Heat treating hammer head

Not satisfied with stock models, I turned my own hammer head (W1). At this point I want to HT it and question I have is: what RC should I go for ?

The hammer is to be used for hand-riveting, rivets are annealed wire

Reply to
rashid111
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This is a situation that demands a long temper -- at least two hours. Someone else will have to suggest numbers; I don't have my charts for W1 handy.

The reason I'm responding is to point out that hammer heads should have a second temper, at a higher temperature, applied just to the outer edge of the face. I don't know how they do this in industry but a friend of mine did it years ago with something we came up with together: a conical hole in a

3"-dia bar of HRS, large enough to fit the face slightly below the cop of the cone. He heated the bar to dull red and tempered the edge of the hammer face by pushing it into the cone and drawing it to a color. Which color, I don't remember , but I think it was medium blue.

Otherwise, the edges of the hammer face may chip.

-- Ed Huntress

Reply to
Ed Huntress

That's precisely my main concern. Would't be too much fun having to wear protective glasses every time I use it.

I fugure something like 55RC should work ...

Most gangerous chipping comes when tools are @ eye level. I wrapped some copper around the drawbar wrench I use around me mill. I use that wrench quite extensively to tap on R8 drawbar to release tooling and whatnot. Although I wear glasses about 99.99% of time I operate the mill, better safe than sorry .

I don't think much is done in the way of selective tempering to most of hammers of today. Most I saw are very soft.

Ed Huntress wrote:

Reply to
rashid111

Well, good ones have the differential tempering.

Our original thought on doing that job was just to heat a thick steel plate on the kitchen range and roll the head around on it to get the temper. But my friend had a new lathe, and he wanted to get fancy.

-- Ed Huntress

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Cold forge .....

Ed Huntress wrote:

Reply to
werty

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