Thread: A diagonal peen hammer on the cheap

thought I would add this for anyone interested
made my own diagonal peen hammer
Started with a 1.8kg/3.9lb square mallet ($15 from Bunning's)
marked each end to give me a Left & Right hand Diagonal Peen hammer
cut off the corners with my 5" grinder with a 1mm thick cutting disc
then cleaned up with the flap disk

not bad for $15 and about 1/2 an hours work
sorry I forgot to take before pics but I figure you'll work that out



now my hammers are starting to breed also the as collection grows


3lb Ball peen & 4lb Gimp hammers - had these since starting my apprenticeship in 1986
4lb cross peen ( Demo hammer is Aus $30 Bunning's)
the new Diagonal peen ( $15 Bunning's)
not shown
I also have my smaller peening hammers a 0.1kg ball peen & a 0.1kg cross peen,
& another 0.2kg ball peen (awaiting a new handle) for big pins

yes I am a Boilermaker & like hitting things with hammers LOL

Brilliant! I love DIY solutions like this. I sawed one side off a similar hammer to make a Japanese stile hammer.

Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius!!!!! Love it, but that is a bit of grinding and from the finish, it doesn't look like you were in a big hurry to get it done when you started. Nice work.

I like it a lot, very cool. It looks like it would be useful. I wish I had one.

Charlie

Originally Posted by JDM61

Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius!!!!! Love it, but that is a bit of grinding and from the finish, it doesn't look like you were in a big hurry to get it done when you started. Nice work.

not much grinding all done with a 5" angle grinder (I should add)


I cut the corners off with a very thin 1mm cutting disk,

then did a bit of final shaping with a standard 1/4' thick grinding disk

and finished with a 5" flap disk


screw doing it with the bench grinder seriously took about 1/2 an hour of actual work

What is that hammer for? Does it have a specific job or just ornamental hammer marks?

The intention is for hollow hammering razors and or stretching out steel on what ever I forge
Mainly the same as the cross peen but just means less rotation of the job or my arms to get the angles I want.

I am curious how you will fare. I have found that hammering out hollows is usually more problematicc and time consuming than hammering out a triangular-ish wedge and then hollow grinding. It takes a lot of effort to keep the hollows symmetrical, and you remove any margin for hammering error to be corrected by grinding.

Originally Posted by Bruno

I am curious how you will fare. I have found that hammering out hollows is usually more problematicc and time consuming than hammering out a triangular-ish wedge and then hollow grinding. It takes a lot of effort to keep the hollows symmetrical, and you remove any margin for hammering error to be corrected by grinding.

I've been hammering out the hollows on all of my razors with 100% success so far. My pre heat treat grind is deep enough to grind out very deep hammer blows. The biggest problem for me when doing this is that it is very easy to hit the spine, and being so far proud of the hollow, even a light hit with a misguided cross peen causes a big problem.

Originally Posted by Substance

Mainly the same as the cross peen but just means less rotation of the job or my arms to get the angles I want.

This makes sense to me intellectually, but I suspect I would have trouble keeping both sides of the peen even in practice. It seems to me that hand height would be more critical than with a normal cross peen, though It's hard to know how much of a problem this might be without actually trying it. I am very interested in how it works for you.