For the guys that do their own body work. Do you prefer body hammers with hickory or fiberglass handles?
“There’s nothing like a nice piece of hickory.” Clint Eastwood-Pale Rider.
depends what you do with’em, i guess…
Well you would probably pound nails with them since your idea of body work is cutting up pieces small enough to fit in a garbage can. But I was thinking of the more traditional use of working metal.
The majority of your metalworking involves a quick succession of tapping, which involves choking-up on the handle and getting a circular rhythm going with the body hammer. The fiberglass body hammers have a rubber grip, which just gets in the way. Exceptions include a shrinking hammer, where you hold it at the end of the handle for better leverage and power, or a door hammer where you need that extra length to extend into the door cavity. My only fiberglass-handled is a door hammer, and it’s been problematic when I’ve needed to choke-up on the handle in some situations. My vote is for hickory-handled for all of your body hammers.
Hickory for me.
I have a set with fiberglass handles and they are okay. However, I agree that choking up on the handle is common and with the hickory-handled set I use, it is more comfortable.
I don’t recommend the Eastwood “professional” set. The curvature of the hammer faces are all too similar, if not identical, and the pick end is not very well finished. It could have been gound smoother. It has a few small facets.