Lead Hammer

Lead hammers are easy to make and don't damage your machined steel surfaces.
I have a small lead "knocker" but that one stays on the lathe. Time for a new hammer.
So I took two small pieces of pine (2x4 pieces actually) cleaned and squared them up.
Drilled 4 holes for long 1/4-20 bolts.
Drilled a hole for the shaft. (old piece from the junk box, cleaned and knurled.
The end of the shaft inside the lead head has a 3/16 screw through it to retain the lead head.
The round cylinder was cut using a round nose endmill and trepanning on the mill and then finishing the ends with a 1/4" em. Drilled two holes in one side for the lead in and air out. Melted the lead and presto, a nice new hammer.

The other one is for my mini mill and I used an old wrench, cut off one end (most of it) and made a similar mold that I seemed to have misplaced but it was made using the same principal and it was made of wood.

Happy Hammering.

John

Interesante proyecto jjr y facil de reparar....se funde y se hace otro: Lol:.

Thank You jotasierra
JR

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Very interesting! I have a couple of old lead hammers that I built in shop class back in the '80s. They've needed new heads for a LONG time but I never thought of using a wooden mold.

Did you coat it with something?
Why didn't it burn?

Wmrra13, Hello and thanks for checking in. It was not coated at all. Just plain 2x4 lumver that was dry. It had been in the shop for quite a while. There was some smoke but no flame. Guess 600 degrees is less than the kindling point of the wood. There are a few scorch marks but very little flame as I remember. I have stirred my lead furnace with a wooden stick and if I don't leave the stick in too long it does not burn.

I found this on the net:

For a wood ignition time of less than one minute, the wood must be heated to a temperature of 430 degrees Celsius or 806 degrees Fahrenheit. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, studies on wood ignition conclude that there is not a fixed temperature for ignition, and the moment of ignition largely depends on the amount of exposure time, the density of the wood and the type of wood.


Cheers, JR

Cool, now I just need to find some lead....

When I was a kid my dad was a cop we lived just far enough outside the city limits that we could shoot guns so many friends, relatives and other cops used our place for a practice range. We had a big old-growth stump in our yard that was the backstop for the targets. The neighbor kids and I spent many enjoyable hours digging slugs out of the stump with our pocket knives and screwdrivers. The mini-balls from my uncle's black powder rifles were always the big prize.

Back in Ohio many years ago I would find pure lead under the phone lines where the lineman would make his splices. Gathered up quite a bit of it. Also wheel weights and I pulled old car batteries out of the junk piles in the country ravines. Found enough of the stuff to make a 75 lb set of weights for my attempt to become Charles Atlas...Ha Ha. I melted it in an old lead laddle my dad used for leading the cast iron drain pipes when he built our house. I made the ingots the size of the laddle and then drilled 1" holes through them so they would fit on my weight pipe. No OSHA in my back yard....Amazing I am still kickin after all the stuff I handled when I was a kid.

Cheers, JR

That's cool! I have a house with leaded drain joints that I've had to replace. The new method using jute and fancy caulk is much more of a PITA and a LOT messier than pouring hot lead in your crawlspace.

I guess I forgot to mention that we melted it and made fishing weights and ballast for our Pinewood Derby cars. I hear you about it being a wonder we're still alive considering all the stoopid things we did. Monkeying around with the lead was much less dangerous than what we did with the gunpowder we had unfettered access to...