Humor - If I Had A Hammer

If I Had A Hammer
By William I. Lengeman III

I’ve always felt uneasy in the company of ball peen hammers. Perhaps I'm alone in this, my distrust of certain hand tools. At the other extreme is a guy like Dave Pahl, hammer collector extraordinaire and curator of an Alaskan hammer museum that houses more than twelve hundred of the little buggers.

Pahl has gone on record as saying, "I like hammers." Obviously, and who can fault a guy for that? Hammers are a good and useful thing and where would we be without them? We’d be running around trying to bang in nails with screwdriver handles, is
where we’d be.

Still I find something unsettling about ball peen hammers. It's like they're a perversion of the normal order of things, like the kid I went to school with who had an extra toe on his left foot. Strong words, I know, and maybe in these politically correct times I shouldn't be making disparaging remarks about any class of hand tools, but that’s how I feel.

I don’t see why ball peen hammers exist, actually. Oh, I know there’s a use for them because I looked it up at Bobvila.com. Vila, you may recall, is the guy who made a career of nosing around dilapidated houses, quizzing guys named Red and Shorty about molly bolts and nail guns. Some uses for ball peen hammers, according to Bob’s site, are "to drive cold chisels, setting rivets and shaping metal."

Fine. I can accept that – on an intellectual level. But ask yourself this. Have you ever seen someone use a ball peen hammer, specifically use it for a task a regular hammer couldn't handle?

My theory is that ball peen hammers are one of those tools everyone has in their toolbox, but which we don’t remember buying, which is really creepy, in an Invasion of the Bodysnatchers/talking ventriloquist dummy kind of way. Speaking of creepy, check out Hammernet.com, which features an Anatomy of the Hammer. It names all of the major hammer parts, including the cheek, head, throat, face, neck, eye and claw.

If you ask me, a hammer isn't worthy of the name unless it has one of those little curved claw thingies. There are few things in life more satisfying than using a claw thingie to yank a nail from a board, even if it does make that godawful screech that sets your teeth on edge.

I can only think of one possible use for the peen on a ball peen hammer and that’s to crack open a coconut and, quite frankly, you don’t need a ball peen hammer for that. The New Century Dictionary claims there are at least five different types of ball peen hammers, by the way. Which is absurd.

As for the origin of this quaint and rather silly word, the American Heritage Dictionary says peen is "probably of Scandinavian origin." This, incidentally, is a lot more vague and mealy-mouthed than I normally prefer my dictionary entries.

Maybe I'll never come to terms with ball peen hammers and maybe this is all just a way of distracting myself from the real issues with hammers – be they claw or peen. Issue one, why can’t someone design a hammer you can use without whacking yourself on the thumb? Issue two, why can’t we make a hammer that won’t bend the damned nails as you’re pounding them
in?

We've put men on the moon, for criminy’s sake. This is not too much to ask.

(Copyright © 2007, All Rights Reserved)

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