Patrick Nowak

You're right about that Rodger. I'd completely forgotten. I have a piece of that flash in my office along with an anvil still in the flash. I used to have a finished anvil too but it seems that someone has walked off with it. Those little anvils are the only true closed die forgings I know of that Scot Forge ever made. Much of the work we do on the hammers now is almost closed die, but the tooling is loosely held on standard flat dies to allow for quick changes in set up while working a piece or series pieces so I don't consider it to be closed die in the same sense as the closed die work done under very large hammers with impression dies keyed to the anvil and ram. Patrick

Danger, As far as I know, Scot Forge has never made anvils, though I'm sure they could do it. Even if they used a similar approach to what I did they could still do it much faster since they could profile cut the anvil from a solid block and hard face it using the submerged arc welder to hard face it, or even forge it from a grade like 4340 and quench and temper to avoid the hard facing all together. My guess is that from a cost stand point, you'd still be looking at a price of several dollars a pound or more if they would even consider taking a job like this. Thanks for all the compliments. One of my goals with this project was to make an anvil that would mimic a closely as possible a traditionally forged wrought iron anvil with a steel face. I could have saved a bunch of time if I was just going for functionality, but the look of the anvil was important to me. I don't have a specific project in mind for this anvil, though one of my first tasks will be to forge hardy tooling since none of my current ones are that big. I have visions of my kids learning to strike for me and then working on projects with them on this anvil, but we'll see if they have that much interest as they get older. Patrick

I just finished a very long term project of making a large double horned anvil in the English style. This anvil was inspired by some shown on Bruce Wilcock's website as well as by one that I saw at Quad State a few years ago. I started with two pieces of 4.25" thick plate 16" wide. These were cut to the profile I wanted on a programable flame table. A third piece, 1" thick, was cut to a similar profile, but slightly smaller. This was sandwiched between the two thick plates and the gap was filled with weld all the way around the perimiter of the anvil. A piece of 1.5" plate was cut for the base. The feet were built up from small bits of scrap welded in place and ground to shape. The horns were profiled by hand with a torch and then ground to shape. Once all the shaping was done, the face and top of the square horn were hard faced with Hobart Hardalloy 58. That alone took about 35# of rod and 12-15 hours of welding and grinding. The hardy holes are both 1.5" square. These were done by drilling and counter boring holes through the face which exit the anvil just in front of the waist. A coworker cut two inserts from 1.5" plate using a water jet that fit in the counter bore and were welded in place prior to hard facing. The insersts were 3" in diameter. Overall dimenstions (in inches) are as follows: Length: 52 9/16 Face: 91/2 x 19 5/8 Square horn: 17" long. 6" wide at widest Round Horn: 16" long Base: 15 3/4 x 19 3/4 Height: 17 13/16 Hardys: 1.5" square centered 2" from each end of the face. Weight: 1050# I need to be sure and thank Keane Pardiso and Andy Svaboda who both helped with this project. Keane provided the programmable torch, heavy welders used to do the main assembly and the radial arm drill used to drill and counter bore the holes for the hardy inserts. Andy provided the burners used to preheat the anvil prior to hard facing. I don't have an exact count of the hours going into this project but I wouldn't be a bit surprised if its close to 100. In the last week alone I've put in about 30. The cost is tough to pin down as I was able to get the steel for less than scrap prices and the hard facing rod and other filler rods and grinding consumables were picked up cheap off of ebay and from sales at the local welding shop. Actual cost on the project is probabably close to $1000, but would have easily doubled or even tripled that if I'd had to buy the material, welding supplies and grinding consumables at new/standard prices. I doub't that this method of making an anvil would be cost effective for any of the standard anvil patterns availbe new or used unless you are comparing this to the cost of purchasing a one of a kind collector type anvil or having an anvil custom cast and consider your own time to be of no monetary value. The attached photos show then anvil at various stages after I got it home from Keane's shop. Photo 4 shows the anvil and burners set up for preheating prior to hard facing. The anvil was actually completely wrapped in Kaowool during the heat process and after hard facing was complete the Kaowool was replaced. The anvil was still too hot to touch more than 12 hours later. Picture 2 shows my two yougest children playing on the anvil. It is included here to show the scale of the anvil. Surprisingly, this anvil rings as loud as any I've ever run across. Patrick

This is very sad. I have communicated with Grant for years via the web and had hoped to meet him in person someday. His knowledge, willingness to help others and creative approach to problem solving will definitly be missed. Patrick

