The lump hammers are in stock as of 2:42 p.m. today. And sold out in two hours.

We've just sent off nearly 700 more Crucible Card Scrapers to our warehouse. You can order yours here for $20 plus shipping.

I for one have had it with Lost Art Press & Crucible Tools They are playing games with the supply & demand of their Lump Hammers and now the scrapers, if they truly wanted to meet the customers needs they would take orders so people didn’t have to set around and try to guess when the next batch will be listed just to have them sell out in 2 hours. Well I certainly don’t need either that bad so my response to Lost Art Press is to stick both your Lump Hammers and your scrapers where the Sun doesn’t shine!!!!

So, we know that a fair number of you are upset that you can’t get your hands on a lump hammer or our new card scraper. We’re not happy, either.

We are grumpy when tools are out of stock. If you look at our sister company, Lost Art Press, we are almost never out of stock of any book. That is the result of careful planning. After 12 years of this, we know how much to order. We know how to set up a supply chain. And we know how to calculate how long our inventory will last.

For the first two years of running Crucible, we had a good handle on our supply and our sales and we kept most things in stock (even dividers). But in the last five months, things have changed. Since the release of the lump hammer, demand for our tools has surged past all our familiar metrics.

And when we released our scrapers this morning, we were shocked. We delivered the largest load of tools (to date) to our warehouse. I thought it would last us a few months. It lasted it three hours.

We need to scale up production significantly. And we will. I’ve spent all day on the horn with suppliers of our raw materials and the people who make some of our parts, including our handle supplier and our waterjet cutter.

We don’t want today (put up a load of tools and they are gone in hours) to become the normal way we do business. It’s frustrating to you, and it’s frustrating to us.

I know many of you have asked: Why not just take back orders? We have watched many young businesses get crushed by this strategy. It’s like a debt in reverse. Read more on that here.

I apologize that we can’t meet demand right now. We’re making more tools in a month than we ever thought we’d have to in a quarter. It’s good – in a way – but not really good until everything is in stock.

Thanks for your patience.

— Christopher Schwarz

The price is $20 plus domestic shipping. You can read all about the tool and order one in our store. We have sold out of the first batch and are working on the second batch now. We hope to replenish our supply in two weeks.

I’ve never met two people who sharpen their card scrapers using identical methods. As a result, there is more misinformation about sharpening card scrapers than sharpening any other woodworking tool. And that is saying a lot.

The following technique is based on 20 years of daily practice and a decade of research into historical methods. I won’t bore you with the spreadsheets and the bibliography. Instead, I’m going to explain the process using as few words as possible.

For those of you who learn using video information, I’ve also made a short film that will be released soon.

Step 1: Remove any Existing Burr or Hook

The first step is always – always – to burnish the faces of the scraper to eliminate any existing burr or hook. The burr could be the result of manufacturing. Or it is the remnants of the hook on the tool you’ve been using.

Step 2: Stone the Narrow Edges

To get perfect 90° corners, use a block of wood as guide and stone the long edges of the tool. Shift the block of wood around so you don’t wear a groove in your stone. Use the sharpening stone that you use to begin your typical honing process (a #1,000-grit waterstone or a soft Arkansas oilstone, for example). Seven or 10 strokes should be enough to stone away any extra metal. (Note: There is no need to hone the short ends of the scraper as these don’t cut.)

If, however, this is a new scraper, you might need to stone the edges on a coarse stone for a few minutes to ensure the edges are dead 90° to the faces and consistent. Future stonings will go faster once the tool is set up.

Repeat this process with the block of wood on a polishing stone, such as a #5,000-grit waterstone or a hard Arkansas oilstone. Look closely and continue the work until the edge is consistently polished. The first time you do this on your tool it might take a few minutes. Subsequent sharpenings will require only 10 strokes or so.

Step 3: Burnish the Faces

Wipe a little oil on the scraper and the burnisher. Place the scraper flat on the bench again and repeat the same burnishing process you used to remove the burr. Remember: Use hard downward pressure (yet the burnisher should still glide across the face of the tool).

This burnishing polishes the face of the scraper (much the way a hard bone will burnish soft wood) and push a little steel up on the tool’s edge. This step improves the durability of your hook and makes the hook easier to turn.

