the video you're about to watch has been made
possible with support from kiwico makers of beautiful maker kits for all ages from zero to 103
and beyond and we'll be covering what makes them remarkable and one of their kits specifically
later on in the video but for right now let's get into it hey everybody adam savage in my
cave with a tool tip that is more of a tool category than a specific tool um it's one of the
most common questions i get is about the tools that beginning makers should have in their shop
and it's not going too far to say the first tool any of us ever used was probably a hammer and it's
probably one that looks just like this this is the er hammer this is every house has one um every
one of us has used one it's got this fork in the back which is for lifting nails what is a nail a
nail is the way we used to hold [ __ ] together i haven't seen one in years but you could still
get them out of wood using one of these and it's got this striking face right we we know the parts
of a hammer but it's so much deeper than that and i'm gonna go through a bunch of hammers that i use
on the regular but please understand this is not a comprehensive hammer video i recently actually
saw a talk given by a person who was an actual expert in hammers that's not me i am not so
it's not comprehensive and it's not expertise i'm literally giving you a tour of the of
the different things i use to whack stuff um and the first thing that i learned about
hammers when i became a more developed maker was they don't have to be metal actually uh
in fact one of my favorite hammers is this thwacker which is just a piece of it's a crown
tools i'm not sure what this is might be hickory might be maple and it's just a straight two-piece
wooden hammer and that piece slips in there and this is fantastic for moving stuff without
marring it and that's one of the issues with a metal hammer but within the non-metallic hammers
there's this whole world and it's really awesome um if you saw the armor making video of me making
uh excalibur armor with terry english in his shop in england we used a lot of these phenolic
hammers and these are different types of high density plastics with different shapes for
hammering out the aluminum hammering out the metal and using it to get shapes so it's pretty
easy to see that if i smack a piece of aluminum with this as opposed to this i'm going to get
a a more a a a smoother detent out of it than this this is going to leave this sharp angle i
suppose if you had to you could make an entire suit of armor using just this hammer but it would
be such a pain in the ass no one would try it uh so for moving around aluminum and and hammering
some of the lighter metals i absolutely rely on these phenolic hammers a ton and there are many
more shapes than this i have i think seven or eight in total and i've used all as you can
see from their marking um and by the way i'm like every hammer has written on it when you buy
it from the hardware store don't do this with hammers we did a whole episode of mythbusters
on it don't do that with hammers the reason you don't smack hammers together is because the
hammer is a piece of metal forged into the hammer shape and then case hardened it has to be case
hardened so it can handle but it can't be too hard and if it is it can shatter and commercial hammers
tend to be case hardened just a little bit past where they ought to be uh and if you smack them
into each other they can shatter and parts can fly fast and they're searching for your eyes man they
just want soft parts of your body to go through is that too dark that's how i think
about tools they're out to get me that's that's the proper mode of thinking
with tools okay so after phenolic hammers we have replaceable tip thwackers and honestly
this one with these little what i think are like ultra high molecular weight plastic tips i use
more than most other hammers here it gives me a nice fine control it's got a narrow tip i
can get in and because it's a non-marking face i get so much done with this hammer when i wear
my apron this lives right here and i use it 40 times a day along those same lines i recently
picked this up off ebay here's something maybe i shouldn't tell you but beautiful hammers can be
bought on ebay for 10 or 20 dollars at the most i picked this up for i think 11 look at this
beauty look at this masterpiece it's a thwacker after my heart it's just a little bit bigger
than this it's light i can get i can get little i mean for like the kind of gunsmithing that i've
been doing with the samaritan tapping out pins this is perfect it's all the weight that i need
for sensitive little tapping ebay this is a hammer i think made by the new concepts fellows the ones
that made my watercut titanium coping saws uh this is another yeah new concepts k-n-e-w
and this is another replaceable head and it's got a soft rubber head a slightly hard
rubber head and i have several other faces for it again a really pretty critical thing to have
in your shop this is a this is a lovely tool okay let's move on to some more metal hammers
this uh after you've seen this hammer besides this and a mini sledge the other hammer you've
probably seen is this one this is called a ball peen hammer and it has again like this
hammer two sides one is the striking face here and then it's got this secondary striking face
uh that is rounded and that's called a peen and because it's rounded and hemispherical it is a
ball peen there are many different sizes of ball pins i've got some smaller ones i've even
got some much bigger ones uh and these are fantastic for rounding over the heads of rivets
uh and many other uh armor making operations one of the main things i love about ebay purchases
of tools is not actually the business end of the tool it's frequently the handle that is the
loveliest part of an inexpensive ebay tool purchase look at this handle for my favorite
ballpeen hammer this handle is magnificent and it feels great and again way better than than that
right like seriously this is objectively better now that we're into the shape of the peen
uh having a specific effect on what you're hammering well within blacksmithing and armor
making there is a king's ransom of hammers and i'm just going to show you a few uh this might be
the the the metal hammer peen that i use the most i really like again clearly i've my my wheelhouse
is in the like the wide narrow head it is like a specific kind of control that i like your results
may vary um but this one is what i use for rounding over rivets it allows me to get into
tight spaces where this one might not so this is my favorite ball peen hammer but there might be
