They say that for everything there is a time and a season.  I always liked the fact that specifically there was a time to cast away stones – and a time to gather stones together.  I am tempted to infer from this incomprehensible larger rightness and balance of activities that I must be stepping through a little bit of hammer time.

This mini-epoch found it’s beginning last year when, possessed of new chisels, I needed something not metal with which to drive them.  Thus was born my first wooden hammer.  The other day I was working on making a handle for an adze.  The adze (below) was also a hammer, so it falls into this dance of hammers.  The handle I fashioned was of recycled mahogany (a great trash pile there is where I live).  I made it fatter at the top so that it could not pull through the eye of the adze head.

I suffer though, often enough, both from a lack of judgment and from impatience.  These combined can be very powerful forces.  Desiring to seat the new handle tightly in the adze head I picked up the nearest striking device, my wooden hammer, and applied with it far more force than it was designed to deliver.  The adze handle was driven to it’s destination, but the hammer head split.

Now I’ll be forthright and say that seeds of this doom had already been sown in the fisrt making of this hammer, that in my impatience and lack of judgment at that time I had driven that handle in a trifle too hard, cracking the head ‘a little’ and wrote off the malady as inconsequential because of the light force it would be called upon to deliver.  I love the way the seeds of future outcomes are planted in everyday actions.

It just so happened, because for reasons beyond my ken it is a season of hammers, that a rock hammer head had also recently come into my possession.  I had some white oak lying around.  I removed the broken shards of the previous handle (I did not break the previous handle) from the head and with great circumspection fashioned and installed a new handle.

Feeling, therefore, now marginally fit to take action in a world at least partially governed by hammer gods, in order to please them, I undertook to remedy my first hammer failure.

and to further gain legitimacy as a native practitioner of hammer craft I undertook the making of a second wooden mallet, this with a head of orange osage (a very hard wood) 

and a handle to be made of purpleheart, again a recycled find from the treasure trove of our local dump.

and here the saga pauses, in a time of hammer time.  I have used a steel hammer to stamp a sign on the shaft of the new hammer – such a world it is – of hammering, you can see the sign if you strain your eyes.

Maybe this hammer time is like something like Australasian dream time, a step out of the ordinary continuum, where one can talk with the hammer and tool making spirits and learn by paying attention to what happens.  I’ll provide an update when the osage purpleheart hammer comes together.