Step 4: Burnish the Edges

Secure the scraper in a vise with one edge upright. Wipe a little oil on both the scraper and the burnisher to make your work easier. Hold the burnisher parallel to the floor and burnish the edge with moderate downward pressure (a bit less than you used on the faces). Five or six smooth strokes will do.

Tilt the burnisher about 5° to the right and burnish one corner of the scraper with five or six smooth strokes. Run your fingers up the scraper to feel if you have turned a hook. The hook is slight and subtle, much like the burr you turn on the backside of a chisel when sharpening it.

If the hook is not there, repeat with more strokes with the burnisher tilted at 5° to the right until a hook appears. Try adding more downward pressure to see if that helps.

When you have a hook, tilt the burnisher 5° to the left and repeat the burnishing process for the other corner. When you have two good hooks, flip the scraper over in the vise and repeat Step 4 for the second edge.

Clean the scraper with an oily rag and get to work. To improve the longevity of your burr, store the tool in a cardboard or paper envelope. The hook is as fragile as the edge on a paring chisel.

You can purchase the Crucible Card Scraper in our store.

Lump hammers are in stock today, as of 7:45 p.m. Eastern. You can purchase one here. If it is listed as out of stock, then we have sold out. (We sold out by 9:45)

We’re finishing up production on a large batch of lump hammers and will deliver them to our warehouse in the next three days.

We’re getting faster – though I know it might not seem fast enough to you. We’re still making tiny tweaks here and there to the machining and assembly process to get things assembled as quickly as possible while reducing re-work.

If you are interested in following our progress on lump hammers and the other tools were developing, check out our Instagram account, where I post photos every few days.

https://www.instagram.com/crucibletool/

Every time we post a new batch of Crucible lump hammers for sale (and they sell out in three hours), we are greeted with cries of: “And we want dividers, too.”

Here is where we are with the dividers. They are too expensive to make, and too finicky to assemble and finish. They should be $300 as-is, and we have zero desire to make $300 dividers. We’ve tried to find less costly ways to make them. And we have tried to find better ways to assemble them. We’ve failed.

So we have taken dividers off our production list and discontinued them in the Crucible store. We might redesign them in the future. Or we might move on and make other tools instead.

We still have parts for about 60 dividers that we will assemble and sell when we have satisfied demand for lump hammers. When we have made progress on those 60 tools, we’ll let you know here.

It’s not easy discontinuing a tool that you love. But we know it’s the right decision. We’re a small company – and we always will be a small company by design. We have to pick our battles.

We are working on more lump hammers now, plus a card scraper that we think is superior to every design we’ve used in the past.

This isn’t defeat. Just a reality check.

— Christopher Schwarz

We’ve just delivered a large batch of Crucible lump hammers to our Indiana warehouse and they are available for sale and immediate shipment. The price is $85 plus shipping.

These hammer heads are milled out on a CNC, but everything else is done by hand – the surface finishing, the assembly, the detailing. As such, they will exhibit infinitesimal imperfections that are the result of a handmade product. If you are looking for perfectly extruded and plastic perfection, this is not the hammer you are looking for. Try the home center instead.

Each tool is a little different, thanks to the hickory, which has great variations in color, and the hand finishing of the heads, the hand-cut wedge and the hand assembly. I have personally inspected every one of these hammers with my eyes about 1” from the surfaces. They are gorgeous.

— Christopher Schwarz

After we sold out of lump hammers this week, we started getting a lot of questions about when the next batch will come. My best guess is two weeks – likely around Valentine’s Day. We have some classes going on at the storefront, so the machine shop is tied up with woodworking chores.

We are all working hard to satisfy the demand and keep hammers in stock. And after we get hammers flowing steadily, we’ll turn our attention back to dividers.

— Christopher Schwarz

We have a sizable load of Crucible lump hammers in stock and ready to deliver. They are $85 plus shipping. These hammers tend to sell quickly, so if you want one, don’t wait too long.

We also have a big batch of Crucible American-made T-shirts in stock at a special price – $17. That’s basically our cost to buy the shirt and print them here in Kentucky.

