Ditto on what Thomas said... A treadle can draw material with the right tooling, and an overdeveloped right leg, but if you want to draw material out a fast mechanical hammer is the way to go. Treadle hammers are great for using tooling under, punches, chisels, and stamps. An air hammer is more expensive to build normally and is good for most of the stuff that a treadle hammer is good at, and can draw pretty well too. But for drawing out billets a mechanical hammer is the berries. Billy Merritt is a knifemaker / patternwelded steel maker, and he has a super tuned 25# LG that he has running FAST I would guess it is running atleast 400 Bpm and maybe faster?
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the rest just gets in the way:-)
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