100 year old gizmo?

[John Kogel]

Celebrating its 100th birthday on April Fool's Day. What is it?

It looks like you would heat it up on the woodstove and use it to put a perfect curve on the beak of a felt baseball cap. But it is a little too narrow for that.

For curving the blade of a hockey stick? The Vancouver Canucks are celebrating 100 years this year as well.

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How about this hammer? Anybody know what it was used for? Nailing planks on a clinker boat, maybe?

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[Bill Kibbel]

The first item was a device for an old method of patching tire inner tubes. The side with the bowl of spikes would have something flammable - I don't know what - and the heat would conduct to the patch and tube, clamped on the other side.

If related, I'm guessing the hammer thing was for removing and seating tires to rims.

[John Kogel]

Thanks, Bill. I suppose the curve helped to get the rubber to lay flat. The rubber would have been real latex rubber from a South American tree. So that would explain the need for heat.

That also explains the extra corrosion in the cavity part. Maybe gasoline with a bit of motor oil added would work for that, on the side of the road, miles from nowhere.

I hadn't connected the two items before today. I brought the patch melding (vulcanizer?) tool in from the shed and then remembered the mystery hammer as I was posting.

I do remember watching the process of beating a truck tire onto a rim, but that required a big sledge. Thin Model T tires, sure, the smaller hammer could do it.