's always this image of someone going and doing a quench in water can you kind of explain to us what's actually going on there well sometimes they they do it in oil and you get the flames and it that looks pretty spectacular and some people even in milk I I have no doubt that some people do it in milk unicorn piss is the best but I've never tried it uh one day we might we might find some I've got a few of my team hunting it's not actually unicorn urine it's it's a number three and how you get it it's another story but anyway so um what is going on here yeah right okay so what we're doing we're getting the steel up to its austenizing temperature we're going to quench it in water and when we stick boiling hot oh it's not boiling hot red hot steel into water the water boils and it it forms what's called a steam jacket on the outside of the steel and what I'm going to ask you guys to do as you quench these is to vigorously move it up and down because what we're trying we're basically going to be making the Unicorn number three juice juice right just like just like that just imagine that you're going to get the best and most unicorn juice possible okay for a single action so we're going to go up and down two-handed maybe yes into the into the bucket of water and make sure that that steam jacket doesn't form because it will slow the cooling down all right okay so we want to shake it we want to get we want to get water Tay said we want to get water contact with as much of the steel as possible okay cool and um so some Steels you can quench in water some Steels quenching oil some it doesn't matter what you do they're not going to get hard and um and that's life so it just depends some be quenched in air yes okay okay so what I'm going to do now is just show you guys just how hard steel gets right so I take this piece of Steel which is at ionizing Temp and I'm going to do my what is now known as the Unicorn shake the Unicorn Shake um Shake I think that's uh Shake all right we'll make sure we are that sorry okay we've gotens we've got senses and beeps for that exact uh purpose right good so we do that quench like that and then we'll just see how hard it is oh my God that's steel oh you see how hard that is yes it is literally like glass oh wow why would I want a hammer that's like glass though but you don't that's the whole thing so why can't I break this so more beefs yeah so can you break it no it's too small of course he got the big one made himself look like a tough guy and then he gives us the little ones you know the whole pencil thing where you're try and like break the pencil with your thumb like arold SW no but you need a long pencil it doesn't work okay come on man so what we're going to do is we temper it okay let's just get it hot again like I just did then yes okay and then you'll see now I didn't temper it enough with this very scientific tempering method what we'd normally do is draw a color so I'd sand that back to shiny and I'd heat it up and watch the oxides form you know how you when you heat steel you get those oxides forming for a knife we'd be looking for a straw color but if we keep heating it we go to Blue have you seen that before do you want me to do a demo yeah I've seen it before you've seen it before that's okay you'll see it on YouTube guys there's this thing called YouTube you can get on there and see and then now that steel oh yeah is super hard to break right okay and obviously take a bit more science to it we can exactly decide how hard that Steel's going to be and that's what we're going to do with your hammers it does look like powder in there yes M so I've just finished schlopp this in the water and now it is going in the toaster oven to temper it to make it not so hard which means it won't be uh as brittle and it'll sitting there for an hour or two once it comes out of the toaster the Hammerhead is getting a nice juicy coating of beeswax next step is to grind our Hammerhead so this is a shopmate 48 belt grinder it's pretty pretty fancy actually um like looks a lot like the linisher that we have only way more versatile you can go this way you can go that way you can change belt easy all sorts of belts what I'm going to do now this is the flat face of the hammer and that's the Dom one so the flat one I'm just going to go straight in like that and flatten it off make it look pretty and then deur it and then we do like a slightly different process for this side next up it's time to move on to the wooden handle so to get the actual head of the hammer onto the handle I need to increase the lubricity and I'm going to be doing that by getting some lens seed oil on there like this and once that is nicely shooed up like that then I'm just going to get this put it on there and then we're just going to let it Hammer itself on so this here is the last step I've got a little metal wedge that is going Crossways to the wooden wedge that just went in there so I've sat that in there there it's got a little bit more Lube on it and then I'm using this this here is called a ball pen Hammer um and this ball pen is hard so that's going to be good for getting that into there with the handle sanded and oiled up our hammers are done and we are so stoked with how they've turned out we made a hammer two hammers they're excellent they're so cool and I can't wait to hit things with it uh a massive thank you to for having us down it was that it was a little bit of trailer axle thank you for having us how did we go today this was what we