Fighting with a Sledgehammer

Been in my share of bar room brawls, I always loved it when an opponent picked up a chair or some other item that would slow him down. Heavy weapons are best used to crush the opponent’s head once he is already on the ground and knocked out. Anything close to 1 pound will considerably slow a swing and make it much easier to react to.

Huh, I would have thought your preferred style of barroom brawling would involve being a thousand yards away from the bar.

At the risk of nourishing this zombie - same goes for a baseball bat. Hold it at the grip and 1/2 way up the shaft, and stab/slash. Don’t swing it like hitting a baseball.

Annnnnnnd this is how you get a safety briefing …:smack: :stuck_out_tongue:

Just don’t be the guy who bought a sledgehammer to a nailgun fight.

Nor to a bugspray fight, nor to a slingblade fight, nor a pickup truck fight.

When it’s you against the sledgehammer, bet on the sledgehammer.

I’m going to call bullshit on this. Well, depending on your definition of “weapon”.

As someone with a fair amount of combat training and as someone who uses a sledgehammer occasionally in work, I’ll say if you are calling a sledgehammer a weapon you would probably be better off with out it.

A lot of fighting theory is just that - theory. Real fights are fast and messy. And they happen without a compliant kata partner. Unless you are super strong, swinging a sledgehammer fast enough to be effective against anyone with a bare minimum of training or who is very motivated will be just about impossible.

There seems to be a wide definition of “sledgehammer” in this thread. Although there are a lot of tools that have a shaft with a weight on one end; I envisage the OP to mean a three-foot shaft with a lump of metal at one end weighing between ten and fourteen pounds. The only practical way to use that as a weapon would be to hold it by the ‘throat’ (ie - the part of the shaft nearest the weight) and then to use it as described in #17

Grrr - I am sure it would work on zombies too.

I neither fight or use a sledgehammer that much, but I pretty skeptical about this. If I was ever in a life-or-death confrontation I would definitely rather have a sledgehammer in my hand than nothing at all. As a couple of people have pointed out, you probably would want hold it at or near the head instead swinging it, but having several pounds of metal in your hands seems like massive advantage during a physical confrontation to me.

And even if I am wrong, I’d STILL rather have one in my hand simply because any potential attacker is unlikely to think “actually a sledgehammer is not an effect weapon”, as opposed “f*#k! that guy has a sledgehammer!”,

I’d be interested in seeing what people come up with in terms of a cite for this.

Everything I found online were very much divided into “fantasy D+D warhammers” which looked like modern sledgehammer, and "real medieval weapons"which looked like a maul.

Though I did come across this which is more ridiculous than any D+D weapon (at the royal armories in Leeds, which is awesome BTW, if you ever get the chance to visit) :
https://collections.royalarmouries.org/object/rac-object-40790.html

And even if a big heavy sledge made sense at one time, it doesn’t necessarily still make sense today. In medieval times, you might expect to be fighting a knight, who on the one hand is encased in enough steel to be impervious to any small hand weapon, and who on the other hand has somewhat decreased mobility (not as much as often assumed, but still some) and a significantly decreased field of view. So it’d be harder for a knight to dodge a sledgehammer, and that might be what you need to make a dent in his armor.

You are right on. I recall one seminar where we were doing stick and knife fighting, and the discussion turned to flexible/jointed weapons. The instructor joked that it would likely be best to toss it to your opponent for him to pick it up, watch him beat himself up with it as he tries to figure out how to use it, and then step in and finish him off. :smiley:

Another factor is if you don’t know how to use a weapon - like a knife, you could be disarmed, and then your opponent has a weapon.

I’d wager that in the vast majority of instance in which an untrained person is considering defending themselves with a sledgehammer, by far their best bet would be to exercise their Nike-do (run away)!

A lot of people get hurt in encounters because they try something that seems like it should work.

What. The fuck.

It’s like someone took the concept of a bayonet and said, “I can make this a lot stupider.”

Except it might predate the bayonet, if it does date from 1600-1630, as the site says, or at least the bayonet as a sharp pointy thing which attaches to the end of a long gun, as opposed to just being a kind of knife.

I can’t imagine it was ever a serious weapon.

I would be tempted to pick up the sledge hammer and turn to my opponent, offering it as a gesture of peace. When he got close enough, I would drop it on his foot and run like hell.

You could always pretend the sledgehammer was a microphone and start singing Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer into it until your opponent decides you’re too insane to risk confronting.

IME (medeival reenactor) this is closer to reality, There were very few hammers this heavy. Fighting hammers were typically much smaller heads (2-5 lbs) with a handle 2-3’ long. They were used exactly like an axe would be except that the damage was more blunt trauma than cutting.

Heavily armored opponents who were downed could be dispatched fairly effectively with the pointed end.