A few years back, Brandon made a giant wooden mallet from a piece of butcher block counter top that was laying around the space. This was a 9pm, make-it-right-now sort of project. He’d repurposed a chair leg as the handle, but it was a bit too short and bent, making the mallet awkward to use. We dubbed this bludgeoning device “The UnMaker”, and used to “unmake” things that needed unmade. Eventually the handle failed and the head was lost.
Fast forward to August 2018 – Eric and Kevin were cleaning out the shed a bit and decided to build a new UnMaker. We turned up some maple planks for a head and handle and started piecing things together. The head was going to weigh about 15 pounds. About that time, we noticed that we had “just enough” material to build a hammer that matched the proportions of the bright orange Dead Blow (shot-filled) hammer hanging on the pegboard across the shop, and an idea was born.
After some quick math, we ended up hollowing out several layers of the head using a router, and purchasing 4 packs of 6000 steel BBs from Walmart to fill the void. It turns out that lead shot, while ideal for this application, is expensive and difficult to find. We ended up with about a 60% fill, and a total head weight of 34 pounds.
Ben helped out with the handle design (using a taper and a retaining pin) to make it replaceable in the future, and Eric put a coat of orange paint on the finished product.
The result speaks for itself. You don’t so much swing the UnMaker 2.0 as you do lift and drop it. My form in the video below is sub-par, based on our later experiments.
In an ironic twist, this giant utility knife hit Hackaday shortly after we finished up our hammer.