There is another solution that has not been discussed. The elbow should never be used in the striking of the metal on the anvil. There are over 15, out of 75, serious smiths in the NTBSA and none of them have every had serious problems with their elbows. If one stands correctly at the anvil, has the anvil at the proper height, holds the hammer loose in the fingers with the correct handle and your elbow is not out at a right angle, you should have no trouble. The smiths that learned under Dr. Seybold and Bill Epps were taught that you use the wrist and shoulder to strike with not the elbow. Here goes:

If right handed, stand with the left foot close to the anvil stump, the right foot slightly back of the left foot, both facing the horn, so that your striking motion is over the anvil, up and down, holding the hammer so that the handle moves back and forward in your fingers, raising the hammer about head high and striking with a downward motion using the wrist as the pivot not the elbow. A good exercise is to hold a three lb. hammer in the hand(fingers only) and move it back and forth, using only the wrist, between the index finger/thumb and the little finger.

An old blacksmith friend of mine, who smithed 7 days a week for 50 years, never had a sore elbow. He would say "you young fellows just don't know how to hold a hammer. Holding the hammer tight is for driving nails." (May get some arguments here).

If you have an image-capable web browser, you can look at:

It has a collage of high-speed photos of me hammering so that you can follow the geometry of the hammer blow. There are some graphs linked in, too, that help analyze the motion. I don't claim to have the provably perfect hammer style but I've never had elbow trouble despite a broken elbow in a hockey game when I was a teenager. Still have the steel pin.

Before I did the shoot, I made some diagrams of just how I imagined my arm and hammer moved. I was way off. Most of the acceleration of the hammer is done with my shoulder and much less than I imagined with elbow motion. When my elbow begins to extend, the hammer is already moving really fast and I'm essentially just guiding it during the last 20% or so of its flight.

I have noticed that beginners, especially those with a very slight build, allow their wrists to cock downward when they lift a hammer. I take this to indicate the hammer is too heavy for them and may cause difficulty. I find the same for myself when I have to use a 5# hammer. For the students, I recommend a lighter hammer and explain why. For myself, I alter my stance and (somewhat awkwardly) my way of lifting the hammer after each blow to eliminate that excess wrist strain.

I have some more images for the web page that I haven't managed to analyse, crop and paste up yet. They show the hammer in the last couple of inches of flight, taken closer up and at an even higher frame rate. Slightly disappointing that we couldn't do it with hot iron, though. Too much heat on the camera and too much glare. So we used cold steel (to maximize the impulse) and lead (to simulate the inelastic behavior of hot iron).

Michael Spencer