call a little bit of Master Apprentice do not hold back we each need a score of our abilities out of 10 and be honest we need you to be honest first of all Martin's overall score out of 10 yeah Marty is Marty's done very well he's excellent blacksmith uh got great skills with his hands uh in more ways than one and um he's done a really good job maybe a few sharp Corners there could have finished up so I'm giving him a solid uh an eight oh we're push it eight and a half just to make him feel better and a half yep plus5 what oh I don't know it make me feel better apparently Oh I thought you made another feel better all right and um and how did I go mate well that's a that's a solid nine do I lose points for that because I dented it oh we could have made that the bottom if we were smarter but he loses .5 so we got the same did we yeah let's go 85 yeah it it is my first Hammer I'm happy with that thank you so much for watching this special edition of whatever this was uh how can people check out some more of your blacksmithing and your knife making skills how can they find you kinor gamco on Instagram or just Cor on Facebook I make Barrel knives uh and that's pretty much what I'm known for so but I do all sorts of weird and you'll see on my Instagram do you know what a barrel knife is check have a look and find out also thank you to the young fella thank you very much thanks for coming in I don't really know why he was here today but he appeared to be helpful so thank you very much dude I reckon we should show how to fix a panel on your new car and I could I don't have to kick it I can hit it aome idea awesome what about this thanks fellas what about that bye owno matter what it is that you do whether you're playing with cars playing with wood playing with metal or even just doing farming tools are required aren't they Mar tools are required and all over the country Australia in our case there's people making stuff now it's not all happening in mega factories a lot of this is happening in back sheds Garden sheds small sheds people just love making stuff the feeling of achievement you've got a thing in your hands now obviously there's a lot of tools that people need at home whether it's screwdrivers drills and other things but one of the most commonly used tools that anybody needs is a hammer now you could just go and buy a hammer couldn't you Martin absolutely you could go down to the shop and what would you say you'd go give me a hammer and it'd be five bucks yeah and they'd give you a hammer and it would work for like three goes and then it would break possibly Martin or you could go and make one but that would require finding a machine shop and a blacksmith and that is exactly what we've done so we are down here in pton which is about an hour and a half south of the CBD of Sydney and we're going to make a hammer today m stuff I love making stuff I like making I what it is I like making fences to put plants on and now we'll have our own Hammer to do you need a hammer for fencing yeah to to do stuff anyway so come with us and we'll take you into the machine shop and we'll make a hammer so everybody we are down here at um Bunnings in pikon which is not really Bunnings but um this is kin how you doing mate good as go thank you very much for having us down so sent us an email and said hey I make um oh that's nice nice and toasty uh you make knives you make you're a blacksmith yeah sure what what do you do down here so blacksmith knif maker tool maker um I've made things for uh for a satellite I've made things for um the last thing was a blade for an antique pencil sharpener and today I hope you guys will be interested in making some hammers so yes we're going to make some hammers Forge some hammers unreal man Forge some hammers with fire with fire with heat with fire and metal can you give us a quick tour of your of your Bunnings down here okay so this is a filing machine called a die Filer and um this will file all shaped holes that's literally a machine that's made to simply fire a job in life that's a fridge that keeps the beer cold fantas power hack here Cuts any size metal this is up to sort of 150 by 150 mil that'll that one actually pneumatically HS like this right yeah yeah that's right it's mechanical but that's cool um swage block this is used for shaping metal will you be using that today this is um this is filed on the die filer so that's um but this is a striking Anvil um we got the small power hammer it's a 9 kilo falling weight power hammer and this one here is the bigger one 25 kilo we may or may not use those today we've got a Rolling Mill here which is for flattening and elongating steel this Anvil is how much does this one weigh 250 kilos wa yeah we're bench pressing that later weren't we Martin no and um we've got the uh got the fly press uh which um does a whole variety of jobs and again we will be using that one today we've got the digit digitally controlled toaster oven Y which um we'll be using for tempering heat treat part of the heat treat process we got a um Artis supplies Paragon Kil here this is the Pro Series Kil U may or may not be using that today probably use the forge and this is where you would like youd stick knife blades in there right yeah absolutely that's a hardness tester we'll use that later on we've got the lathe the milling machine disc grinder cleaning buffing sanding sharpening various lishes we've got three lishes here today um we've got the surface grinder with a belt conversion variable speed band