other operations i need to do where i don't need a compound curve so here is a type of striking
hammer with a simple curve instead of a compound curve that curves in two directions and this
allows me to straighten certain things out and again this is not a comprehensive view
on how hammers work and what they're all for because i'm sure that each of these has names
and i don't know what those names are i do know that uh that's called a cross peen because
it is perpendicular to the line of the hammer i don't know beyond that okay so we've established
there's a whole bunch of different armor hammers or or peen and different shape faces for striking
metals and if you notice that like this what i said is my favorite this is another ebay find and
i think it was maybe 21 bucks for this beautiful i mean this is probably 100 years old yeah get thee
to ebay to find your hammer expansion before we go too much further let's talk about kiwi co and the
things they make because they are awesome both the company and the things as i said the beginning
they make maker kits for kids of all ages and they're built to introduce young makers to the
ideas of steam science technology engineering arts and math and they do a fabulous job of that
i've built several of their kits and i found the experience rewarding easy simple and the
actual final result to be pretty satisfying a driving ethos for kiwi co is that small changes
made today can yield big dividends tomorrow and as a human being who was encouraged to make things
when i was younger i could not possibly agree more that bit of encouragement matters so much to the
future when you give a kid a box of parts and they make something they didn't think was possible you
literally open up the entire world for them it's not going too far to say that uh this ballista
i can tell you having built a full-size belief it has all the constituent parts this is a
great way to teach people how a ballista works and it even comes with projectiles so you can
engage in some ye oldie warfare with each other it is a terrific company with terrific
products and i love supporting them they even have instruction booklets that
come with extra experiments you can do for instance the ballista will teach you about
trajectories and even parabola if you want to get that deep into it tested viewers
i have a special offer for you you get 50 off the first month of any crate that kiwi
co sells by going to kiwico.com tested all right let's get back to the video now within the
jewelers art there are also hammers of every kind of striking face you could imagine but on a
much smaller scale because jewelry making is is not dissimilar from armor making in moving metal
stretching it squashing it all those operations this is a set that i purchased and i i
think i bought like eight of them in a set and they are very useful these are made by true
strike by euro tool uh they are really lovely and very recently i used one in a perfect application
i i'm a tool hound like when i find out something exists i've just got to add it to my collection
so the fact that i could have a full set of like weird shapes large and weird shapes small
i totally had to do it um these aren't used very regularly by me um and probably because i
don't work that that small um okay now we get to the big thwackers and like i said this is one of
my all-time favorites as you can see from its face it gets a lot of love here at the shop um
this mini brass thwacker i made that gives me a lot of momentum out at the end of this arm it
may be just a little too heavy but i love its form factor so much it's going to stick around uh and
then there's this a nice big uh non-sparking head the head is brass now we use these all the time on
mythbusters because we were working in potentially flammable environments so we had all all manner of
non-sparking heads i just love the weight of the brass on this i love this i don't even think
i have a mini sludge in the shop this is the closest thing i have and i just i like the weight
i like the fact that it's not going to mark steel the last thing i want to show you is
the only hammer here that i designed uh and this is the hammer that i designed
as a crew gift for the mythbusters crew i think at the end of season three i
made 30 35 of these and they're based they are based i think this one is serial
number oh no this is 22.
I still have 001 somewhere around here i kept a couple um
this is a simple piece of two-inch steel four and a half inches long is that two inches
yeah two-inch steel four and a half inches long welded to a one-inch piece of schedule 40 plumbing
pipe uh and this is a design i copied from a 1940s steam fitters pipefitters hammer that i found and
it was made the same exact way they'd taken just a billet of round steel welded a handle with
it it was so old uh on modern plumbing pipe uh the the the schedule of the pipe is usually
uh uh stamped on in ink in the olden days they used to do it with an actual physical stamp
so in this steam fitter's hammer that i that i witnessed you actually got to see schedule
40 like etched in the side it's just beautiful um i actually hired dennis kwan before he was a
producer for mythbusters when he was interning for jamie just to kind of learn the ropes i hired
him to turn for me all 35 of these handles with some knurling it feels great i then after all the
welding i made a jig for welding these i sent them off to have them all case hardened and uh i called
the convincer it is one of my favorite designs of a thing that i have ever done i can't believe i
haven't shown it to you before but it is a totally great way to end this uh if you're an expert in
hammers and i've gotten something painfully wrong i apologize but again i am not an expert this
is not comprehensive i just strike things with everything on this table on a regular basis and i
thought how i strike them would be useful for your edumacation thank you guys for joining me for
this tool tip i'm adam savage in my cave and i will see you next time i will describe to you
the scene in which i gave these hammers to the entire mythbusters crew we were all at m7 outdoors
because there was a enclosed outdoor space we were having a barbecue i broke these out and i gave
them to everyone and as you can imagine a tool doesn't fulfill its purpose until it does what
it's supposed to do and here was the crew of mythbusters and cast with the tool in their
hands and they wanted to use it for its purpose they wanted to release the beast and we had a car
we had just filmed with and everyone took their hammers over to this car and we turned it into
garbage in about half an hour it was so much fun just like 30 people at a barbecue just destroying
a car with their brand new hammers so much joy