Instead of whamming in a pointy cylinder, that stress and vibration might work it out back against the force of our whamming, we TWIST in a similar bit of hardware, only we wrap an inclined plane around the cylinder so that it cuts as we twist, making a walled channel that resists working out backwards under vibration.
Pneumatic press, nail gun, screwdriver, impact wrench, seems like these could work, while maybe not a direct dirivative. Some things persist, and are stable as others have noted. A cool thing about innovation is that the ideas are often things people didn't know they wanted until they see it.
These are not improvements of a hammer design, but completely different things. Screws do not play well with deformation, but let’s ignore that: you’ll probably have both a hammer and one of these things in your toolbox, and you’ll miss a hammer if it’s not there. It is a general-purpose hit-force tool for hitting anything, not only nails. A better design for a hammer itself could include a claw or new hitting surface geometry, handle amortizer and so on, which are successfully done in variety, despite gp thinks that it’s “stuck”. First, it’s not, we just waited for better materials, advanced tasks, etc. Second, it is not much to do with hitting something with inertia-accumulated force.
Anyway my point is that if you change all hammers in the world overnight (like software does) you better have done a good job of century-testing your changes in all situations. If your reasoning is just “it gets old”, well, this site’s rules do not allow me to express what I think of that.
But can’t you just question the need for a hammer in the first place. You don’t need one if you don’t have nails. You don’t need nails if you find a better way to fasten things. That’s the job to be done. Soo instead of a better hammer, let’s get rid of the nails. And with it goes the entire industry.
But why? Hammer/nail is essential, cheap and natural for crafting, and honestly I do programming in a somewhat handcrafted way, i.e. I don’t need sophisticated stock market frameworks for e.g. sending a request for quotelevel2. And many people seem to do that, that’s why deprecating ‘request’ instantly gave birth/popularity to ‘got’. There is no reason to complicate simple, battle-tested things until there really, really is a big reason. There is no such thing as “new”, until your task is “new” in any way. Using new things for the same old purpose is called fast fashion.
Ok, let's play do this imaginative exercise - Hammer looks simple but actually if you're few inches off while slamming it down, you can seriously injure yourself if you're holding the nails with your other hand. I'm sure we have all experienced that. How about a sensor that always drives the motion in the right location, it can be done by having sensors that feel your muscle twitches and angle then recalibrate using camera to the right angle and nails it in (pun intended). Another idea is a Swiss army knife but something that combines hammer, screwdriver, wrench into one design design offsetting the need to by separate tools.
Many framing hammers have a nail set on top which is a t-shaped depression with a magnet in it to hold a nail. Set the nail on top, swing and set the nail int he wood up to half depth, then hit it two more times to finish nailing.
Idk what professional woodworkers do today, but I just hit very easy for first few times (bait? non-native speaker) and then the nail holds with its “spearhead”, so you can remove your hand away from the danger zone. Or use pliers. I agree with the commenter above, hitting fingers is frankly a noob’s issue that is completely avoidable without rocket tech.
