It looks like the retainer on the **** is broken off. I have an unusual ball peen hammer where the head and handle are one piece with washers for grip material. Some are missing as the **** is broken off and in the pix, this looks almost identical to the broken end of mine.
Is yours an Estwing?
Like the one
shown on this advert showing tools in 1939?
The versions with the blue rubberised plastic grip have this under the rubber
Like this picture I found on the net.
On the hammer with the stacked leather grip there's no lanyard hole and prongs on the end go through the endplate and are peened over.
What people naturally assume are rivets are actually the ends of the steel shaft.
Like this.
Now, I've seen several blue handled Estwings over the years where the grip has slipped slightly and can only assume that the bumps on that fire axe are there to stop that from happening.
I've got two Estwing hammers that need a few more leather washers to replace the crappy plastic ones Estwing insists on using several of. They get damaged when the user overstrikes and I suspect that UV light also makes them brittle.
The leather washers last a lot better than the few plastic washers in my opinion.
I'll get round to it at some point.
Incidentally, you don't know just how many pathetic, dweeby little "Zombie killer" site images I trawled through on Google images to find the top image.
Sheesh, those kids just need to get laid.
