patrick

I have not seen the one Sid sells, but from descriptions I've read it is more of a rebuilding video. I own the two by Dave Manzer and I like them both quite a bit. The first is focused primiarly on proper adjustment and tuning and he uses high speed photography to show you how tension on the arms of the hammer affect performance. His second video is about tooling for the hammers. Both are excellent and in my opinion well worth the money for anyone running LG style machines. Patrick

Another way to make a replacement anvil is to contact a large forge shop and see if they will rough forge a block or round from a piece of scrap for a reduced price. I think there are one or two open die forge shops on the west coast. You could also contact a company like EMJ or Castle Metals and see if they have some drops or shorts of large rounds that they would sell at a reduced rate. I know they deal in rounds up to 30" since we have forged product of that size for them. I don't know how short a peice has to be before the scrap it, but even if it is a foot you could ask for a couple of pieces. Or offer to buy a random length between X and Y and then cut to your needs later. An anvil doesn't need to be anything fancy-1018/A-36 etc will do, though if they have some other alloy that they are looking to get rid of, that could work for you too. Patrick

I have 2" square in the shop and I have access to more at work. The sizes I can get are fairly large but I can forge down to what ever size you want, provided you don't need bar stock of very long length. You can contact me directly with what you need at: pnowak@scotforge.com Patrick

Greg, I hope you made it to the UMBA event this weekend. I believe we talked about it Friday afternoon, but I don't recall meeting you there. I am not sure who has shops in the Madison area, but down in the Beloit area there are several guys with shops. If you made it to the event this weekend, then you know how to get to Jim Ribordy's place. He typically has an open forge night in his shop on Thursday nights. If you don't mind driving a couple of hours, Dave and Babe Brandon host a get togther once a month at their place near Rock Falls Ill. You can get addresses for both shops off of the umbaonline website. Feel free to contact me directly via email for more info. Patrick Nowak

As far as large Bradley's are concerned, I only know of less than half a dozen of the 300 lbs and 2 of the 500 lbs. currently beeing used by blacksmiths. I'm sure there are others out there, and some are probably still to be found in facatory enviroments but what I've seen of Bradleys coming out of industrial enviroments are the medium sized units up to 200lbs. I know of a few smiths in CA runnng Bradleys, but most seem to have originated from manufacturing sites on the eastern half of the US. That being said, if you want a reliable, simple, industrial quality machine then it is worth shipping. When I bought mine, it was in Oklahoma city and I was in eastern Ohio. Prior to that my hammer had been with a smith in Virginia and before that it had been down south somewhere. While shipping isn't cheap, it doesn't have to be outrageous either, especially if the buyer and seller both have a means to load/unload. Besides the two hammers Stewart noted, there are also some in the Akron Ohio area listed by WelderJim. He does have a means to load on his on a commercial carrier. Good luck with your search. They are great machines. Patrick

I too would take flat dies over any other type for general forge work. Here's why: 1. They give you the most flexibility in terms of auxillary tooling, which you learned in the class you attended. 2. With a flat die you should be able to work either parrallel to or transverse to the long axis of the die. This feature is good when you want to get a very wide die bite or angled die bite for spreading rather than drawing. 3. As has already been noted, combo dies usually have the transition in the middle of the die and therefore you can't use the center of the die. 4. On hammers without subtantial guides, the off center loading is hard on the rest of the hammer. If you are planning to do only a narrow range of work which consists primarily of drawing out, then combo dies could be a good choice for you. However, flat dies will draw very quickly once you learn how to use them effectively. My work consists primarily of forging 2x2x6 inch blocks of mokume to other sizes specified by my customer and I do all the work on flat dies. I have made large dies with multiple slots and grooves to allow me to forge the width and thickness in the same set up without having to use hand held stop blocks. Dimensional control is critical in this work since the cost of material is high. With this setup I can typically hold to +0.010" on thickness and a bit more than that on the width. Undertanding how metal moves and how to contol that movement allows you to use the tools best suited to the job you want to accomplish. This takes practice, but is also faciliated by studying with other smiths, especially those who have an industrial background. In another thread someone was mentioning the work done at Scot Forge. I am one of the metallurgists at Scot and I can tell you that ALL our presses and hammers are set up with flat dies which we use for both drawing and spreading, upsetting, punching etc. The only other shape of die we use is a V die for working hollows. Everything else can be done on flat dies. To answer the question regarding die radius and how much should be on the die: That depends on the size of the hammer. I would suggest that the radius should be (at a minimum) large enough so that the penetration of a single blow into the typical work piece will not leave any vertical surface that could lap when then next blow is applied on top of that. The radii on my dies are all just hand ground by eye but if I had to guess I'd say they are about 3/16-1/4". Patrick

