A Small Wooden Hammer

A few years ago I made myself a large mallet from maple and that thing has been great.  The head is laminated from three layers of 1" thick material.  But sometimes I find a need for a smaller wooden hammer, for example, when tapping the wedge of moulding planes (not that I use them much).

So I squared up two pieces of maple and marked out some joinery.

Already looks a little like a hammer

Tenon on end of handle

Mortise on head

I've been trying a mortise-chopping technique that I read about on Dennis Laney's excellent blog "A Woodworker's Musings".  He suggests to line up the board with your eye so you can better tell whether you are chopping vertically.  The following photo shows the alignment.

Length of mortise aligned with the chopper's eye

I do find that this helps me with chopping vertically, but I have a tougher time holding the chisel comfortably and seeing my end lines.  Anyway, after chopping from top and bottom, meeting in the middle, the mortise was made.

Nice and square with clean walls

This mortise is square now, but later I angled the mortise end walls for wedging the tenon.  Pencil lines in the picture above show the extent of the tenon shoulders and those lines are 1/8" from the ends of the mortise.  Later I made the mortise wider by 1/8" (1/16" on each side) on the top.

Then to the handle.  After sawing the tenon cheeks ...

Cheeks sawn, ready to saw the ends

... I did a dry fit and all looked good.

You can see the extra space for the wedges

Before gluing anything together  I wanted to do the shaping of the handle and the bottom of the head.
I used a small ball peen hammer as a model for the handle shape, made cardboard templates and transferred the shape to the wood.

Shape for the thinner aspect of the handle marked out

And for the thicker aspect

I cut some relief cuts with a crosscut saw, then used chisel and spokeshave to get roughly to the lines.

Handle shape roughed out

Then spoke shaved the corners and scraped and sanded for a smooth feel.

Smooth

I also did a little shaping on the underside of the head.  With that done it was time to glue up and wedge the joint.  I had some oak wedges from a prior project that worked fine.  I fine tuned the width of the wedges by swiping the wedge's edge across the sole of a #4 plane held upside down.

Cooking ...

The next day I cleaned up the joint.  I didn't need to make it look so nice (because of the subsequent shaping), but I just love to look at the joint cleaned up.

All cleaned up

Then it was on to shaping the top of the head.  It was a challenge clamping it in the vise and having enough room to plane the edges from square to round.  But round it got.  Then I chamfered around the business ends.

Head rounded and ends chamfered

The finished and shaped joint

Finally I gave it a couple coats of oil and let it dry.

The completed hammer, with hanging hole

And here it is in it's new home under the bench, hanging out next to it's big brother, Bruno.

Hanging out in the dark

Fun little project.  And I hope it proves useful next time I need to hammer something made of wood without damaging it.