This club hammer with forest and raven is one of my favorite recent works. For the design of the hammer I chose a forest theme: one side of the hammer head has a line of trees in the horizon, and on the other side there is a black bird. I decided to cover the wooden handle with black leather to give it a smooth and soft look.
The club hammer with forest and raven is made using the metal etching with electricity method. This method allows to transfer an image with high precision. It does not use corrosive acids like other metal etching methods, and it is much more environmentally friendly. It is also an inexpensive and easy way to etch metal.
For this project I used an old hammer with a broken plastic handle. Before etching the metal, I removed the metal head of the hammer. Otherwise the process would be more complicated: it is easier to work with the metal part only. Then I cleaned the surface with sanding paper to remove rust and smoothen it out.
To get a light 3D effect for the forest I etched the metal twice. In this way I got three layers of depth. When I was etching the metal for the second time, I also transferred the image of the raven on the other side of the head. To make the metal head shiny, as the last step after the etching process I used metal polishing paste.
I attached a new wooden handle to the hammer head and covered it with velvety black leather. First I took an old piece of leather from an old leather jacket and sewed the leather cover as a sleeve. For that I used a sewing machine. Then I wrapped the cover tightly on the handle. To prevent it from sliding, I used universal glue.
The trickiest part was to finish the end of the handle. I decided to fold the edge of the cover as an envelope and then I used a handmade metal nail to secure the edges. As a final step I decorated the hammer by wrapping a thin leather string that I cut out from the same leather jacket at the top of the handle. I used glue to secure the end of the string to prevent it from unwrapping. I hope that you will like it!