Well, I finally tried this with my Bradley Guided Helve last night and obtained the following restuls: Starting size: 1.008" After 5 blows: 0.408" After 10 blows: 0.259" The hammer is a 300 lb model but has a ram + die weight of 460#. I had the stroke length set at its maximum limit and at rest there was 2" of space between the dies with the ram at the bottom of the stroke. The hammer is set up to run at about 200 blows per minute at maximum treadle depression. I tried twice to get the hammer up to full speed before putting the stock between the dies, but I could not accurately positon the stock to get exactly 2" on the die, so I just positioned the stock and then started the hammer. This means that the first and possibly second blow delivered to the work piece were not as forcefull as later blows. The stock was heated in a gas forge with I had cranked up for several hours prior to the test to both warm up the shop and hammer and to ensure the forge itself was at maximum operating temp. This forge is fairly large with brick floor so it does take a while to reach a uniform temperture. Judging purely by eye I would say that the temp was well in excess of 2300F.

My anvil, a 400 lb Peter Wright, had been severely abused at some point in the past. It had torch gouges about every 1" or so down both side of the face and about 3" of the horn had been cut off. The guy who had the anvil before me repaired all this damage with standard, i.e. non-hard facing, mig wire. You'd never know it on the horn. You can see some of the repairs in the face and they are a little soft, but it has never been a problem for me. The anvil repair work I have done was with a 180 amp stick welder and that worked just fine. I would strongly recommend preheating the anvil regardless of the welding methods and materials you plan to use since the high carbon content in the face will cause the heat affected zone to have untempered (brittle) martensite in it that can result in cracks adjacent to your welds. These can occur either on cooling from welding or during use. Patrick

A few points: From an historical perspective, very large anvils were used to do very large work. See the chain making and "Welding the Big Ring" videos on youtube or check out pictures of the old steel mill blacksmith shop in Johnstown PA. Also note that large anvils were used in shipyards. From a modern point of view, the best example I have seen of ornamental work done by strikers was the dragon sculputre display at this years ABANA convention. The dragon heads were forged from 2 or 3 in square bar using strikers during a public demo in Texas. The smiths that did the work had to bring all their own equipment so I don't think the anvils they were using were more that a few hundred pounds. However, the heads were pretty intricate and I personally would find it difficult to forge them under a power hammer. I'm sure they could have been roughed , but a lot of the details were created in such a way that a striker was probably the best method. From an efficiency standpoint there is a definite point of diminishing returns. Chambursburg figured this out for steam hammers and they came up with a 20:1 ratio for the weight of the anvil compared to the weight of the hammer. I don't think the same number applies to hand forging because of a number of variables such as anvil hardness, blow energy and how well the anvil is achored. From a personal standpoint I find that I, like many others, am attracted to large anvils, but that the attraction dimishishes if the anvil becomes so large that it is a characature of historical pieces. That is to say I would love to have the largest anvil I could that was actually produced for real work and not for show. The biggest I've personally seen were in the 700-800 lb range and I've seen advertisements for some larger, upwards of 1000 lbs. I've also seen an anvil that was cast as more of a show piece than anything else which weighed 2000# or so and I found that one to be less desirable to me since it lacked any historical reference that I know of. Having a tie to history is important to me. Patrick

I would strongly advise against using either the A or D series tool steels for hammer dies because they lack the toughness of grades like 4140, 4340, S7 or H13. As Stewart noted, 4140 makes very good dies and is very economical. 4340 is the material of choice for the open die hammers we have at work and in our case the hardness is kept in the upper 40's HRc. For smaller hammers a harder die can be used, but you need to be careful not to make any die too hard since you don't want it to spall or crack. I have friends with a 4B that split one of the dies during use. No one was hurt, but that is a very dangerous situation. Patrick

