OK, folks, you may want to hit play on this video while you read the article…

When people think about woodworking, the image of driving nails typically comes to mind.  While driving nails does happen in woodworking shops, there are many more tasks for which a hammer or a hammer like tool is appropriate.

So, for your viewing pleasure, here are the tools I use for hammering-type tasks.

On the top is my 16 ounce claw hammer.  I think it was the first tool I had ever purchased back in 1987 to drive nails into the wall to hang some pictures in my apartment.  It’s not a bad little hammer, and I have yet really need to replace it.

I bought the  first mallet on the bottom left from a fellow woodworker on the Woodworker’s Website Association.  It’s a beautiful specimen, built of an exotic wood (I can’t remember which) and maple.  The faces are glued on leather, which soften the impact on pieces I am trying to assemble.  The head is also filled with bird shot, making it more of a dead blow mallet.  Great for assembly of pieces.  I keep this mallet on hand at all times.  Very useful.

The one in the middle is a Crown carpenter’s mallet.  A heavy chunk of beech, this is a great mallet for driving chisels and adjusting irons in my wooden planes.  I also love the large striking face… it’s hard to miss what you are swinging at.  It was very inexpensive and if anything happened to it, I would definitely buy a new one.

At the end  is a cheap dead-blow mallet.  I used to use this mallet for just about everything, but today I use it for snugging down bench hold fasts, driving wedges and other odd jobs.  It’s also great for sealing cans of finish after I pour out what I need to finish a project.

Sure, it’s not a large collection.  However, now that I have a few ‘hammers’, I guess I should start hammering in the mornin’ and in the evenin’….