saww Cuts metal of wood and um this is awesome and you got this as a little Dusty space so that you can kind of got this so you can kind of close it down keeps the dust out of the machine shop yes good job you run to this stuff yeah I've got you'll see on my lawnmower and everything is all roobi so you be happy about that and it's all good stuff and they've been very supportive when I've had an issue so can only speak unlike the people you bought your engine off they've been fantastic to me robt been great we've been using it for years so well before they were sponsor as well so not my sponsor but it's all right OB gear and except for the drill presses which are all strain made um and antiques really n so these look vintage like the design of that but in really good condition uh it's fully restored by me yeah so I do my own gun bluing here so all the parts have been reblued this one here is a um a tapping machine it's mt1 tapping machine this will tap 1 mil Taps it'll run a 1 mil tap W no trouble at all up to 5 mil and um yeah that's pretty much it we're just going to enter into the oh we got a little Parts washer there and a worm farm because why not yeah great yeah awesome man and well what a great space you've managed to fit a lot into what is picked and Bunnings excellent there's a here course I got all my nuts and bolts and screws and everything all nicely ordered and and aine with a man cave up there I hope yeah yeah yeah well actually a train set but we won't half on too much yeah nice everybody's got to have their Vice right so um yeah that's basically it thanks so much for having us down today and thanks for sending us an email inviting us down I've never made a hammer I've used a hammer but I've never made one so I'm pretty excited yes yeah I hopefully uh you're going to show us what to do right yeah we we'll figure it out first step the heads of our hammers are actually made out of secondhand trailer axles first we chop them to size on the hacksaw then after a quick clean up on the linisher we can mark the center and then stick them into the forge the forge is gas fired and we'll get our metal up and over 1,000° C this isn't a quick one-step process unless than a minute outside the forge the steel Billet will cool down making it harder and harder to shape the first part of the process is punching the middle of the Hammerhead out to make room for the handle of course there are machines that that can make this whole process easier but we're going as analog as we can for the full smithing experience this is heavy and hot work requiring hundreds of strikes with a massive Sledgehammer there is a reason the blacksmith in all your computer games are massive units once we' finished smashing out the hole or the eye of the Hammer with a sledgehammer it's time to get the billets into the fly press so we can start shaping the ends which is called fullering you only get a few swing at this before the Billet is too hard to shape and needs to go back into the forge it's pretty awesome watching metal this thick and strong get squashed like it's made out of plasticine so everything happens really hot and really fast the longer you leave stuff out of the fire the harder it is to work which is why we're sort of rushing around and obviously we're going to end up with something that looks a little bit like that we got these dips in here that we just made in the big press so now we're going to put it on top of these metal round bars there so as we work it this is called the cheek apparently as we work it we don't sort of deform the hammer cuz it's still going to be red hot so the heads of our rounding hammers are in the Forge they're getting nice and hot and from there they're going to be coming out and we're going to continue drifting which is shaping the eye of the hammer then we're going over to fullering which is kind of flattening out and then cupping now I know that forging drifting fullering and cupping do sound like sex moves but it's all part of the actually part of the forging process that's right it is which is what we're doing we're forging and blacksmith and some stuff and I'm learning a lot and I'm learning it's very hard hot work but I'm very excited for the physical work isn't it yeah I'm excited for the out dangerous man yeah yeah it is um but we've got our station set up here so we're just going to kind of keep going round and round and round and then after that we're going to be then temper tempering the steel it's also worth noting that uh the better you are at this the quicker you can do it like the less times you got to reheat it you got to reheat it but if you're really good you can do it in less we've heated it a lot of times that's all I'm going to say but we are learning it's our first Hammer double to Triple the amount of times that other blacksmith may may do and then afterwards when obviously when the metal comes out of the forge it looks a bit scabby so we're going to go through a brushing technique also to kind of make it look a little bit fancy and then when we're working on our cars we can use this to beat the absolute crap out of things it's easy to go to the hardware shop and buy a hammer but somewhere somehow this process had to happen yes and it is happening right now mutt I'm let's let's can you hold that mutton I'm going to get I'm going to get it out of the of the forge right now and we're going to get drifting again mate oh that's H it turns out not all hammers are built the same and the metals you use to