scurry57

It looks like your bases are coming along nice dillon! The base of your hammer is really important. Ive seen some of our bases fail and the hammer will actually start swaying upto a foot at the top, Then its all downhill from there. Right now we have 9 operational hammers ranging from 1,500lbs to 25,000lbs. all of them are erie steams except for our 20,000 its a chambersburg. the two hammers in those video are a 25,000 and the pedal hammer is a 10,000lb. All of our hammers are closed die machines, and our shop is in central IL.

our hammers use both treadles and straight levers. how the linkage is ran is pretty complex they use a wiper arm the rides on the ram for timing. depending on when and how hard you press the pedal gives you great control over the hammer if your an experinced operator. you can kinda see the setup from these videos

[media=]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4VTDiNC95M

Wow! that thing is insane. We use something very similar to that at work to drive our keys to our dies at work which weigh about 100lbs. this thing would come in handy for when we get the keys stuck good and tight!

Hey Scurry57

All the hammers in your shop closed die hammers? or do you guys use open die too. What sort of steam plant are you guys using to provide steam for all those hammers. Looks like a fun place to work on a hot day, I noticed all the big man fans in the background.
Love the little charging manipulator too.

Yep, all the work we do in the hammer shop is strictly closed die forging. as far as steam we have 2 boilers, they push around 20,000 lb/hr of steam and we only run one at a time. The man fans are nice but with all the hot weather lately its miserable, I wear thermal underwear under my uniform and with the fans its like standing in front of a blow dryer. The temp in our shop is usually 130+ with hot weather like this.

Danger, my position out there is heater/trimmer and Ive never done any blacksmithing outside of work yet. Its something that interests me and I am looking to start doing some stuff soon!.

That noise from the hammer was a blown gasket on the steam pressure line, nothing too serious just annoying! The best part is when the main steam line blows, thats when you turn and run, or get on your knees and crawl to feel your way outta the shop.

yep those last couple of hits on the big hammers chatter your teeth. You cant really tell in the video but you can really feel when the dies start pingin' off each other. As far as the hammer with problems, one of the packing rings around the rod blew out and some of the material made it into the throttle cutout inside the hammer making it start moving and hitting on its own. talk about scary right there. Them hammers aren't forgiving at all, if you get bit by one it usually isn't good.

Im located in Champaign Illinois and the company is clifford-jacobs forging. Heres the links to a few of them, the first few the video format is jacked up on them. Just watch them in fullscreen HD and itll be fine. the rest of them are on my youtube account, Im too lazy to post all the links!!

My link1
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Hey guys....New member here just joined. Im a union boilermaker and I work in a forge shop that runs all steam hammers. Our smallest hammer is 2,000# pedal hammer and our largest hammer is a 25,000# lever erie steam hammer. Im sure there are larger hammers than ours out there but there is nothing like working next to one of these big hammers! I have several videos and pictures of a few of our units in action if your guys are interested?