I suspect your ball pein might just have the original handle, but the end user thinned down the neck.
A wooden handle naturally absorbs impact, keeping shock away from the user, better than anything else. Always did.
But guys would cut down the neck for generations and generations. It might have started over reducing felt impact, but it was really more as a boast of skill than anything else. If you could use a hammer with a really thin neck and not break it, you had to have at least some skill.
We still have a guy in town here who believes in this with all his heart. Must have had a relative or something who remembered the old days.
The practice is still around in certain places too. I saw some guys on TV, from about 5 years ago, from the south seas. They were carving a dugout canoe with a steel adze. But it was mounted on what looked for all the world like a 3/4" dowel for a handle. Great big head, skinny skinny handle. I suspect the handle was ebony or some other super hard tough tropical hardwood, but it sure was skinny.
The story was a great story. The people lived on this killer beautiful island, in the modern world. They had, and could have, all the contact they wanted with the outside world, but they rejected the modern world almost completely.
Their philosophy went something like, "When you a--holes can beat what we have here, maybe we'll be interested. But you schmucks never had anything like what we already got. Not ever"
They had gardens of delicious food, an ocean loaded with fish and seafood of all kinds. They had year round fruit galore for the picking. They had pigs so pampered they were said to resemble candy. And they raised a certain root as a crop that not only fermented into alcohol very easy, it also had certain psychedelic properties. So they could prepare it either way. And they did.
Oh, and they loved to sing and dance the night away.
And their girls were really cute.
Not exactly a hardship life.
yours Scott
