Review of Saign Charlestein’s chasing hammers

A while back Saign Charlestein and I were exchanging messages on FaceBook about lighter weight chasing hammers. Those who know me know I’m something of a tool minimalist, at least compared to most metalsmiths. Some people have a wide range of weights in chasing hammers they turn to depending on what they are chasing. I basically just use one hammer that’s heavy enough to let me really move the metal when I need to. For lighter work I would just hammer lighter. This had always worked well for me and so I had never really tried using lighter weight hammers for lighter work. Anyway, Saign suggested that I try a lighter hammer and to do so he was generous enough to send me a couple of the chasing hammers he crafts, asking only that I write a short review IF I found I used them regularly. Well, as you might guess from reading this far, I do find myself using them and am more than happy to share my thoughts about them with others.

In truth I knew I’d be happy to review Saign’s hammers before I’d even used one. There are lots of chasing hammers out there, but very few are of high quality. I could tell just by the photos that Saign’s were quality hammers. Having now used them I can say that, as far as I know, Saign Charlestein is making the best chasing hammers you can currently buy! I’m sure there are others out there I don’t know about but I have a hard time imagining how they could be better. At best they would be his equal. Why do I say this? Well, let me get into some details.

First there is the hammer head. The heads are forged and include all the details I’d expect to find in a good chasing hammer head. Some chasing hammers have a slightly rounded face while others have a flat face. This may be a matter of personal preference, but I like a flat face better, and Saign’s hammers have that flat face. Also, a minor but very nice detail, is that the face isn’t parallel to the handle. Rather it is canted in just a bit. Why is this useful? Well we tend to hammer with arcing swings rather than straight up and down blows. The relationship of the angle on the face to the handle means that with an arcing swing the face will naturally hit more squarely on the chasing tool. This is a feature you will see on better quality chasing hammers.

The hole in the head for mounting the handle is oval in shape. This is not really an uncommon feature of a chasing hammer, but I can tell you that my first chasing hammer (which was the epitome of BAD) had a round hole. So whenever the head became a bit loose it would want to rotate around the handle throwing it off alignment with the pistol grip of the handle. With an oval opening as Saign’s hammers have a loose head might start working it’s way off, but it won’t spin around. I should perhaps note that I expect all hammer heads to get loose at some point if they are actually put in regular use. I don’t consider this a sign of a poor hammer. It’s just a maintenance issue. That said, thus far neither of the hammers Saign sent me have gotten loose heads in the months I‘ve been using them. The handles have both a wedge and epoxy to affix them to the heads. They appear to be very well secured and might take even the sort of work out I’ll give them without becoming loose.

The features I’ve noted so far about the hammer heads are reasonably common to find in a chasing hammer. However, Saign Charlestein has done something else with his chasing hammer heads that set them a level above any others I’ve seen. All the other ones I’ve ever seen have the face that we use and then a basically useless, frequently ill formed, ball on the other end. Not so with Saign’s! He has formed this other end into a fully finished, beautifully shaped, small cross pein. Those of you who are more familiar with my work, or who may have taken a workshop with me, know that I often do something I call hammer chasing where I work directly on my vessels, chasing raised lines with cross pein hammers. The cross pein on Saign’s chasing hammers will function nicely for this sort of work. He’s turned a nearly useless part of the chasing hammer into another useful tool.

With most chasing hammers out there the heads are decent to good, with great heads not being too uncommon, however, the handles are almost always awful. This is another reason why I say Saign’s are the best hammers out there. Most chasing hammers you can buy have a fairly thick neck to the handle. I was discussing this once with another colleague. Our theory was that with most wooden handles once you get them thin enough to have a nice spring they are also weak enough that you could easily break them if you hammer too hard. It’s not too difficult to imagine a bunch of retailers or manufactures getting numerous complaints from beginning metalsmiths, who don’t know any better, that would break a thin necked hammer handle the first day of use. If I were that retailer I’d probably make sure all the handles were too thick and let experienced chasers thin their own handles. I don’t know if this is really why most commercial chasing hammers have thick handles, but this was our speculation.

