jason0012

Why on earth would anyone cut it in half?

I once had a 25# that did that. I drilled the broken part, reassembled with a 3/4" dowel and two 5/8-11 cap screws. Then veed out the crack and filled it with Ni rod. lots of grinding and I had a die back in and the hammer running for a few years more. I replaced it with a 100# hammer but the repair held as far as I know.

I once dumped mine and found a lower die for the hammer. It was a taper die for sharpening breaker points and I had been hunting for it for over a year!

I was at the flea mrkt the other day and stumbled across a set of old ironwork catalogs, or at least that is what I assumed them to be. For $1 each and all four were there I figured it wouldn't hurt to take them home. When I got home and started reading through them, they arent cataloges but part of a course on operating an ironworks buisness, from 1968! They are actually an amazingly usefull looking set of books on the economics of operating a shop. Has anyone out there heard of R.J. Cunningham Designs? I have never heard of them, there is a phone listing though I don't think its current. I thought it was interesting to see that thier shop rate in 1968 was $5.50 an hour!

I remember how Clifton's 250 leaned from subsidance under the foundation. If you watch the videos you can see the hammer leans forwards. He said the problem was the wet conditions, and quantity of sand in the soil. His hammer sat right at the edge of the foundation and all force was on the front edge. As I recall he said that the foundation should have extended two feet or more in front of the machine to stabilize it.

Try moving the idler to the other side of the drive wheel. Then it will be turning the right way. Bradleys as well as most other belt hammers have provision to do so.

I believe it was in Donna Miliech's book that I saw an illustration of the "old" way of doing this. The process was similar to inlaying gold or silver in engraving, with the brass spine being forged onto spines chisled out of the blade. The ends were also dovetailed if I recall corectly. I would try just brazing or even more blasphemous, MIG welding a nice bead of brass down the back side of the blade. This sounds far more decrative than funtional anyway.

$95,000 seems a tad steep, I am pretty sure I could build one cheaper

I feel like I am stirring the pot a bit, but have to disagree with some of the opinions here. I have done this cold at the anvil. I don't see why it would possibly hurt the machine, I have done this task by hand and know quite well the forces involved. If you have a hammer use it, that's what its for. I rather liked the look of the Anyang hammers but are you saying they break when they hit stuff? I run a 110 yr old hammer and while it shows lots of wear, all the failures I have experienced were when forging hot stuff on a production basis. Try this, does it hurt the hammer to hit cold tooling? My tools are 5160 and 4140 and a few are H13. They are considerably harder than cold HRS. Knocking corners down takes very little force as does most texturing . I would expect most any hammer to be able to handle this work. It is a job that small fast hammers are perfect for. 16mm stock is kinda small too. It is far harder on a hammer to hit nothing than to hit die to die. Die to die is really hard on the dies, the hammer has to withstand the forces of the dies getting smacked together every time it gets used. Hardened dies have a nasty habit of chipping or worse when smacked together. The dovetails and frame ought to be stout enough to handle the forces of the tup hitting the anvil. If not, the hammer needs to be redesigned in a big way, since this is the very operation it is intended for. What I have seen of the Anyang It at least appears to be quite sufficent for this sort of thing and it would surprise me if it suffered any damage from this operation.

It cant hurt the machine. It is a hammer, it is meant to hammer! What can happen is the cold stock can groove out the dies. Hot forging will do this too, just takes a whole lot longer. Anyone using a hammer ought to learn to hold stock level anyway so the "hard on the smith" is kind of relative. Just think, you wont burn any gas or be standing in front of the forge- that makes a difference when the shop averages 112 degrees in the summer. I always thought breaking the scale was actually an advantage of cold texturing, the client I did a lot of this for painted everything, and often neglected to sandblast. I descale most of my own work anyway, even for indoors applications. I don't like to think of big chunks of scale flaking off at some point down the road.

As I recall he was trying to find a way to produce inexpensive copies of forged blades- complete with hammer marks and on some, file teeth. D-2 was necessary to compensate for loosing strength in the casting process. There was a company casting blades in 1045 too, but I don't even forge blades out of steel that cheap!(I think they were located in India)

I had two kitchen knives I forged from 440-C. Both were excellent for edge holding, but the stuff is awfull to forge! Up there with H-13. Sadly, a house guest a few years back stole one of them!!!! If your blade is not holding up it is either heat treated improperly, or made from one of the lesser 440 series. Many cheap knives are made from 440B or 440A which aren't the same steel at all.

Boye was originally casting those in D-2, and they got pretty favorable reviews, though heat treating D-2 isn't for the novice. Probably best to stick with simple alloys and grind or forge the first few.

I've cold textured lots of stock. 1/4-2 inch It warps a bit, but isn't too big a job to straighten out. It tends to be good money for not much work, and, the shops I always did it for usually used me for that job on a nearly monthly basis. I couldn't estimate how many thousands of feet(or even miles) of 1/2" square I've knocked the corners off of! It can be hard on your dies if they are soft, and you will quickly learn about keeping stock level in the hammer! Nothing about this work should hurt the hammer or cause excessive wear to the dies.

