Sledge Hammer Repair

As you may recall, I recently had to bust up a big block of concrete in the back yard. To accomplish this task I was borrowing a sledge hammer from my landlord. As it turned out the handle of the sledge had a small crack in it that started to become a major crack after a few hours of pounding on concrete.I wrapped the handle up with some duct tape and it held together perfectly through the rest of the job. It seemed to be a completely functional repair, but I felt bad returning the tool in this condition so I decided to do a proper job of repairing the handle.

To start, I got a new handle from the hardware store that was supposed to the designed for the size head that I was working with. It turned out that it was not quite the right size, so I had to cut it shorter.

Now the head could seat all the way onto the top of the handle.

The next adjustment I needed to make was to the width of the handle. No amount of pounding and pushing could get this handle even half way into the hammer head so after some research, I learned that one is meant to trim the handle so it can fit inside the head. I approached this task carefully not wanting to remove too much material, so I put a sanding bit into my rotary tool and took off a little at a time. I tried putting it back into the head often to make sure I didn't take off too much wood and took note of the high points that were getting stuck so that I could contour the end of the handle to the inside of the head. I stopped when I got it to a point it didn't easily go on, but seemed that with a bit of effort it would be able to.

You can see here, that the wood looks a little darker than before. I used mineral oil lubricate the inside of the head and was then able to get the handle all the way through. The next step was to drive a wooden wedge into the slot in the top of the handle. The first thing I had to do was trim the wedge down to the width of the handle.

It turned out to be very difficult to pry the slot in the handle open again to get the tip of the wedge in there. I ended up pounding a razor blade into it and subsequently widening it with pry bar. Once I did get the tip of the wedge in, it was trivial to drive it all the way down. I was able to use the weight of the hammer head to my advantage here and just pounded it straight down against the floor of the garage.

Ok... we're almost there. I cut off the part of the wedge that stuck out so it was now flush with the top of the handle.

The last step is to drive in a steel hammer wedge perpendicular to the wooden wedge. At this point the wood flares out in all directions above the hammer head so I'm pretty confident that it's not going anywhere. This certainly wasn't the easiest fix