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Deemed as a right of passage by some, my next project is to design and fabricate a machinist hammer.
Machinist hammers are distinguished from other hammers by their removable striking faces, allowing for the use of harder of softer materials.
This project was intended to be cast out of aluminum but, the casting system was not operational at the time.
So, I decided to fabricate it instead.
When designing my hammer I wanted the handle to be as comfortable in the hand as possible but still be a shape that could be turned on a lathe.
When creating the shape I also kept in mind that I wanted the finish to be a polished smooth so I was going to need the end of the handle to be flared to not allow the hammer to slip from grasp.
My plan for the hammer was to form the handle first on the lathe then move to the head.
Manual lathes don't easily cut curved features along the Z axis so my plan was to make small cuts only just to depth creating a graduated curve in the handle.
Each cut would be done with a button (rounded) part-off tool every 0.1". The handle is 8" long so this equated to 80 individual cuts.
In order to keep track of all these cuts I printed out drawings with each cut depth denoted and worked through all 80 of them
Once I had finished all 80 cuts it was time to smooth-out the graduations. for this I used a metal file.
After sufficiently filing the graduations smooth, I then moved to sand paper, then to a polishing abrasive.
The end product was a handle with a mirror-like finish.
I then removed the handle from the chuck and flattened the top of the hammer.
The next task was to machine the head features.
To begin machining features to the cylindrical head I was going to need to add some flat surfaces.
This is when I discovered that my tool holding was not as secure as I had presumed it to be.
This was an issue that plagued me throughout my time using this specific mill until I ended up replacing the tool collet.
Chamfering the edges.
I decided I wanted the threading of the hammer to reach all the way through so I had to modify a tap to thread the entire length of the head.
The threading process was rather perilous.
Next came the striking faces.
I intentionally designed these pretty simple because what if i need to make a lot of these?
To secure them to the head, I planned on threading a hole in the tip; inserting a bolt with red thread glue then cut off the bolt head.
nuts.
Now it was time to add the striking face feature to the head.
Manual machines do straight lines very well, but they are quite difficult with curves. Coming up with a way to create this circular beveled hole in the head was going to be quite difficult. So I began looking around the shop for a solution, and I found it in the form of a rotary table vice.
with this I could angle the spindle to the 10 degrees bevel I desired and spin the part around the moving cutter.
Easy.
in-fact not.
Aligning the tool's tip to move precisely around the point I was desiring proved to be very dificult. I had no real fine tuning of the vice's position other than taps of a hammer that I would then tighten down very quickly.
It was tedious but eventually after some practice I was able to get it figured out.
The cuts began, and they were made shallow and slow.
And with that, the hammer was complete.
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