I run a 100# Bradley upright helve. Its a nice little hammer, and while I would like a larger one i definitely don't have the room! On tooling, somewhere I have photos of ALL of Clifton's tools. I dragged them all out and snapped a shot of everything in his shop , and even have notes as he had stories to go with everything! I think I have only tried about 4% of what I saw at his place. Despite that,when I culled all my junk recently, I tossed a half ton of tooling ! I can Imagine how many tons of tooling are in his place! That stuff really piles up after a while.

Rebuilding a Bridgeport head was the most godawful project I have ever tackled in my shop! That thing has a bazzillion parts and they all seem to become airborn whenever a screw is loosened! None of it is really all that hard, just frustrating. Wholesale Tool lists replacement parts pretty cheap, and with a manual you should be able to get the thing running.

I have considered this myself. I think it would far far cheaper and produce a far better machine to use burn outs of heavy plate. To function without developing serious fatigue issues an aluminum frame would have to be 3-4+ times the cross section of one in iron. So a 100# frame for a 25# sounds right. The question is, why not just buy an old 25 ? Before spending over 1000 hrs making the patterns, furnace flasks and handleing equip for pouring 3/4 ton aluminum castings I am pretty sure you could scrounge enough $ to buy some old LG. In fact, you could probably buy one with the money you could get scrapping that aluminum!

I don't know the durometer. He simply guessed based on the rubber used for die springs. I believe I payed $150-250(it was a while ago) I don't own a compact but an upright, so that was a total of 5 cushions. A friend with a 100# compact has rubbers that were simply bandsawn from 3-4" sheet rubber(I'll bet that wasn't much fun). The new rubber I am using is a lot snappier than the originals, though it seems a lot harder. Rubber technology though seems to have advanced a little bit in the last 110 years! Pressumably one could cast these yourself, though I will freely admit to knowing very little about casting rubber.

Sorry it took a while to find. I'm not even sure the address is still good. The last I spoke with this guy was in 1998. His name is Jeff Starke. He is an engineer for a rubber manufacturer and made a set of cushions for my 100# upright. The adress I have is 3071 Kerlikowske , Coloma Mi 49038. His number was (616) 849-1239. I hope he is still there. The cushions he made have been running in my hammer for quite a few years now and work quite well. I will warn that the bright blur rubber is quite the change from the old bone white/grey of the natural latex! I should also add that I have tried to buy parts from Cortland years ago and found them to be quite disinterested in helping me. The one part they were willing to replace was the rear bearing at $3600 for the raw casting! They also quoted me a 6 month lead time on it. I found a local foundry that was more than happy to pour a new one using the old as a pattern . It took less than a week and they only charged $600.

I got an e-mail this morning from Steve Kayne. He didn't have kind things to say about this hammer. Apparently the clutch is poorly designed and the motor it shipped with was quite problematic. He didn't go into a lot of detail but seemed to think it had potential if someone wished to invest some time into re-engineering it. He did not feel that it was worth the effort however to get the thing market ready so lost interest. While I don't have the highest opinion of Little Giants I don't think it is fair comparing a 50#LG to a 3B Nazel! Kinda like a bicycle trying to compete in the Indinapolis 500! Reminds me of the time i got to use Kurt Ferenbach's 600# Erie, then went home and went back to work with my 25# LG !

Thanks for posting some real answers. I figured surely someone here would know a thing or two about this. I think I am following what is being said . But I do have some questions. So the ash and clay form a sort of "can" to contain the weld? I expected some fluxing reaction as the ash is alkaline and should reach a liquid state. I know from experience that clay will melt into a glassy vitrious substance if it reaches a high enough temp. (I have melted firebricks before) How is slurry applied to hot steel?

They make some decent looking belt grinders too.

What/ where is that hammer? It looks a lot like the Indian hammer. I saw this company online years ago with a name like "Rattan" or something . I e-mailed about it but never got a response. At the time I was actually serious about buying one. There are advantages of a mechanical hammer over an air breather. This looks like a pretty good design. There were a number of old machines like this, the names elude me at the moment but I have seen the stroke adjustment like that before. It is my biggest complaint with the Bradley that the stroke requires loosening bolts to adjust. Being able to change the stroke while running sounds pretty good, though I'm not sure how sturdy this machine would be. I was curious how much the beast would cost, and how prohibative shipping from India would be. Kinda a moot point now as I don't have the spare cash to get one but I'm still curious if anyone knows.

Crane cable, and rigging cable are high carbon and usually not galvanized. I am fairly certain that you will be able to find some sort of crane/rigging source in Austrailia. You may try companies that move machinery, or repair heavy equipment. Cables have to be changed out when they show wear or fray. They still will have enough material to weld up into a nice billet and have nothing left but scrap value, so you can get the stuff cheap to free. Here in the states OSHA requires condemed cable to be cut into lengths that can not be used for anything again. It is certainly more convienient to cart home 3 ft pieces than a 200 ft coil!

$9 an hour costs the employer $18, who charges their customer $36. The money you take home cant pay the shop bills and still pay your paycheck. Thinking along those lines will have you out of business quick! You need to charge enough for your work to pay for the shop and materials and your take home pay. It might seem that your shop costs nothing since you are paying anyway, but you aren't running the forge 8-10 hrs a day, 7 days a week yet. There are also numerous costs involved in doing business that will eat you alive should you base your price on expected take home. Insurance, taxes, and advertising can eat twice as much of your income as you do! Anymore a shop rate below $50-60 isn't enough even for a hobby shop!