An exercise in basic hammerwork, finishing, and assembly
by Eric Slyter
Page 4 of 8
You now have all the lames curled. It is time to start working on the "cop."
Sinking the "Cop"
The "cop" (apparently a modern term, but there does not appear to be a specific medieval equivalent for it) is the portion that protects the point of the shoulder and from which the lames depend. This is where the real hammerwork comes in. It is advisable to wear safety glasses and hearing protection for all hammering processes. Some armourers don't wear hearing protection during procedures such as planishing, citing that they need to hear the difference between a true strike and a missed one. It is true that you need to be able to hear the difference, but your ears can be trained to hear the difference through your hearing protection. I've been a musician for 15 years and noticed hearing damage early on, and as a result have worn ear plugs religiously when playing ever since... but this has not inhibited my ability to hear when someone is out of tune or singing off-key. Similarly, I can hear the difference in various armouring steps that require it.
For the first step you will need your sinking hammer and your sinking stump. Figure 12 shows my sinking stump with a ruler. My depression is about 3/4" deep and about 3" across.
Figure 12
The hammering pattern that I'll be demonstrating is a bit more complicated than the usual "spiral" pattern that is most often seen, though results can still be had with that. This is the one I was taught and it has worked very well for me, so I've seen no reason to change :-) The pattern is illustrated in Figure 13. Essentially, starting at the center of one side of the cop, you hammer a course around the edge until you arrive back at where you started. Then turn it around, and start from the other side, a little further in, and hammer along that course until you come back to where you started. Then, again, turn it around, start a little further in, ect. When you reach the center, just fill the remaining area in with hammering. The hammer blows should be close-set and overlap a bit. The hammer should be gripped at the very end, furthest from the head, and gravity should be doing a lot of the work. To save strain on your tendons, don't hold the hammer with a death-grip... you don't need to. Hold it securely in your palm, gripping it mostly between your thumb and forefinger with the other fingers cradling the end of the grip. This will allow some "play," allowing the hammer to strike the steel with the force of gravity and your elbow motion, and "bounce" back without as much effort actually spent lifting it. Your wrist should not move much, and you don't want it to. It is not strong enough to do the work, and if you try to make it do so, you'll be sorry. You should think of the hammer as a stationary machine... the steel should be moved under the hammer, not the other way around. The portion of the steel you are actively shaping should be centered over the depression to get the best effect. Sinking in this manner takes some force, and though you can't really harm the steel, you should work towards consistency in the amount of force you are hammering with. You should also be mindful of the amount of force necessary to shape a given thickness of steel... it takes less force to shape 18 gauge than 16, and overdoing the power will cause greater wrinkling and a a higher likelihood of an uneven surface. Be mindful also of the fact that, while you cannot really harm the steel, you can harm yourself in working it. You must be aware of the amount of strain you are putting on your tendons, and your muscles will be none too happy with you at first either. Pacing yourself and doing some stretches will ease this process. (see also: Tendonitis: Solutions from a Bodybuilder's Perspective)
Figure 13
Execute the hammering pattern to the center in full, or what I call a single pass. It will take 3 passes to get the final shape, so pace yourself- you'll be doing it two more times. On the 2nd and 3rd passes I usually avoid sinking the corners and the bottom edge (hammering about an inch instead). This is because I prefer the bottom edge to meet the lame along more of a straight plane rather than having the cop curve inwards. Do your own as you prefer. Figures 14, 15, 16, and 17 demonstrate starting at each of the courses of the first pass. You'll notice that I wear a padded glove on my left hand. This is because if you are not careful, you will transmit strong vibrations into your left hand (the one holding the steel) while you are hammering. One way to help curb this is to try to make sure that the steel is resting against the stump and depression in at least 3 places, so that the vibrations go into the wood instead of your hand. It is difficult on the first pass to manage this because the steel is still flat, but successive passes are much easier in this regard. Some wrinkling on the edges is expected, but if you get major wrinkling on the edge, tap them out with care. One of the advantages of using a shallow dish like this one and doing several passes, as opposed to sinking aggressively into a deeper dish, is that the wrinkles are manageable.
Figure 14
Figure 15
Figure 16
Figure 17
Between each pass examine the hammerwork. Look at how the light plays across the surface... If you see major dips, then there is a spot you missed and you should gently tap it into place. Do this before proceeding to the next pass, and do a final inspection when done (the process of hunting down and eliminating high and low spots is called bouging). Do not get discouraged as you proceed. The metal will look twisted and deformed on many occasions, but when you are done with all three passes and bouging the overall result should be a relatively symmetrical domed shape with a relatively even, though bumpy, surface as in Figure 18. You may find that your results have a twisted or assymetrical profile, and that is probably because your hammerwork is uneven. That is to be expected- it takes practice to get consistent at it. The good news is that there are ways to fix it to a certain degree.
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