make them also vary depending on how hard you want the thing to be we ask Corin for a rundown on why that is steel comes in a whole lot of different carbon contents and um we can get it to obviously Harden now you know about hardened steel right so all your tools are hardened so basically we're taking steel which is a mixture of iron and carbon we've mixed those two um chemicals together carbon and iron and we're going to heat treat them and create a a crystal lattice that's hard okay so to do that we bring it up to a high temperature about 800 830 de C where the steel is red but it's not um it's not got any shadows in in a semi- darkk shop like we've got here so we're seeing a nice glow coming from the steel but not more than that if we call that's an tintic heat and if we cool the steel from that heat the steel will convert in crystal structure to a crystal IR structure called Martin side if we cool it quickly if we cool it quickly if we don't cool it quickly enough it won't form this Martin side it won't snap freeze it in position yeah okay now once we're form Martin site the steel is going to be very hard very hard like glass like we can take it and snap it oh might we might do a demo piece where we do that so we can see just how how it can be break so easily that's why it's super important to temper the steel afterwards tempering is what makes that hardness tough takes away the some of the hardness and turns it into toughness if you have a tool that breaks and you're sure you've had one when when it broke and you look at the brake and you see it's got um we look at the grain structure the fracture pattern we can tell how the steel was heat treated uh from the way that it's broken and normally if something's broken it's because you've either done something with it that wasn't designed to do or it was left too hard and not Tough Enough ah right okay and so the purpose I mean the purpose of all this you go okay why did it all why did it all so Harden the idea is that you want to hit something softer with it and not break the tool I mean like you got to balance up the hardness of it so so and balancing the hardness on a hammer is very important for a blacksmith we'll actually make our hammers a lot softer than you would for an engineering hammer and the reason is if I hit my Anvil um I want my hammer face to dent I don't want my Anvil to Dent so I always want my hammer to be softer than the Anvil it's much easier to go to a grinder dress a hammer than to reface an anvil oh of course so that's where we're at yeah cool all right there's something incredibly calming and almost otherworldly and beautiful about the dynamic way that these hammers are being made we are far from the sanitized air conditioned rooms that we often inhabit and this hot work really imparts a primal experience on all the sensors yes there's more time and work in creating a hammer this way and you could drive down to your local hardware store and buy one for cheaper without the sweat but the Hammer is not just about the result it's about the process something that these days can feel like it's getting lost in an Ever quickening results driven environment all right so we're doing some brushing this is like an aesthetic thing to make the outside look really nice to get all the scale and crap off um and we're also doing another heat treatment while the forge is kind of cooling down a little bit cooler than it was before where he cycling Martin we're heat cycling to normalize it because otherwise what can happen is on the inside of that hammerhead it can just look like salt it can look all crunchy whereas we want it to have nice grain like a delicious wagu steak hopefully we'll never break it to actually see the inside of it but we're just going to know it's done right K often when people think of blacksmithing there's always this image of someone going and doing a quench in water can you kind of explain to us what's actually going on there well sometimes they they do it in oil and you get the flames and it that looks pretty spectacular and some people even in milk I I have no doubt that some people do it in milk unicorn piss is the best but I've never tried it uh one day we might we might find some I've got a few of my team hunting it's not actually unicorn urine it's it's a number three and how you get it it's another story but anyway so um what is going on here yeah right okay so what we're doing we're getting the steel up to its austenizing temperature we're going to quench it in water and when we stick boiling hot oh it's not boiling hot red hot steel into water the water boils and it it forms what's called a steam jacket on the outside of the steel and what I'm going to ask you guys to do as you quench these is to vigorously move it up and down because what we're trying we're basically going to be making the Unicorn number three juice juice right just like just like that just imagine that you're going to get the best and most unicorn juice possible okay for a single action so we're going to go up and down two-handed maybe yes into the into the bucket of water and make sure that that steam jacket doesn't form because it will slow the cooling down all right okay so we want to shake it we want to get we want to get water Tay said we want to get water contact with as much of the steel as possible okay cool and um so some Steels you can quench in water some Steels quenching oil some it doesn't matter what you do they're not going to get hard and um and that's life so it