Thomas is correct. I did try this on two anvils about 14 years ago and it was not successful. I've also tried welding a plate around the edges of an anvil with a damaged face and was not pleased with those results either. This method can work for fabricated anvils, but trying to reface and anvil this way presents some problems because you have the challenges of welding two high carbon, possibly high alloy and likely pre-hardended pieces of steel together and then you have to do that in such a way that the plate added on will not act as a spring but will sit tight against the anvil face beneath it. The best way to repair and anvil that can't be used as it is probably to hard face it. This is not cheap, but may be less costly than finding a replacement anvil. I did meet a smith onece who said he had refaced several anvils by silver soldering a slab of pre-hardened D2 tool steel to the face, but that requires both surfaces to be extremely flat and then you have to heat the entire assembly evenely to the temperature to get the solder to melt and wet all the surface. I've no doubt that it can work if done correctly but again that is going to be a fairly expensive repair unless you have access to the material at low cost.

Contact Hobart for their procedure on reparing anvils. I just finished hard facing a fabricated anvil using their Hardalloy 58 and it seems to be decent. I know that the folks at Southern Ohio Forge and Anvil (SOFA) have used this procedure successfully on quite few anvils as well. I'm sure there is a wire similar to the Hardalloy 58 rod product I used. It is a 0.60 carbon, 1.2 Mn and 5.5 Chrome rod. It is NOT stainless nor is it extremely wear resistant. Rather it has a good combination of both wear and toughness. As-welded it should be between 45-60 HRc depending on the number of layers used and the pre-heat temp used. I used significant preheat becuase I wanted to make absolutely sure the weld depostists did not crack. I may have over-heated somewhat, but the only drawback to that is that the face may be a bit softer than it would otherwise have been, but I don't anticipate any problems. Be carefule when selectiong a hard facing rod becuase some of them are designed to crack. These would be the very wear resistant alloys whick may not have the best impact resistance anyway.

"Killing" Steel- The term originated during the early years of high volume steel production and has to do specifically with the removal of oxygen which is dissolved in liquid steel. IF nothing is done to remove this dissolved oxygen, the liquid metal will appear to boil in the ingot mold as the oxygen is forced from the solidified shell towards the still liquid center and then attempts to float out of that liquid. Today, most steel is killed because that boiling can create problems with the solidified ingot and, more importantly, becasuse dissolved oxygen will reacte with iron, creating solid iron oxide which can remain as a solid particle or inclusion in the steel and these, in sufficient quantity, can have a significant negative impact on the performance properties of the finished component. Today, killing (or deoxidizing) is accomplished by the addition of either aluminum or silicon. These elements will more readily combine with dissolved oxygen than the iron. If the iron is allowed to remain liquid for a sufficient time after the deoxidizing elements are added, the oxide particles will float to the top of the liquid metal and, if good pouring practices are used, the majority of those inclusions will be excluded from the ingot. Aluminum has the added advantage over silicon in that it can help keep grain size small during heat treatment since it will for aluminum nitride in addition to aluminum oxide. These nitrides will remain in the steelt some degree and, if there enough of them present, they will act like fence posts to prevent grains from growing during heat treatment. The nitrides are dissolved at temperatures above about 1850 F, so they have no affect on forging, but during normalizing and austenitizing, they are present. Killing has nothing to do withe the steel making method (ingot cast vs. continuous cast) nor does it have anything to do with cropping of the the solidfied ingot. It is strictly related to what happens during the liquid stage of steel making. Cropping of ingots is very important from a forge product standpoint since that is the location in the ingot most likely to have inclusion material, but that is a seperate operation from Killing. To gaurantee that you have fully killed steel, you may have to get ahold of the mill cert for the specific heat lot you intend to buy. That cert should state if the material has been killed and will what element. If not, look at the aluminum content. It should be at least 0.015% to be considered killed. Patrick

Nope, The initial bond is made in an electrick kiln with the piecies clamped between two steel plates. When I get them they are already a solid block.

