According to eBay seller, anyway.  Item number 160666882204, an odd looking hammer.   I'd like to know more about the particulars of this shape.  I picked up one of this shape last weekend.  It's in much better shape than the eBay item.  Stamped with the initials J.F.W. on one side, and 1899 on the other.

The eBay link is:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-VERY-RARE-DOUBLE-HEAD-HAMMER-28oz-2-HEADED-BLACKSMITH-CARPENTRY-/160666882204?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item25687e109c

I think that this one is more likely a modified ball pein, that is showing signs of having been struck by a sledge! Well made and hardened hammers don't mushroom like that!
Graeme

I'm thinking it is a rivit setting hammer that someone has been 'helping' by striking the back face. Only a guess tho, it is an odd pattern....

The one on eBay looks to me like the face is just too soft.  I see that in a lot of hammers, especially projects made in metal shop. 

If there was only one, it would be an oddity an individual's quirky idea.  But two of them, unrelated to each other make a pattern.  I just don't know what the pattern was supposed to do, or improve.   The thinned area around the eye, like on the Heller cross peins and straight peins, had a certain currency around the turn of the last century.  J.G. Holstrom's Modern Blacksmithing (published 1904) insists on the pattern, and shows a picture of a common cross pein, saying that:
"No smith should ever use a hammer like [this] I have not yet been able to find out what it is good for.  Too short, too clumsy, too much friction in the air.  I have christened it, and if you want my name for it, call it Cain's hammer.  It must surely look like the hammer used by him, if he had any."

Elsewhere, he refers to it as a club.

Quote from: rusty on October 22, 2011, 06:19:10 AM

I'm thinking it is a rivit setting hammer that someone has been 'helping' by striking the back face. Only a guess tho, it is an odd pattern....

It's actually a lot like a rounding hammer, but with the round face about half the size of the flat face.

It might be a badly used farrier's rounding hammer with two sizes of head but I think it is a misused doming hammer for copper/brass work.  Doming  hammers are softer than blacksmiths hammers.  The key word here is MISUSED.  I take sellers descriptions with several grains of salt.

Maybe not so rare, but I never heard of Heller until I found this one at an estate sale. It was too unique to pass up so I threw it in with the lot I bought.

Obviously a factory reject -- the head is upside down on the handle.  But I might use it anyway...

>YES! It's for sale!

For how much?

Oh, um... how about $10 shipped? i don't think it will be under the first-class limit, so I'd probably use flat rate.

>Oh, um... how about $10 shipped?

Sounds good to me.  PM to follow.