just depends some be quenched in air yes okay okay so what I'm going to do now is just show you guys just how hard steel gets right so I take this piece of Steel which is at ionizing Temp and I'm going to do my what is now known as the Unicorn shake the Unicorn Shake um Shake I think that's uh Shake all right we'll make sure we are that sorry okay we've gotens we've got senses and beeps for that exact uh purpose right good so we do that quench like that and then we'll just see how hard it is oh my God that's steel oh you see how hard that is yes it is literally like glass oh wow why would I want a hammer that's like glass though but you don't that's the whole thing so why can't I break this so more beefs yeah so can you break it no it's too small of course he got the big one made himself look like a tough guy and then he gives us the little ones you know the whole pencil thing where you're try and like break the pencil with your thumb like arold SW no but you need a long pencil it doesn't work okay come on man so what we're going to do is we temper it okay let's just get it hot again like I just did then yes okay and then you'll see now I didn't temper it enough with this very scientific tempering method what we'd normally do is draw a color so I'd sand that back to shiny and I'd heat it up and watch the oxides form you know how you when you heat steel you get those oxides forming for a knife we'd be looking for a straw color but if we keep heating it we go to Blue have you seen that before do you want me to do a demo yeah I've seen it before you've seen it before that's okay you'll see it on YouTube guys there's this thing called YouTube you can get on there and see and then now that steel oh yeah is super hard to break right okay and obviously take a bit more science to it we can exactly decide how hard that Steel's going to be and that's what we're going to do with your hammers it does look like powder in there yes M so I've just finished schlopp this in the water and now it is going in the toaster oven to temper it to make it not so hard which means it won't be uh as brittle and it'll sitting there for an hour or two once it comes out of the toaster the Hammerhead is getting a nice juicy coating of beeswax next step is to grind our Hammerhead so this is a shopmate 48 belt grinder it's pretty pretty fancy actually um like looks a lot like the linisher that we have only way more versatile you can go this way you can go that way you can change belt easy all sorts of belts what I'm going to do now this is the flat face of the hammer and that's the Dom one so the flat one I'm just going to go straight in like that and flatten it off make it look pretty and then deur it and then we do like a slightly different process for this side next up it's time to move on to the wooden handle so to get the actual head of the hammer onto the handle I need to increase the lubricity and I'm going to be doing that by getting some lens seed oil on there like this and once that is nicely shooed up like that then I'm just going to get this put it on there and then we're just going to let it Hammer itself on so this here is the last step I've got a little metal wedge that is going Crossways to the wooden wedge that just went in there so I've sat that in there there it's got a little bit more Lube on it and then I'm using this this here is called a ball pen Hammer um and this ball pen is hard so that's going to be good for getting that into there with the handle sanded and oiled up our hammers are done and we are so stoked with how they've turned out we made a hammer two hammers they're excellent they're so cool and I can't wait to hit things with it uh a massive thank you to for having us down it was that it was a little bit of trailer axle thank you for having us how did we go today this was what we call a little bit of Master Apprentice do not hold back we each need a score of our abilities out of 10 and be honest we need you to be honest first of all Martin's overall score out of 10 yeah Marty is Marty's done very well he's excellent blacksmith uh got great skills with his hands uh in more ways than one and um he's done a really good job maybe a few sharp Corners there could have finished up so I'm giving him a solid uh an eight oh we're push it eight and a half just to make him feel better and a half yep plus5 what oh I don't know it make me feel better apparently Oh I thought you made another feel better all right and um and how did I go mate well that's a that's a solid nine do I lose points for that because I dented it oh we could have made that the bottom if we were smarter but he loses .5 so we got the same did we yeah let's go 85 yeah it it is my first Hammer I'm happy with that thank you so much for watching this special edition of whatever this was uh how can people check out some more of your blacksmithing and your knife making skills how can they find you kinor gamco on Instagram or just Cor on Facebook I make Barrel knives uh and that's pretty much what I'm known for so but I do all sorts of weird and you'll see on my Instagram do you know what a barrel knife is check have a look and find out also thank you to the young fella thank you very much thanks for coming in I don't really know why he was here today but he appeared to be helpful so thank you very much dude I reckon we should show how to fix a panel on your new car and I could I don't have to kick it I can hit it aome idea awesome what about this thanks fellas what about that bye ow\n"