Emergency services...Darwin Award winner--lol, not too overdramatic? You give the wood a couple taps to get the point to bite in and hold it, then your hands are free to give the wood a whack with the sledge. Hands nowhere near the pointy part. If you miss you might wreck the hammer handle, oops, but no one's going to the ER.
Getting hit with the rogue head of a 12-pound sledgehammer that is travelling nearly 100 MPH after the swing IS
pretty dramatic, regardless of what the point of impact is. I promise. So is getting hit with the shrapnel from the hammer head or the splitter when it disintegrates after all that energy is absorbed along a cutting edge. The ones with the big rings at the top at least have the advantage of stopping or slowing down the hammer before it impacts the blade (especially if you miss and hit the ring with the handle). It really doesn't take much to break a wooden hammer handle and send the head flying. Remember, hammers work by inertia and transfer/conversion of kinetic energy. They really don't care what they hit, either. A fiberglass handle on the other hand is less likely to break, but the non-business end (grip) is gonna give you a serious whuppin' when the head tries to wrap it around what you just missed. I won't say they're impossible to break, just less likely if you don't have my kind of luck. In my experience, if it can go wrong, it usually does.
When I was a kid, as a 10th grade 4H/FFA project, I decided to build a concrete walkway from the carport next to the laundry room out to the clothesline (the way us Boomers' parents dried clothes if we weren't rich). This was probably my earliest DIY project without supervision at the ripe age of 14. Two years before, I was a city kid with ZERO practical farm work experience. Now, I was a bonafide hard-working farm boy with two WHOLE years of experience. I knew how to do anything (at least I thought so).
The short version of a very long story is as follows. While building the form, I got a little too close to the clothesline with a 12-pound sledgehammer while driving in a wooden stake. Time really does slow down just like in the movies when a catastrophe is about to happen. Seeing things in slow motion is real. I remember feeling the difference in the swing when the head went over the wire, looking up to see the hammer on its way back, thinking "This is gonna hurt", seeing my toes and blue sky at the same time, then darkness. The impact had knocked me out like a left hook from George Foreman, so I never had the opportunity to scream in pain so someone would come check on me. I wasn't using any power tools, so what could go wrong? I laid unconscious in the back yard long enough to get sunburned before I finally came to. When I finally woke and could stand up, I stumbled into the kitchen with what was a very strangely shaped head, something more than a mild concussion, and a small bleeding wound just above my now swollen shut right eye. As it were, the bleeding was probably what stopped the swelling from damaging my eye in the now fractured eye socket. My mother's response was "What have you done now?" I didn't bother to tell her the fact I'd just removed a tree root with a double bit axe standing in exactly the same spot just seconds before my KO maneuver. The head injury was bad enough as was and I really didn't want the rest of the lecture with the headache I had. I had never moved my feet between having the axe and the hammer in my hands. My only guess is that the weight of the hammer extended my swing just that little bit more, just enough to catch the wire. The rest, while a blur, and despite the near instantaneous unconsciousness, is still very memorable. Me and that clothesline have a LOT of history. Included was a particularly ugly bicycle chase with my brother when I rode under the line and was taller than I remembered being when I went under it the last time. I still remember seeing the bicycle keep going after I stopped, then landing in front of my brother who proceded to run over me with his bicycle. Really, you can't make this stuff up. Then there was the inevitable not looking up often enough when cutting grass around it. That usually just knocked my hat off my head, but the line was low enough for my 4'11 mother to reach it. By the time I left home, I was nearly 6'2" and still cutting the grass under that clothesline. I do often wonder how I survived my adolescence. Certainly, how I survived that clothesline. Whodathunk a place to dry clothes and linens could be so dangerous?
The scary part is, I became an electrical engineer. Go figger how I survived the dangers of that career. Oh, and should I mention I've used a dryer since I could afford one or to even go to a laundromat? I don't do clotheslines now. I think the biggest insult is that my mother later had the walkway removed because it was too much trouble to go around it with the riding mower she got after I left home for college. My folks figured they didn't need a riding mower while they had a teen-age boy that had little else to do besides chores around the farm. It was 26 miles one-way to school, so social life and school sports were non-existent. Getting done early with chores left me entirely too much time to get myself into some other life-threatening situation. It took nearly 6 hours to cut our yard, which had to be done nearly every week in summer, so mission accomplished.
I was being funny (well, trying to be), as humor is often the best way to learn/teach something, but I'm really quite serious when it comes to safety. I've spent a lot of effort since the clothesline/sledgehammer incident learning how to be safer in what I do, never mind the annual safety training that was required for my job of 40+ years, and the 5 years of swimming pool construction before getting my degree. The sledgehammer incident could/would have been life ending had I done the same with the double blade axe. You can bet I
always look up when getting ready to swing something now. Experience is the most successful teacher, if not the most brutal. When doing dangerous things, it's generally a good idea to remove as much danger as possible, especially if you want to survive it. Eliminate the task if possible is the number one rule in safety. Finding a better way without the danger is the number two rule. Modify the tools or task to make the dangers less prominent is number three. And finally, get someone else to do it is number four. Just kidding about number four, actually. If it's too dangerous, I won't let someone else do it in my presence. They can do what they want if they just let me leave first. I don't want to be a witness nor have to call 911.
I don't think you could have gotten that camera angle any better if you tried.
