Say hello

to my handy dandy meat tenderizer. Haha! Just kidding, though you could tenderize meat with it no problem.

But no, say hello to the carbide-tipped bushing hammer! Love this guy! Been using it for some months now. Don't ask me what it cost. Though really, long term, the price is actually not bad, since if I use it the right way it should last a lifetime, relatively speaking.

You can really dial in the granite (and other stone) with this puppy. But it's finishing, finesse. You don't hammer with it. It took a bit to learn how to use it right. You hold it with both hands with a good deal of tension. The entire spiked surface area needs to make contact dead flat for it to be effective (and also you could ruin the hammer otherwise). You drive-push it, as it were, into the stone. You don't want the hammer bouncing off. It's methodical, slow, and effective. You don't just get a rough finish. You can get totally precise. You can totally level off a piece, completely flat, on all or as many sides as you wish, round off or sharpen corners, if you keep at it. It takes time.

Sometimes when you're chiselling granite or using the bushing hammer on it, the smell is exactly like the smell of a dentist's office when they're doing drilling. The smell of nightmares. Yet when it's with the granite, outside, you're working away - it's somehow good, like I love the smell of napalm in the morning kind of thing.

I first went to Micon on Granville Island. I love that place. Been there since the thirties. They forge their own tools, and they import. I got the carbide-tipped chisels, a pitching tool, the bell hammer and the splitting hammer (love the splitting hammer!) from them. They are absolutely "go-to" for these kinds of tools. You go in there and it's like the front office hasn't been changed since the forties or fifties.

But they don't have the bushing hammer! I asked them and they pointed me to Pothier Enterprises in Surrey. By the way, the folks at Micon are very helpful and very much into talking to the customer about using the tools etc. - great customer service. Will definitely be going back to Micon!

Pothier had to order in the bushing hammer from the eastern US. It's something that annoys me from time to time about Canada. Some things here are just weirdly unavailable. Like, point chisel? Check. Wide chisel? Check. Pitching tool? Check. Bell hammer? Check. Splitting hammer? Check. Bushing hammer? Nope, sorry. You can't have that - that's too much of a good thing.

Like come on man!