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By "fungus" - 6th January 2007.
nb. If you don't know what a shovelglove is then go to http://www.shovelglove.com/ This page will make a lot more sense afterwards...!
I've been shovelgloving for a few months and my hammer was starting to feel a little on the light side. I looked around for a few weeks but couldn't find anything bigger than 5kg. If I lived in America it'd be easy - Amazon will ship hammers to your door, but I don't. I live in Spain, not a bad place to live but not real big on Internet ordering.
So...I started thinking of a way to add weight to my existing hammer. Somebody mentioned ankle weights in the shovelglove forums and I thought "Hey, cool. I could pull the little lead weights out of a set of those and fix them to my hammer."
A few days later I went off to a large sporting goods store to see if I could find some but I was out of luck. The only weights they had were soft squishy ones filled with lead shot. The old manly ones with lead bars in them have gone out of fashion, now it's all softness and comfort in the gym.
What to do....
I wandered around the shop a bit more...then I saw the answer in the diving section - lead diving weights. The type divers wear on belts. Perfect!
These weights come in all different sizes. Some are plain lead, some are coated in yellow plastic. but they're all pretty much square and they all have slots for threading them onto a belt.
They're also cheap - much cheaper than the ankle weights would have been.
The weights in the store ranged from 0.5kg (1.1lb) up to 4kg (about 9lb). I figured that an extra 1kg on my hammer would be a good start - I could always change the weights later. I passed up the yellow plastic weights because I liked the look of the plain lead. The plain lead was also half the price which helped sway the decision a little.
Two 500g weights cost me a grand total of 4 Euros (less than $5).
I used:
Note: You could also use epoxy resin instead of hot glue, it might even be stronger.
nb. As it turned out I also used a heat gun, I'll get to that later....
I used hot glue for this. First I put a generous coating of glue onto the back of the weight then I plunked it onto the hammer. There were some gaps at the corners which I filled in with extra glue.
nb. Make sure you get the weights perfectly centered so you don't unbalance your hammer....
There was a slight problem during this step: Putting a thick layer of hot glue on to a big piece of cold metal doesn't work very well because the metal absorbs the heat from the glue very fast - the glue was almost solid by the time I got the weight to the hammer. To fix this I heated the weight with a hot air gun until the glue melted again. When the glue was nice and runny again I pressed the weight firmly onto the hammer.
Note: In hindsight, epoxy resin would probably have been a slightly better choice because of this problem...but it's messier and much harder to unstick if you ever have to (with hot glue you just warm it up and it comes apart!) If my shovelglove ever shows signs of coming unstuck I might rebuild it with epoxy.
(Heating the weights with the hot air gun...)
When both weights were in place and the glue was completely cold I tried picking up the hammer holding just one of the weights.
It held... a good sign!
To decrease the chances of the weights flying off and breaking/killing things I tied them to the hammer with some big zip ties.
Run your thumbs over the ties in the direction of threading to get them really snug around the hammer head. I didn't trim the ends yet because I'm going to repeat this process tomorrow when they've had time to "bed in" a bit. I really want to try and get the zip ties as tight as possible.
Total cost: Around $5 of materials and half an hours work.
Here's a couple of shots of the finished shovelglove:
The hammer didn't feel a lot heaver when I first picked it up (it's only 20% heavier...) but after a bit of swinging it's definitely got a lot more "heft" to it.
So there you have it: The story of how I upgraded my hammer. I'll update this site in a week or so to let you know how it went.
If you have any suggestions or comments I'll be in the shovelglove forums.
Disclaimer: Unattached weights moving under the influences of inertia and/or gravitational fields can be hazardous to both you and your surroundings. You should read and fully understand the consequences of Sir Isaac Newton's three laws of motion before attempting to modify any kind of hammer. If you do modify a hammer using any of the information in this page then you do so entirely at your own risk.
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