It seems much more rare to find a chasing hammer with a good handle than it is to find one with a good head. There are some out there, but here again Saign has a critically different detail to his hammers. That detail is the type of wood he is using for the handles. That wood is Osage orange, and this is what makes his hammers so superior. Not only is it an exquisitely beautiful domestic hardwood, it is also a strong and very flexible wood. It is that strength and flexibility that make it exceptional for chasing hammer handles. With the Osage orange wood you can whittle it down to a nice thin, supple neck without the high risk of it breaking. I’m not saying you couldn’t break it if you hammered hard enough, but it’s not going to be nearly as easy as it would be with other woods. Osage orange is a prized wood for making archery bows, if that tells you anything about it’s ability to flex rather than break. If you do a side by side test with a normal chasing hammer and one of Saign’s you can easily feel the spring of his handles making them much nicer to work with.

Another interesting feature of Osage orange wood is it’s durability. One of the names by which this tree is known is hedge apple. This is because it used to be planted in long rows to form living hedges to keep livestock contained. Not only this, but the wood would frequently be used for making fence posts. These were generally made while the wood was still green because once fully dried the wood can become so hard it would be difficult to nail into. Does that sound like the sort of durability you’d like in a hammer handle? I know it sounds good to me. Another reason it was prized for fence posts was its resistance to rot even when in direct ground contact. I’ve read that it will actually last longer than our modern chemically treated fence posts. This means that should you accidentally leave your Saign Charlestein chasing hammer outside in the elements for a couple decades there’s a reasonable chance that the handle will still be intact after the head had rusted away! (I’m not implying you should try this as it would be a crime to treat such a beautifully functional tool that way.)

There is one very minor downside to the Osage orange handles I feel I should mention. With some of them, but oddly not all, there will be an initial period of time where the wood will stain your hand a yellow orange. I had it happen with one of the hammers but not the other. As I recall it did this for the first day or two of regular use, after which it tapered off and stopped. Should you have this happen just know it’s normal and nothing is wrong. It’s a bit annoying, but ultimately a very temporary, inconsequential thing to put up with for such a superior performing wood. When you pass the hammer on down to grandchildren decades into the future you can tell them about all the toil and strife you suffered to season the tool for their use, when you weren’t walking up hill to and from school in unrelenting blizzards 13 months out of the year.

Saign sent me his 2 ounce and 3.5 ounce hammers. They are both lighter than my regular chasing hammer (which I might add has an Osage orange handle custom made for me by a friend many years ago) with a head around 4.5 ounces. I still find I use my 4.5 ounce chasing hammer the most, but when I do start moving into lighter work I’ve been switching to Saign’s hammers. Initially I didn’t notice much difference with the lighter weights, but then if I switched back to the heavier hammer I could immediately feel how much more work it was to use. The lighter hammers do make it easier on your body when they are appropriate for the chasing work. It does seem worth having a range of different weight hammers if you do a lot of chasing work. That said, the tool minimalist in me has to note that it is quite possible to have just one hammer if it’s heavy enough. I wouldn’t try to make a light weight hammer do the work of a heavier one, but you can lighten your blow with a heavier one to function like a lighter hammer. If you wanted to start with just one chasing hammer I would go with one whose head was around 4.5 ounces. I don’t believe I’ve mentioned yet, but Saign has chasing hammers in a full range of sizes (including a 4.5 ounce size), not just the lighter ones he sent me to try.

If you are someone who is serious about chasing and repousse work and want to invest in a top quality tool I feel like you’d be hard pressed to find higher quality chasing hammers than what Saign Charlestein offers. For more information about them you can go to his website,
www.metalsmithing-tools.com.

As a special new bonus, Saign has given me a coupon code just for my readers that will get you 10% off tools on his site. That code is DH10. For full disclosure I feel I need to also note that he will give me a small commission on any qualifying sales that use this code. I certainly appreciate this as such things help pay for the website and time I put into it. In case you don’t know though, I first wrote this review years ago without getting any sort of commission on sales based on my recommendation. I felt then and still believe today that he is making the best chasing hammers you can buy. If you are interested in investing in high quality hammers his site is worth looking at. Again his website is www.metalsmithing-tools.com.