If You Own Just One Budget Harbor Freight Tool, Customers Say Make It This One

As you might imagine, most hammers are designed to change things. Hammering a nail changes the wood you're driving the nail into, for example, and hammers used for demolition change things into smaller, disconnected things. But one type of hammer looks and acts different from all the rest, and it's designed to move things while changing things as little as possible. Meet the dead blow hammer, the oddball cousin of the mallet that has a couple of party tricks up its sleeve: It won't rebound like other hammers, and it won't damage whatever you're working on unless you try really hard. And, if you buy it from Harbor Freight, it has a price so low (as little as $7.99) that you can finally stop damaging everything you set your hammer upon.

A dead blow hammer accomplishes its wizardry by taking advantage of a hollow head filled with some medium that can move around — often steel shot or sand, sometimes lead or even steel washers — because they're often coated with a relatively soft, non-marring material. In exchange for all this, Harbor Freight only requires that you supply $7.99 for a one-pound Pittsburgh hammer, $15.99 for a five-pound hammer, and in-between prices for three weights in between. To get a handle on how good these prices are, you need look no further than the store's Icon line, in which a one-pound soft-face dead blow hammer will cost you $19.99 and a 40-ounce ball peen dead blow runs $64.99.

Dead blow hammers are used for a lot of tasks, so there are several varieties, like the aforementioned ball peen dead blow hammers. Some have replaceable rubber or leather faces, since you can damage a dead blow hammer while trying not to damage anything with it — so it's best to not use one for things like demolition and installing T-post fencing. But Pittsburgh, a Harbor Freight house brand, isn't selling variety. Its five dead blow hammers — weighing in at 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 pounds — are all coated in orange PVC. They come with a limited lifetime warranty and do what they do well, according to reviewers.

But what, exactly, do they do? Harbor Freight describes a few uses — automotive repair, including chassis, suspension, and brake work, as well as metal fabrication. Some reviewers report similar uses, from hobby machine shops to all manner of auto repairs. But they also mention more DIY and home-maintenance-related uses, like installing porch rails, aligning pieces of wood in a workpiece, installing vinyl plank flooring, assembling and disassembling furniture, and small engine repair tasks of the sort you might encounter fixing a mower.

Of course, some of the specific uses are linked to the weight of the hammer used, such as using a three-pound hammer for loosening brake rotors and metalwork or using a four-pound hammer for constructing block walls. The main use for home improvement might be assembling and disassembling things like furniture that you don't want to damage. It might not be the most indispensable thing in your toolbox, but it'll be dead useful.

The physics of a dead blow hammer work something like this: Whereas the force of a rigid hammer is greater and is delivered all at once, the dead blow hammer delivers slightly less force over a slightly longer time. Some amount of a traditional hammer's kinetic energy is wasted on its rebound, and some amount of a dead blow hammer's energy is absorbed by the unproductive movement of whatever medium is moving freely inside the head. 

While opinions differ about the precise physics of the operation, two things are reasonably clear: dead blow hammers don't rebound, and many users swear they can accomplish the same task with less force using a dead blow. While the hammers themselves don't rebound, the free-floating material inside the head does. So, obviously these hammers aren't completely efficient at directing all of the user's force to the struck object. But most mechanics and more than a few homeowners consider them indispensable for delivering a solid, controlled, powerful blow. "Works as it should. Smashes fingers GREAT," jokes one five-star reviewer on the Harbor Freight website. So you'll need a whole other tool to save your fingers from getting hammered. But not to save a buck, as another reviewer points out: "You can spend more but this does the job just fine!"