I’m hoping this also demonstrates a principle of hammer-building that can be useful to others. It has sometimes been asked how to build a hammer in a way that actually stays properly affixed to the core, rather than wobbling all over the place. This is my answer.

With this approach, you build a solid base of closed-cell foam that is solidly affixed to the core (fellow builder Tyson referred to it as a “lollipop” upon hearing about it, which I think communicates the structure pretty well), and then build out from that using the much softer and lighter open-cell foam. There are some additional steps not illustrated for brevity, but that is the basic version.

After that, I added more foam pieces to make the structure more interesting, a layer of extremely thin packing foam around the entire exterior to hold structure and make sure the tape didn’t pinch, and then duct tape with an inlaid pattern that is adapted from the design in the trailer for The Great Gatsby. Dwarf aesthetics are, as we all know, Art Deco.

80% of the side surface (and the little silver emblem near the pommel) is done by digitally designing a vector file to input into the Cricut and then cutting those out, but everything else, including the tape on other surfaces of the hammer head, and along the rest of the handle, is done entirely by hand.