— Christopher Schwarz

We keep selling out of lump hammers within hours of releasing them – no matter how many we make (and we make hundreds and hundreds each month).

As a result, we get this question a lot: Why don’t you take my order and fulfill it when you have more hammers?

The answer is: Sorry, we don’t accept back orders. This blog entry seeks to explain why.

Simply put: We’ve watched too many small toolmaking and furniture-making business get destroyed by a big backlog of business that eventually crushed them, personally and professionally.

If the above statement sounds weird, read on.

When you take an order or a deposit for a yet-to-be manufactured item you establish a relationship with that person. Most customers are wonderful. They’re easy to deal with, patient and they understand that making tools or furniture is difficult. But a small percentage of people use this relationship to hound the maker.

I’ve watched it time and again. Certain customers ask – over and over – when their item will ship. And if you have enough customers ask this question, then you spend hours each day just responding to the query: Hey, where’s my thing?

If the maker took a deposit (or, God help them, the full purchase price), then they are in for more trouble. The few difficult customers will hound the maker. Sometimes they’ll threaten them. And when they don’t feel they are getting enough attention they start to defame the maker on Internet forums or chat rooms.

If this sounds like we are down on our customers, we’re not. The vast majority of you are wonderful people – honest, patient and supportive of what we do. But the tiny minority prevents us from entering into a situation where we could be overwhelmed by back orders.

We’re a tiny company. And we’re not trying to grow quickly, take on a penny of debt or hire a bunch of people to address what could be a passing need. We’re working as hard as we can to supply more hammers (and dividers). We hate the fact that we are out of stock, and we work every day to fix that problem.

We think our tools are worth waiting for. But we promise that we don’t want you to wait too long.

Thanks to everyone who has supported us and has been patient during the last 30 months.

— Christopher Schwarz

We have a good-sized batch of Crucible Lump Hammers in stock and ready to ship. The hammers are $85 plus shipping, and (we think) they will become one of your favorite striking tools.

These hammers are 100 percent made in the United States – from the hardened steel to the hickory handle to the oak wedge to the hide glue that holds it all together. This batch was machined in Indiana and finished in Covington, Ky.

— Christopher Schwarz

Here’s the quick version: We won’t have any new stock on dividers or lump hammers until January at the earliest. We are working hard to build up inventory on these items, here are some details.

This change will speed up production greatly. But changing our manufacturing process (and the holidays) have slowed us down. We had to move equipment, build new jigs and train Megan and Brendan.

As soon as we have any new information we will post it here. Promise.

If you ordered a lump hammer from us late last week, here’s an update: The tools will arrive in our warehouse tomorrow morning and ship out soon after that. After that, the delivery time is in the hands of FedEx.

So this blog entry is an attempt to set expectations for how long it takes our tools to hit the mailstream once you order.

It can take five or six days to get an order processed, checked for quality control, wrapped, boxed and shipped. We try to beat that timeframe, but it’s not always possible.

Once you get your tool, I think you’ll find it was absolutely worth the wait.

— Christopher Schwarz

Visit the Crucible Tool store to purchase one of our lump hammers. They are $85 plus shipping. This is likely our last batch before Christmas.

Remember: If you have a question about Crucible, please send your email to: help@crucibletool.com.

— Christopher Schwarz (Illustration by Raney Nelson)

A large number of Crucible Lump Hammers will go up for sale in our store at noon Eastern time on Thursday, Nov. 15. This likely will be the last batch of lump hammers we will sell before Christmas.

This is our largest batch so far – Raney has been toiling for weeks in the Crucible Lab to get the heads milled and the hammers assembled and finished. We hope this batch will last a good long time so that everyone who wants one can get one, but we simply don’t know if we’ve made enough this time. So mark your calendars and set an alarm to avoid disappointment.

And Sweatshirts!
We now off high-quality Champion sweatshirts that feature the Crucible logo – an ancient symbol used by alchemists in recipes to depict a crucible. These sweatshirts are the best we can get our hands on – hence the price. (We’re taking very little profit on these.)