For quite a while most of my forge time has been spent forging mokume billets into bars stock and I thought many of you might find the process interesting. I've posted a series of photographs (see embedded link to photobucket) showing the process of forging a 0.210" thick x 1.375" wide bar of twisted material from a staring size of 1"x2"x6". The final bar is about 36" long. The process typically takes about 8 heats and is as follows: 1. Forge initial billet to 0.700" square. 2. Forge to 0.700" octagon 3. Twist 4. Forge to final size. Steps 1&2 take a total of 3 heats, twisting takes an additional 3 heats to ensure even twists to the end of the bar and forging the twisted bar to final size typically takes 2 more heats. This bar is machined to a final size of 1.00" wide x 0.135" thick and is used by production knife companies for high end folders. My part of the process is to do the forging. Fusing of the starting components and machining is handled by my customer, who then supplies the end users. The billet shown is made from 89 layers of copper, brass and nickel silver. Typical forging temperature on this material is 1800F down to black. Besides the obvious risk of overheating, the two other main concerns are preventing delamination due to poor forging technique and making sure to achieve the full 1.375" width, which is also a function of proper forging technique. The die pictured allows me to forge a variety of widths but all to a thickness of 0.210". The hammer used is a 300# Bradley Guided helve. This is an application where the long dies of a Bradley are very well suited to multi-size production tooling. I have similar dies for forging 3/8" thick by 2.500-2.625" widths which are the starting sizes for raindrop and ladder pattern material. When forging these sizes, the starting billet is 2x2x6. One of the most interesting mokume projects that I've had a chance to work on was the forging of billets for cell phones. These were all machined from solid blocks 5/8" thick x 2" wide. I was able to attach one here. You can find additional pictures and information about the company making and selling these phones by doing a web search on the topic. http://s1126.photobucket.com/albums/l617/pnowak1/ Patrick

Michael, Some guys do turn their work after every blow, but I don't follow that habit and it is not one that is used at work except when breaking corners. I do pull my work back to the near edge of the die if I am trying to be most efficient in drawing down big stock. To skip that is really making more work for you in the long run. Patrick

Michael, If I counted right, your hammer is running around 160 blow per minute. Mine is up closer to 200 and the one time I forged a piece of 4x4x8 stock I did not have any trouble moving it. It took me one heat to rough that out into a squre taper for a square anvil horn to replace a conventional heel that had broken off and a second heat to clean up the forging. Given the really wide range of blow speed and hardness that you can get from a Bradley Guided Helve, I would suggest you consider the 200 bpm set up when you get your new motor. I do not think you will be dissapointed. Also, when forging stock like this, you don't need any more than 2" of die contact with the work piece. That is the minimum amount needed to prevent a suck in type crack from developing on the end of the billet. A die bite any bigger than this just makes the stock bulge out on the sides requiring that many more passes to get to your final size.

When I worked as an intern at the General Motors foundry that made engine blocks and ductile iron cranks, they still had a blacksmith on staff and he told me that it is possible to forge ductile iron. You will have to keep heat much lower than for steel since the high carbon content significantly lowers the melting temperature compared to mild steel.

For something as small and simple as this, it might be worthwhile to sent the job to a commercial heat treat shop. They will be able to heat the full component and quench in the proper volume of liqiud. When I was dealing with a commerical heat treater years ago, they chargeded by the pound and had a $20 minimum order. For small jobs like this, you likely won't even get to a price per pound fee but will just have to pay a flat amount. If you have a lot of time and machine work into the dies, you really should consider this option. Patrick

The dies keys on my Bradley are made from 4140 left to air cool after forging with no further heat treatment. They are big enough to take a pretty good beating, but they do mushroom and require grinding occasionally. I'm sure they would hold up better if quenched and tempered, but they are adequete for me. If they were smaller keys, then a higher hardness would be important to prevent bending other deformation during driving in and out. Patrick

In the section sizes you have, 4150 will be very nearly through hardening, assuming a sufficiently fast cooling rate. For blacksmith tools requiring good toughness, you will probably want to temper at 900 F or so. For many tools like hardy swages and bolsters you should be able to use it in the as forged or normalized condition. You could also fan cool the grade from the austentizing temperature to get a slightly harder tool than just a straight air cool. This will greatly reduce the risk of quench cracks which are common in this grade if stress risers or significant changes in cross section are present. If higher hardness is desired, such as for a hammer face, then the 400-500 F temper range as Grant suggested will be good. It has sufficient carbon that it will hold a decent, though not great edge. It is not really a grade designed for edge tools. In larger sizes, you may encounter it with a surface hardening treatment such as induction or flame hardening. It will not have the toughness or hardenability of a 4340, but that is probably not a significant concern in the sizes you are dealing with.

