Necessity is the truely the mother of invention.  My kids keep breaking our oly hammers during practice.  I've only been coaching for 7 years now, but this is the first time they've gone through hammers this fast.  In 3 weeks, they've broken 3 hammers.  Seems the swivel heads keep breaking off of them, which is strange, because they aren't cheapo hammers. 

Anyway, I had this one sitting in my garage/work shop for a little while, trying to think of an effective way to fix it, at least for a practice hammer.  Last night it came to me while watching Family Guy.  Guess that's the advantage of having ADD.  I got an Ibolt that could withstand the force of throwing the hammer and not bend out of shape.  Then, I got a washer, put it between the base of the hammer insert and a bolt.  Added two more washers and then another bolt to tighten it all, so that the Ibolt wouldn't unscrew, but was still able to swivel.  It looks kind of ugly, but it will work... at least I hope it will.

JISurfer wrote: Necessity is the truely the mother of invention.  My kids keep breaking our oly hammers during practice.  I've only been coaching for 7 years now, but this is the first time they've gone through hammers this fast.  In 3 weeks, they've broken 3 hammers.  Seems the swivel heads keep breaking off of them, which is strange, because they aren't cheapo hammers.  Anyway, I had this one sitting in my garage/work shop for a little while, trying to think of an effective way to fix it, at least for a practice hammer.  Last night it came to me while watching Family Guy.  Guess that's the advantage of having ADD.  I got an Ibolt that could withstand the force of throwing the hammer and not bend out of shape.  Then, I got a washer, put it between the base of the hammer insert and a bolt.  Added two more washers and then another bolt to tighten it all, so that the Ibolt wouldn't unscrew, but was still able to swivel.  It looks kind of ugly, but it will work... at least I hope it will.

I thought I actually invented two unique shot put forms back in the early 1970's (The Walk A-WAY and the spin)  Found out later that the walk-a-way was done in 1948 and the damn Russians were spinning in 1955.    Which ets me to the word of the day :

ingenuity

< name=entry =/dictionary method=post>One entry found.

Main Entry:

in·ge·nu·i·ty

Pronunciation:

\ˌin-jə-ˈnü-ə-tç, -ˈnyü-\

Function:

noun

Inflected Form(s):

plural in·ge·nu·i·ties

Date:

circa 1592

1obsolete : candor , ingenuousness2 a: skill or cleverness in devising or combining : inventiveness b: cleverness or aptness of design or contrivance3: an ingenious device or contrivance

 

We have 55-hammers at Moorpark and a number of them with either your " contrivance" or a BIG I-bolt through the whole wt.....major creative -points and very thrrrrrrrrrrifty

JI

I love that pic man, there are washers and nuts everywhere. I am sure that kind of inventiveness drove many of us on the board here when we got started in the games.

For those of you who have never tried to get the spindle out of a badly smashed olympic hammer let me tell you it is a pain.  That big eye bolt will save you a lot of headaches.

Thanks guys, good to see I'm not the only one on here with rigging capabilities.  I got my edumication from SC public schools, so that's my defense on the use of engineuity.  As far as those 55 hammers, care to spare a few?  It's my goal one day to accrue a nice quiver of implements such as you Coach Mac.  For now though, I have to make due with what I have and what I can make out of the scraps.  So far, it's held up nicely.  The throwers get a kick out of my INGENUITY all the time.  I wanted a heavy indoor weight, so I took an old 35 and attached a small portion of military grade cargo netting, so I could put more weight in it.  It actually worked for a long time too. 

BTW, what's the force usually applied to an Oly Hammer?  On this hammer, I put an eyebolt rated for 350lbs of pressure, but there were some that were smaller, but would only sustain 150lbs of pressure.  If those could work, I could actually use them on the newer broken hammers, putting them back into the "rotation".

Nice one!  I think I could actually rig something up like that.  That would be awesome.