3GBP for 3 hammers hmmm!

That would be £3 each.

hammer" being (maybe) thye exception. Don't hurry to your shop, they'll take a while to shift.

Damn! these yellow ones.

There are 3 things to watch out for with cheap hammers besides the discomfort factor (which can run the gamut) The rubber coming loose from the handle, the handle breaking and the iron in the head being soft.

The latter is OK for very occasional use. The head will mushroom with a lot of use and become dangerous and the claw (if it has one) will not last long enough for pulling out small nails. Using pins with such hammers is a real, major, absolute and irredeemable pain and you will waste loads of nails 2 to 3 inches long.

IOW: A decent hammer can be a real bargain in comparison. A decent hammer will have really hard steel so that even after years of use there will be almost no dents or pits in the face.

Tiny little dents and pits will tend to turn the nails and bend them.

Rubber handle? What do you mean?

Bending a nail with an hammer is not down to pits in the face of the head its down to how you swing the hammer along with the right place of the grip of the hammer.

My hammer has more pits than Wales, but i can drive a 3" nail home with two blows.

Or...incorrect place of holding the hammer, rather. :-)

You mock Sire.

First you drive somewhere,anywhere will do,about a mile. When you get there get out of the car and have a 'blow' then start traveling back home,stop half way and have another 'blow' then continue on you're way back home. When you get home remember to take the 3" nail off the seat, don't want anyone sitting on it now,do we. :-)

I've bought something like 4 or 5 of the cross-pein "locksmith's" hammers so far. They're not a common shape and anything similar is usually very expensive. Useful lightweight smithing hammer and the head / shaft are well attached.

The bevel on the face is far too big, so getting the face square again (should you need it) is an awful lot of grinding.

That's about one then :)

In message , The3rd Earl Of Derby writes

Sucking eggs excepted, scrubbing the hammer face on glass paper saves a lot of bent small nails:-)

regards

Anyone tried those new Estwing forward weight jobbies

Not IMHO. They might be worth it if you're an American housebuilder doing a lot of their ticky-tacky 2x4 stick framing, but for anything like a flat surface you've got your knuckles dragging against it.

I love my big Vaughan framer though (Axminster, the one with the hatchet handle)

It depends on how much you use it. Maybe a nice gas power nailer is better value?

The message from "dennis@home" contains these words:

Except the centre of mass in a traditional hammer is somewhere in line with the handle - perhaps two inches behind the striking face. For those of us who can handle a hammer this isn't a problem, but rearranging the mass so more of it is forward, closer to the striking face might help if you're inept.

A hammer head is normally balanced front-back around the shaft (or near enough). This one has almost all the mass (bar a small claw) ahead of the shaft.

It also has a very short face (from the handle centreline), so using it feels more like a bat than a hammer.