Hayden, Based on your more recent description, I think you will find that the weld deposit will be almost imposible to grind or machine without diamond or cubic boron nitride tools. It sounds like the original repair was made using a poor choice of materials. If you are convinced that alterations to the existing components and repairs are necessary, you will probably find it cheapest to buy new parts from Sid. I do not think it is advisable to make the arms from "armour plate" since these are a fairly highly stressed component that require toughness more than hardness. The armour plate I've heard about is designed to resist wear and impact loads in mining and heavy exacavating jobs, This is not what you need for toggle arms and more than likely the armour plate material will be more costly than a more suitable material such as a simple carbon or low alloy steel. I don't like the idea of the dies being welded in place simple because that means they can't be changed. You may be able to remove the weld metal in this area with a carbon arc gouge, If you are careful there should be minimal damage and what damage there is should be repairable with a more conventional filler material. Patrick

It is important to note that not all steels behave in the same way. The higher carbon steels (hypereutectoid, i.e. over 0.77% carbon) are prone to having much more retained austenite than the hypoetectoid grades. The highly alloyed tool steels are in class by themselves. Additionally, the section size of the part and hardenability of the steel used greatly affects the as quenched microstructure. Retained austenite will NOT automatically transform to martensite in low alloy hypereutedtoid grades. It becomes metastable. This can be good or bad depending on the application. For example, some bearings are designed to have a certain amount of retained austenite to promote toughness. Using liquid nitrogen to cool these bearings prior to fitting can force the austenite to transform to untempered martensite which will likely lead to premature bearing failure. When there is a desire to force retained austenite to transform to martensite (as in the case of blades), a sub-zero quench is used and this is followed by a temper. In the case of the low allow, hypoetectoid steels, double tempering at the same or sligtly lower temperature can sometimes help you improve toughness and ductility but it is rare to see this technique result in increased hardness and tensile strength though I'm sure it can happen is some alloys. There are certain grades which have very steep tempering curves, that is the hardness will begin to drop rapidly after a certian temperture is exceeded. This behavior is particularly pronouced in grades containing vanadium. The vanadium forms carbides (good for wear resistance and retention of hardness at higher tempertures) but once those carbides dissolve, the hardness drops quickly. When tempering these grades longer times at lower temps will often offer better control of the final outcome that shorter times at higher temps. For the low alloy steels with carbon up to about 0.50%, most of the time a single temper is sufficient to accomplish the techinical goals. Some grades do require double tempering, but a triple temper is almost never required unless one of the earlier ones was done at the wrong temperture. Patrick

On big hammers, it is pretty typical for the anvil alone to weight 15-20 times the weight of the ram so in the example sited above, at total machine weight of 1 million pounds is actually probably pretty typical. Patrick

As far as US made hammers go, I am not aware of any new production other than what is being done for the blacksmithing community. Ceco/chambursburg/Erie/Niles etc are no longer in buisness. I'm jot sure if Ajax is still in buisness and I they are I don't think they make hammers. They made mechincal presess and upsetting equipement. Let's also be clear about the distingtion between hammers and presses. There are hydraulic hammers, though I don't know how many and I've never seen one in person. Most hammers are either powered by steam or air. Presses on the other hand are quite common and that is what we have at Scot Forge and what is at Jorgensen Forge and many of the other forge shops. Open die presses can be found up to 18,000 tons in China and 16,000 in Japan. I think the largest open die press in the US is 10,000 tons. Presses used for closed die work can have much greater tonnage. Alcoa has one that is a 50,000 ton capacity and I think there are larger ones available. As far a hammers go, the biggest closed die hammer I know of in the US is 50,000 lbs. There are several of these around the contry. Open die hammers tend to be much smaller now than years ago simply because they've been replaced by presses. At Scot Forge our largest working hammers are 8000 ram weight. We do have a 10,000 lb machine that has yet to be installed. These are all old machines that have been refurbished. In industry that is what I think most shops would do. Old hammers are fairly common and you know that when you buy old US iron you get quality equipment, even if a rebuild is required. Closed die hammers are presses are so much larger becuase it takes a great deal of force to make metal fill the die. In open die work the metal is free to move on the sides not in contact with the dies

