Hi there. Welcome to another Friday Findings
video. Today I'm going to talk to you about rawhide hammers. Now, "What is a rawhide hammer?" you may ask.
Well it's this rather humble looking little tool and you can see from the face of the
hammer, this is actually a roll of rawhide. It's just coiled up. It's impregnated with
shellac and then put on a handle. Why do we bother? Well because this is a wonderful tool
in any kind of jewelry making metal smithing for hammering when you need to without marring
the surface.
The rawhide just doesn't mar the surface, but it will harden it and flatten it. Now this particular hammer is just right for
jewelry making. It's got about a 1" diameter face and it weighs about 2 oz, but you can
get them up to 2-2 1/5" in 11 oz or more. I've taken a little time outside. I don't
know if you can see this hammer is fairly new and I've actually beaten this face on
some of the rocks and bricks outside just to break up the shiny shellac. You can see
this side still has some shine to it and this will just soften it up.
You can't feel it
obviously, but I can and this is much softer. And what we use it for is when we need to
hammer something, but we don't want to mar the surface so we don't want to make hammer
marks and strikes on it and here we have a couple of copper figure eight pieces that
I just threw together and these are 16 gauge wire and you can see they're both a little
flexible. They're stiff because I've worked it to make the shape, but I've done nothing
beyond that, but you can see also these need to be flattened out and also if I was going
to use this in a piece of jewelry, I'd want to work harden it a bit so I would know it
wasn't going to come open.
So we just use the rawhide mallet and notice
it just took a couple little taps. No pounding, no banging and like I said this is only a
2 oz mallet, but look at the difference now. Here's the original, open, close and now, =hurk= that
doesn't want too open. It's much, much stiffer and a few more taps to work harden this and
this will be as secure as you could possibly want for a piece of jewelry. So the next time that you want to hammer something,
but you don't want to make any marks on it, consider a rawhide mallet. It's a good investment. If you like this video, please make sure you've
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and on my blog. Happy creating. Bye bye..