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