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I Forge Iron

Show me the tooling for your fly press


Glenn

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Greetings Glenn/others.

 

I will start this thread off ....  I have tons of Flypress tools but not pictures of all..   I hope many IFI members participate and pass on some new ideas for others.  Here are a few simple ones...

 

1..  flat dies for tenons  ( I have not used a spring die since I designed this tool }

 

2..  Butcher...   Universal..  I use most for forming the step for tenons..  (  No more monkey tool } 

 

3..  Off set ram...  Used for many forming odd shapes..  I can form a complete circle with this tool 

 

4..   Fixture for Whitney punches...   Impressions ...  Decorative... Edge work... Ect Ect.

 

The list goes on and on and on..  I will try to take more pictures soon and pass on more.. (  Going to Florida Monday for a weeks warm up ]

 

Press on and make beautiful things

Jim

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Photo one is a typical scene of my press.  I have a p6 from old world anvils.  My favorite machine, i would like a little brother one day.  Lets se, magnets to hold wrenches, the round hunk i use as an anvil.  Easy to move around and you can stack up chunks to get the arm into a favorable working position.

 

Photo two is some of my tooling.  I almost exclusively use 1" bolts and welds.  I dont use tool holders and some of my tools are without bolsters.  I'm a bad boy.  One of the first things i did after using the machine for about 10 minutes was cut all my hand top tools in half and set them up for the fly press, you can see a bunch of these in the pic.

 

Photo three is of a typical fullering setup.  There is a 1" hole for bottom tooling.  Note the little 1/4" arm that fits into a hole in the table.  Keeps 'er from moving.  My table is a 1/2 inch plate welded to a smaller, thicker hunk which leaves a good overhang on all sides for clamping fixtures, fences.  The table is adjustable in all directions to center and offset things.

 

The last photo is more tooling.  

 

Enjoy.  More to come

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Last scrapyard visit I lucked onto an item I believe is a disk spacer for farming.  The luck is that it's stout and has a square hole the same size as my large anvil hardies 1.5"  so now I can use their hardy hole tooling as bottom tooling on my large screwpress.

 

I made a number of them from top tools with mangled striking ends, (using the screwpress to forge the eye ends to fit the 1.5" hardy holes.  Buying set tools with mangled striking ends tend to be cheap a term used to describe me nearly as often as "disreputable red hat"....)

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Greetings ...Nuge,... All,

 

I don't know if you saw the adjustable swing lever that I designed for the P-6  ...  I showed it to Bob and Terry and I think they offer one close to it.. It adds a little weight to the flywheel and is a pinch design...  I made this when I first got the press and as a joke I call it my mini.  NAZEL  ..Notice the stick on nose..

It works well and the arm is also adjustable up and down... 

 

Press on and make beautiful things     Thanx Nuge for the great post..

Jim

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Here is a very simple setup that can be taken in many directions. A v-block on the bottom and a round nosed punch. You can clamp the block down in a perfect position and really go fast with this. The material samples were some round-ish rebar and some 3/8 square bar. The v block is actually textured so the backsides of the samples have a nice organic feel as we'll. The resulting triangular cross section has tons of decorative applications. You can use different top tools, spacings, etc. One of my favorite things about a fly press is how playful it is.

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I had just convinced myself that I didn't need an addition of a fly press for my workshop and now I've gone and seen this thread!!

So what sort of size press is best suited for forge work? Looks like the possibilities are endless!

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Curly......I believe you're right,the possibilities are endless.

The tooling is only limited by ones imagination. I would be interested in seeing
a texturing tool that would do a checkering pattern such as that on a gun stock.

Ever seen anything like that Jim or Nuge ?
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Greetings Vapremac,

 

 

Sure.... I use a section of a file for the top die..  With the size of the die I can only do a small area at a time... I control the impression by the stop and the temperature of the metal...  Hot=deeper..  If you can dream it a fly press can do it.. LOL

 

Press on and make beautiful things

Jim

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So what sort of size press is best suited for forge work?

 

I do not have much experience working with fly presses, I have two presses, one little one, probably 2 ton and one that I am restoring that is close to 10 ton. The answer is crystal clear, the bigger the fly press, the best but I think the "C" frame 6 ton press is the most multivalent.

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Greetings again Vipremac,

 

That's an easy one..  I have a spring rope die..  I have adaptors that I can use any spring die on my fly press... Simple, heat the stock up ... pop it in the die bam bam  than twist to taste...    What's next ??

 

Press on and make beautiful things

Jim

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I do not have much experience working with fly presses, I have two presses, one little one, probably 2 ton and one that I am restoring that is close to 10 ton. The answer is crystal clear, the bigger the fly press, the best but I think the "C" frame 6 ton press is the most multivalent.


I should have known that was the case! Have my eye on a Denbigh no.4 on eBay that's going for £25/$40 at the moment, I am sure it will go up a bit. Think that would be big enough or still on the small side?
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Well that's what I thought John, would buy it in a heart beat if that was the asking price but knowing eBay everyone will wait until the last second to bid and it'll go through the roof!

Anyway folks, sorry to hijack this thread can get back to talking about tooling now.

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I think Nuge and I like the same kind of machines.

 

These are some old photos show some random tooling mostly for bending.

 

You can see part of the 3"x3"x7" V block I use for my anvil to get things up to height. The adjustable square and round bars are nice for a lot of things.

 

The bar I'm curving is 1/2" x 3 1/3".

 

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The two set ups shown by Andrew and Harold are worth the price of admission. It is amazing what size stock you can curve in a decent sized press. And graceful, gentle bends. Don't like it, need a little more? Just a few more bumps. No whaling away with a hammer, easy on the body. And the offset move Harold posted is just plain useful. The different sized jigs for this just seem to pile up.

It's funny but the biggest pain is changing tools. So I find the simplest ones are the best. Same old story. The piece in the picture is all done with the one tool. I think the parent material was 1 x 1/4 or 3/4 x 1/4. That whole thing prolly took me twenty minutes or so.

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