One last note: If you have a question about Crucible, please send it to help@crucibletool.com. Sending questions about Crucible to Lost Art Press will only delay you getting your answer. Crucible is a separate company with different people handling different chores. Thanks.

— Christopher Schwarz

Our second big batch of Crucible lump hammers will go on sale at noon (Eastern time) on Friday, Sept. 28. The price is $85 plus shipping.

A couple quick notes on the lump hammers:

If your handle has a big chip in it, please let us know at help@crucibletool.com. We missed that. But slight variations in color, grain and even the handle’s octagonal facets are part of the reason we like wooden handles.

Thanks to everyone who has purchased the lump hammers so far – I hope you are enjoying using them as much as we are. I recommend you keep it on your bench.

You’ll be surprised how many times you reach for it.

— Christopher Schwarz

Good news: We have 250 more sets of Design Curves in stock in our store. They are $37 a set plus shipping.

If you make chairs or curvaceous furniture, you’ll find these curves a nice addition to your tool kit. They are designed for woodworking – not drafting. Unlike drafting curves, ours don’t have the weird ink ledge, which is designed to prevent ink from smudging. The ink ledge also makes the curves less accurate (thank you, parallax).

Plus, ours are wood, not plastic. Well, actually they are a seven-layer bamboo ply (bamboo is a grass). They are durable, stay fairly flat and the world ain’t gonna run out of bamboo.

These curves are laser-cut here in Covington, Ky. Then I sand them on both faces to #220 grit to remove all the burn marks and dress the edges by hand to remove the extra carbon from the laser-cutting.

In other Crucible news, we are working on our next batch of lump hammers. We hope to have another group ready in the next week or so. Stay tuned for more news.

Also, if you have a question about Crucible Tool stuff, be sure to send it to help@crucibletool.com (not to Lost Art Press). We have different people managing each site, and we want to make sure we get your question answered promptly.

— Christopher Schwarz

So if you are waiting for curves, it’s only going to be a few more days until they are listed as back in stock.

— Christopher Schwarz

While the lump hammer appears in English workshops in the mid-20th century, I suspect its origins are much earlier.

Usually the metal head is brass or bronze and can vary in its decorative properties from “rock-like” to H.O. Studley. Many of the joiner’s mallets I have owned have Lignum vitae striking faces. Invariably, these striking faces are in bad shape after 100 or more years of beating things, no matter how vitae the wood is.

Lee Valley Tools sells a similar product – the Cabinetmaker’s Mallet. This nice tool has round wooden inserts that you can make with a hole saw. I used this mallet for many years and replaced the striking faces several times until the handle broke on me.

At some point in the 20th century, these joiners mallets disappeared and lump hammers appear. Lump hammers are simpler to manufacture – a piece of metal and a piece of wood. There are no wooden inserts to replace. They are cheap as chips. Heck, they are actually an engineer’s hammer with the handle a bit shorter.

And that’s where I think the lump hammer came from. Fancy and fussy joiner’s mallets were replaced with the simpler and cheaper lump hammer.

— Christopher Schwarz

We sold out of our first batch of lump hammers in two hours on Wednesday, which was quite a surprise. Today, Raney and John are boxing up the first batch of hammers to go out. And then they’ll begin production on a new batch of hammers for the store.

In the meantime, you might enjoy the photo above, which I call the post-apocalyptic lump hammer. This is one of our early prototypes that I have been intentionally abusing. We wanted to see how the hammer faces would hold up and if the handle would break.

To test the faces, I loaned the hammer to a masonry demolition crew. When they brought it back, the hammer’s only problem was that the head had come loose on the handle. A wedge fixed that. The handle saw a wee bit of delamination – only one growth ring – with no loss in strength.

This example used to have a charred handle. Some of the charring wore off in use. I removed the rest with a scraper and refinished the handle with soft wax. The decal was a failed experiment – ignore it.

We’re all excited for our customers to receive their lump hammers and start using them – we think you’ll be impressed with how useful they are.

— Christopher Schwarz

We will begin taking orders for the Crucible Lump Hammer at noon Eastern time on Wednesday. The hammers are $85 plus shipping. As always, we will sell only what we have in stock and will not take backorders. The good news is that production is running smooth and we should be able to keep up with demand, even if it is strong.