I got my metallurgical engineering degree from Ohio State. I don't know if they still offer this degree or if they have switched over to materials science with a specialty in metals. It was a good program when I went through in the late '90s. I have several coworkers who went through the University of Missouri-Rolla, which I think has been renamed. Others to consider: Colorado School of Mines New Mexico Tech Michigan Institute of Technology Illinois Institue of Technology Northwetern Carnegie Mellon I am sure there are a bunch of other good ones. Most have switched over to providing students with degrees in Materials Science rather than the strict Metallurgical Engineering degree I have, but there are still some that specialize. Ohio State is the other school I know of that offers Welding Engineering. When I was a student that was a completely seperate department from the Materials/Metallurgy group though we did share some introductory level courses. I will tell you that in the collegiate setting you are not likely to get much hands on exposure or practical application of the concepts you learn unless you pursue interships/co-ops or get involved in some of the extra curricular programs like Human Powered Vehical or others of that sort. Also, in the academic world, steel metallurgy is not considered sexy/flashy. This means that there is not as much reseach funding for steel related reseach so most of the research I saw and heard about was being done with other alloy systems. I am here to tell you that there is a vast amount we don't know about steel so if you like the iron/carbon alloy system don't be afraid to pursue that and don't feel like there won't be jobs for steel metallurgists just becasue it's not popular in academia. Basic steel metallurgy, both from the steel making and steel processing perspectives, is still the backbone of manufacturing. At Scot Forge, we have quite a few metallurgists, each with an are of specialization-steel, titanium, aluminum etc becuase of the wide range of alloys we work with. My personal preference is steels and stainless steels, but there is definitley a need for experts in all the alloy systems. Patrick

Phil/John, In our process there is plenty of clearance below the bottom bushing for the slug and snap to drop out. Our bottom to is loose and is place on the the bottom die by a modified fork truck, but you can scale the concept up or down depending on your needs. In general, when creating a hole with a snap (parrellel sides) you can figure that you slug will be roughly the length of your snap diameter. For short hubs like the one under discussion here you can probably assmume that you will remove about the same weight as if you drilled the ID after forging. If you are punch something substantially taller than the snap diameter, say running a 6" snap through a 30" tall part, you will still only lose a slug about 6" diameter by 6" long. When you use the tapered puncheds followed by a snap I know the weight lost is less, but I am not sure by how much. My rough guess would be something like 50% less waste but you'd have to determine that experimentatlly. As far as extrusion of excess metal, that can happen if you drive a snap against a solid bottom die rather than against a bushing. It can also happen during upsetting of the flange if you're not carefull, but if you pay attention, you will see that happening and correct it before it becomes a problem. I would say that most of our hub jobs are NOT done with plugs in place. We use plugs when we want to use a tool with the ID we need but which has a length longer than we need for the specific job. Patrick

Phil, In looking at your drawing more closely here is what I would recommend: 1. Forge the job to size in a ring tool with a counter bore. Upset your starting stock to create the flange. Be sure to figure and cut the weight very accurately so that you don't form a burr locking the forging into the tool. 2. Flip the job upside down and punch from the small end side with a punch about 25mm smaller than the final forged ID you want. 3. Flip the job back up with the flange side up and run a second punch through, this time of the final ID size. If you used a single snap and ran it from the flange sided first you likely would have a tendancy to drag the ID corner down and create a dish in the face of the flange. By running a smaller and then a larger tool starting from the small OD side and corner drag that does develop will be cleaned up by the second tool since the metal removed by that tool can very easily flow into the hole created by the first tool. In our shop the flat bottom, straight sided punching tools I described earlier today we call snaps and the tapered punching tools are called punches. A snap typically has its major diameter for length of 2 to 3 inches and the remainder is turned down to a minor diameter about 1" less than the major. For a 6" snap the minimum length in our shop is probably about 6-8 inches. Max length is probably about 10". You really have to be careful that these tools don't get too tall or they can bend or shift and fly out from under the press or hammer. Unless you are trying to concerve weight, I'd use two straight sided snaps. When we are close on weight we will run a tapered punch in from both sides of the work creating a blind hole in each side with only a thin bit of metal between the two holes. A snap slightly larger than the big end of the hole is the use to create a straight sided through hole. This method removes less metal than the normal single snap method, but does take longer. We make the snaps and bottom bolsters from 4340 or 4330 heat treated to about 363 Brinell. When working with nickel alloys like inconells the tooling should be made from properly heat treated H13. The bolster or bottom die should have a hole no larger than 1/8" (3mm) in diameter than the snap that will pass through it. If you can't or don't want to make a bolster, you can drive the snap through the work against the bottom die like you would if punching on an anvil and then flip the stock and run the snap back through. This will work but it will be harder to make a clean job of it. We do not lubricate our tools for this type of work. I hope this helps.