The force required to drive the small diameter finish nail is much less than that required to sink the large coated framing nail. The force or energy required to drive a small finish nail is much less than that required to sink a large coated framing nail. At the other end of the spectrum are the framing hammers which are designed to sink large nails and spikes into thick lumber with a minimum number of blows. A small finish nail used to attach a bit of molding to a cabinet calls for a small, light hammer to drive the nail without smashing the fingers holding it and with a smooth face that won’t damage the surface when fully sinking the nail. The thing is, not all nails or woods are the same. The point of striking a nail is obviously to drive it through a piece of wood into another piece, thereby connecting the pieces. Common nails are fairly soft so claw hammers are made harder so they will not be damaged by striking thousands of nails this also makes them brittle enough to chip if used on harder materials like stone or hardened steel.Ī wall of various hammers at a hardware store What are we hitting?Ĭlaw hammers were developed along with iron nails hundreds of years ago those early nails were made by hand one by one and valued accordingly so a means of removing and reusing nails was incorporated into the same tool used to drive them.
These are the same considerations we need to think about today - what are we hitting, why are we hitting it, and how hard do we need to hit it?Ĭlaw hammers were developed hundreds of years ago. Later they improved the effectiveness of their hammer by attaching the stone to a handle which increased the impact force by leverage and protected the hands from the shock of the blow. In the bone and nut example a stone would be an obvious choice, a larger one for the bone and a smaller one for the nut. Who can say what caused our forebears to need a way to apply a heavy impact in a focused way, perhaps to break open a bone to reach the marrow or a nut for its meat? The first consideration was to use a material appropriate to the object being struck. Let’s consider the first tool of all - the hammer, which we can define as a metal head attached perpendicularly to a handle. Scottish writer and philosopher Thomas Carlyle observed that “ Man is a tool using animal … without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.” In the modern world we are awash in tools and we take them for granted, but if we take a closer look we can appreciate how powerful they have made us.
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