The bad news is that we can no longer offer free shipping on our tools. We use the same fulfillment and shipping service as we do at Lost Art Press. And as I explained here, that model is unsustainable for us. So effective immediately, all orders will include a shipping charge based on weight.

We are in the midst of changing our fulfillment system and hope to have more shipping options available as a result.

More on the Lump Hammer
As always, we will include an instruction sheet with the tool. Please read it. It has important information about the wedge that is included in the package, suggestions on use and how to ensure the faces of the hammer remain grippy and don’t deflect oddly off your target.

In fact, you can download the directions here.

These hammers have a 2.2 lb. hardened steel head that is milled to size in our laboratory in Indiana. The interior of the head’s eye is one of the nice details of the tool. Unlike some inexpensive cast hammers that have a straight-sided hole, the eye of the lump hammer is milled with an hourglass shape to a precise fit to the hickory handle. This, plus the wooden wedge, will keep the head in place for many years of use.

Because we think long-term, we are including a steel wedge in the package so you can tighten up the fit between the head and the handle.

The handle is made in the USA from hickory. It has octagonal facets, which give you feedback about the hammer’s orientation in your hand, and is finished by hand with beeswax.

As always, if you have questions or a problem, send us a note at help@crucibletool.com.

— Christopher Schwarz

The first batch of Crucible Lump Hammers will be up for sale in our store very soon this month. This week I visited the Crucible Lab, where Raney showed me how the production run was progressing, and we discussed some of the details of manufacturing.

As we were talking, I noticed one of the Lump Hammers on his bench that had a natural hickory handle – no “shou sugi ban” charred finish. The hickory was soiled from Raney’s hands. I picked it up and was immediately reminded of Alan Peters’s lump hammer, which I fell in love with years ago.

After some discussion, Raney, John and I decided to make the natural hickory handle the standard finish on our handles. For those of you who wish to make the handle black, we are going to offer detailed instructions on how to do it with inexpensive tools and a few minutes of work.

Why are we making this change? Several reasons.

1. The natural handle has crisper facets and a better feel in the hand. Charring the handles rounds over the facets and noticeably reduces its circumference. Leaving it natural makes for a Lump Hammer that fills your palm and offers better feedback in use.
2. The charring is functionally irreversible. If you want a charred handle, it is a simple thing to make a natural handle into a charred one. If we send you a charred handle, however, it is not possible to get back to the full-sized natural one.
3. It looks right. We love shou sugi ban, but we also love the look of traditional Western tools. The natural handle looks like a new one you might find in an English hardware store (in the 1960s), and it will only get dirtier and more glorious with age.

For those of you who were keen on the black handle, we offer the following solutions. In the next week or so we will publish a video tutorial on how to char your handle with simple home center tools. If you are local to us, we invite you to stop by the Lost Art Press storefront on one of our open days (the second Saturday of each month) and I will personally char your handle for you and finish it with beeswax.

Next up: Details on pricing and availability.

— Christopher Schwarz

We still don’t have a final price – $85 to $95 is the target – but almost everything else is proceeding smoothly.

One last detail on the heads: The steel is made in the USA – fingers crossed that the recent tariffs won’t affect us much.

The handles are hickory and made in the United States as well. After charring the handles with a torch, they are dipped in molten beeswax and rubbed down.

The handles are affixed in the hammer heads with hide glue and an oak wedge. The fit between the head and the handle is so good, that we think this will keep the joint tight for many years of use. We are including a steel wedge for those who prefer a steel wedge, or if the head ever becomes loose.

— Christopher Schwarz

Before I tell you more about the lump hammer, let me first explain why things have been so quiet on this blog. For nine months in 2017 and 2018, my sisters and I took care of our father as he ended a long battle with cancer (the cancer won).

I can’t thank John and Raney enough for covering for me during this difficult time. But I am now ready to pull my weight for the company.

We don’t have a date as to when the first batch will be complete and ready for sale. We are hoping for August. The price will definitely be less than $100 – we’re shooting for $85 or a little more. And that price will include domestic shipping.

