Custom Sledgehammers

T

Tingjid

Joined
Dec 23, 2018
Messages
4
First, I swear I searched and found a good thread on hammers of 1045 steel, also if I'm in the wrong sub-thread, my bad.... But I still have questions.

I'm a firefighter with a fair amount of metal working experience, and I have a shop in my garage to accomplish these goals. I'm looking to buy some square 2.5" 1045 stock steel from speedymetals.com (not cheap, but what I could find and I want to do it right), and make some custom sledgehammers for myself, my dad, my father-in-law, and my best buddy (father's day presents). Square stock because it'll be easier to just grind away the edges and I can use my drill press and my mill to make the hole for the handle, mainly because I'm not setup to forge and drift a hole like that. The plan is to do something along the lines of this guy:

Anyway, I'd like this to be beautiful and functional, and functional for me means beating the ever living hell out of it on the street. Specifically for me, hitting halligans (big steel crow bar things), and doors, and bricks, and glass, and literally anything.

So the question that I have is, how do I harden it? I have a good little forge, do I strive to case harden it, in water or oil? Do I try to just heat up both faces and harden those? Do I not harden it at all since it will be regularly striking steel? Or secret option C which I have not thought of?

Any advice will be taken, and if there is interest I will post follow ups. Greatly appreciated.
 
Boggs said:
You pulled up a little quick.....here’s a section of the forum that should provide answers
https://www.bladeforums.com/forums/shop-talk-bladesmith-questions-and-answers.741/
Click to expand...


Boggs said:
You pulled up a little quick.....here’s a section of the forum that should provide answers
https://www.bladeforums.com/forums/shop-talk-bladesmith-questions-and-answers.741/
Click to expand...


Indeed I did, not sure how I missed that. That is... a lot... gonna take a while, but thank you.
 
I'll recommend you get on youtube and watch some videos of Brent Bailey, or Brian Brazeal making hammers. Ignore most others, they either got their stroke from those guys, or are poorly arguing against it with some BS they thunk up out of jealousy.

You can successfully and easily quench 1045 in water or oil for this application, you don't want or need a hammer to be "knife hard", in fact, like anvils, it's not desirable to have them in the chipping range of hardness, as shrapnel is a very real concern with metal striking tools, however you do want to fully harden, and temper properly, preferably differentially tempering the eye area and center, which can be done with a hot drift as your heat source, after tempering the whole head.


If you really want to do it right, the eye should be punched and drifted, not drilled and "smeared open" with a drift like many seem to do these days, which is highly likely to introduce cold shuts in the eye. The eye should be hour-glass shaped, punched and drifted from both the top and bottom of the head, to create this shape. This is what assures your head doesn't go flying off and that you get a secure (in both directions) fit. Unlike a tomahawk or mattock, which it's usually traditional to have it tapered in one direction, making changing handles easier, which makes sense considering their traditional usage.
 
Enthusiastic project for sure.

Some years past, I made pair of similar engraved forging hammers as wedding gift.
Taking the lazy way out. I just bought commercial hammers, cleaned up & polished their exteriors and went at it with engraving. Since steel was already hardened, yes engraving was more difficult, but not too bad. Forging hammers are not all that hard afterall.
 
Tingjid said:
Columbus, Ohio. Not sure how that's pertinent, but there you go.
Click to expand...

It also helps to meet local folks who are experts, or at least have more experience in this or any other knife/forging related question.

Tingjid said:
So the question that I have is, how do I harden it? I have a good little forge, do I strive to case harden it, in water or oil? Do I try to just heat up both faces and harden those? Do I not harden it at all since it will be regularly striking steel?
Click to expand...

It's my understanding that commercial sledges are either case hardened or hardened using you method B. That's what I'd do based on my experience forging different punches and tooling for general blacksmithing.

Not hardening it would be a mistake for longevity of the tool.
 
I would harden them by oven heating at 1500F and soaking for 20 minutes. Quench in water or brine and temper at 400F for 2 hours. This should yield around Rc 50-51.

I saw Ron Smith's engraving hammer once ... it is a work of art. Ron wrote several books on metal engraving and worked for GRS.
 
I heat treated all my hammers in my first simple coal forge made with a hairdryer
I didn't forge hammers tho as I was just starting out and punching an eye seemed daunting to me
I got old 12lb hammers with broken handles I had lying around and went at them with an angle grinder ended up with a 5.5 lb rounding hammer and 4 lb cross pien
Good luck
 
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