What Do You Use a Lump Hammer For?
Everything. Though I’ve been absent from Crucible, I have been using our lump hammers every day in the shop. I assemble and disassemble furniture with it. I mortise with it. I set holdfasts. Adjust planing stops. Anything that needs a heavy but controlled blow.

So it won’t be long. The handles are made. The heads are in the mill. And the torch is getting warmed up.

After months of angst, John and Raney have found a handle supplier that is eager to work with us in making our lump hammer. Their handle prototypes were good. Their prices were in our budget. And – here’s the big thing – they promptly returned our messages.

As a result of this windfall, we are placing a large order for handles in the morning and will start production on the lump hammer in the next month or so.

In the intervening months I’ve experimented with different ways of wedging the handle to the head. I bought every style of steel wedge I could find. I combined it with wooden wedges of different species and dimensions. Then I beat the living goatlights out of the hammers.

I learned a lot. So much that I think the production delay was a good thing. I can now wedge a hammer head in a way that you can beat a concrete block building to death with this hammer and the head will remain tight.

My modifications add 6 cents to the cost of manufacturing.

We are still shooting for an $85 retail price on our lump hammer, though Raney is worried we might have to bump that to $95. Either way, I hope the lump hammer will be worth the wait.

— Christopher Schwarz

We hit a snag with our lump hammers in January. Our handle supplier decided to ignore us and stop returning our calls, emails and offers to give them a big order for handles.

So we are back to finding a new supplier that won’t charge us $35 per handle.

As a result, we are treading water with the lump hammer. We have the money to make the parts, but until we have a handle and know the exact size of the tenon in real life (not in CAD – an important distinction) we can’t make the hammer heads.

So John, Raney and I are sifting through 132 suppliers this week.

Sorry we don’t have good news to report. (This is why most toolmakers don’t have active blogs.)

— Christopher Schwarz

I don’t want to sound like a telethon host, but we are incredibly close to having the cash to order the raw materials for the first batch of Crucible lump hammers.

So we’re going to do this the old fashioned way: Earn the money and then buy what we need.

— Christopher Schwarz

Manufacturing a lump hammer was one of the dozen or so things we wanted to make before we even incorporated Crucible Tool. It’s a tool I’ve been experimenting with in my personal shop for years by modifying vintage hammers to get the balance and feel that I wanted.

Before I discuss the specifications of the lump hammer, however, let me first answer a question several customers have asked: What in the tarnation is a lump hammer?

In the United States, it’s typically called an engineer’s hammer or a small sledge, and it comes in a variety of configurations – different head weights and different handle lengths. In the United Kingdom, the tool is sometimes called a lump hammer and is a tool that shows up in the kit of many 20th century woodworkers, including Alan Peters and David Savage.

The lump hammer is used for everything that a wooden mallet is used for – mortising, assembly, disassembly, chopping dovetails, setting holdfasts, persuading stuck joints. It’s advantage (in my opinion) is it has a lot more punch in a small package. And a lot of woodworking operations can be done without swinging the tool. You merely lift it and drop it – gravity and mass does the work instead of your arms.

During my tests, I worked with a variety of weights, handle sizes and metals to find a lump hammer that was balanced, durable and something I reached for at every opportunity. I am not a fan of cast iron heads, which are common, so we settled on a steel head that is milled directly from a 4140 QT steel (usually called 4140 prehard) that's prehardened to about Rc 28-35. The head is 1,000 grams.

The handle is just as important as the head. Ours is octagonal in section, made from hickory and is 9-1/2” long under the head. During the last year, I think we’ve fussed over the handle more than any other aspect of the tool. The handle has a charred black finish and is coated in soft wax.

The tool will be $85 and made entirely in the United States from domestic materials.

I know that several commenters have noted they can go to Harbor Freight and purchase a similar-looking drilling hammer for $5.99. Is our hammer 14.91 times better than the Harbor Freight hammer? Of course not. It’s 15 times better.

As always, we make these tools for ourselves and our use in the shop – not to a price point. We think the price is incredibly fair for what the hammer is, but if you don’t get that, we don’t seek to change your mind.

The lump hammer is coming soon, just as soon as we can afford the bill for the steel.

— Christopher Schwarz