The anvil to hammer ratio numbers come from a graph that Chambursburg published for steam hammers in which the anvil was completly independant of the frame of the hammer. The physics behind this is the idea that a moving object striking a stationary object tends to cause the stationary object to move. In forging, you don't want that to happen since energy that makes the anvil move is not being absorbed by the workpiece. Therefore, by increasing the size of the anvil, more energy goes into moving the work piece and less into moving the anvil. The graph Chambursburg develped showed that there was not much additional gain to be had by using and anvil with a weight ratio greater than about 20 times that of the ram. I am sure there were several assumptions made when that graph was developed, such as that the force to propel the ram was the same regardless of ram weight. A better way to present these numbers would be blow engery vs anvil weight (or mass). For example, the blow engery of a 300 lb mechanical is probably NOT the same as the blow energy of a 300 lb air hammer which is probalby not the same as the blow energy of a 300 lb steam hammer. Therefore, the numbers provided by Chambursbur are really only 100% accurate for the set of assumptions made when they developed the chart. The principles are the same regardless of hammer style, but the exact ratio at which you begin to see no additional benifit from increase anvil weight may NOT be 15:1. Patrick

An intersting observation about auction prices: I was at an auction of a blacksmith shop last week. There were over 200 peope there and quite a few had known this man, who died unexpectedly at a fairly young age. Among many other tools was a 350 Hay-Budden which he had done a beautiful job reparing. This anvil sold for $1800. As a tool, it probably was worth about 1/2 that or even less, depending on location. However, the high price was driven by the sentamental attachment a couple people had to that item. The winning bidder was a lady buying on behalf of her husband who had learned forge work from the deceased. He fully intends to continue using the anvil. Now, there were probably a lot of folks at that auction who have no idea what the "tool" value of an anvil should be or is and it wouldn't surprise me if the results of this one sale give them an inflated idea of the value of anvils they may have. There is no way to put a price on the sentimental value of an item, and the buyer of that anvil was thrilled to be the winning bidder but the price paid did not reflect the value of the item as a tool. Patrick

Welded Tongs: I have seen huge industrial tongs with welds at critial stress points. Industrial forging is hard on all the equipment involved. We don't use tongs to hold work any more; it is all done with mobile manipulators, but even those machines (capable of picking up 50,000 lbs) still break and wear out. Forging is a tough buisness and requires constant maintainence (including welding) on the tools. I have used and will continue to use tongs with welds under my own hammer. The trick is keeping the work parrellel with the dies. If you are out of square so bad that the tongs could break you are also very likely to get hurt from the hammer driving the tongs down into your hands. When I make my own tongs I forge complete from one piece of steel, but that is becasue I like to make the tongs with reins that taper over their entire length. When I buy used tongs I check them over carefully for bad or failing welds. I find that most old, forge welded tongs are made of wrought iron and are very clunky, so I tend to pass those on to other people because they are not comfortable for me to use. But I'd have no qualms about repairing them if I thought they'd be useful to me. Keep in mind that Lilico's book is geared towards industrial smiths. Even tools for hand work were used much harder than most of us will ever use our tools. Take a look at some of the footage online from the turn of the last centery and watch closely how the hand tools are being used. Flatters, hot cuts, fullers etc were a consumable item. You had blacksmiths in those shops who made the hand tools for the guys doing heavy forging on industrial products. So if those guys didn't have a small steam hammer or it was tied up doing heavy work then hand forging was the way to go and welding on a jaw forged from large stock to reins made of ligher material was the most efficient way to keep the rest of the shop going. When you have access to hammer, then you can make a single piece tong with tapered reins fairly quickly. This gives a set of tongs that is comfortable and well balanced, but hand forging the same item is just not efficient. By the way, we do use a lot of what Lillico shows in out forgings at work. It is an eccellent reference for anyone, even hand forgers, becuase it helps you think of what you can do with metal beyond just bending a scroll or tapering a picket. Patrick

Michael, So would I. This was appently going to the W.F. Stumpf company, or someone associated with it. The company has since gone out of buisness, but they specialized in the resale of used industrial forging equipment. I have asked a few people, but know I've talked to knows anything about it. I am pretty sure is it was not at the liquidation auction. It is also possible that the information my coworker has was incorrect and that the hammer was resold to another industrial user. There is a prety active ABANA chapter in northwest ohio so I would think that if the hammer were in fact being operated in a hobby/ornamental capacity someone there would know about it. Patrick

I have a 300 lb guided helve and a 15 lb strap hammer. I know of at least two more 300 lb guided helves, one in Illinois and one that was in Ohio but I think may now be in West Virginia. Jim Hollo (welder jim) has several in the Akron Ohio area and has posted some of those for sale. There are still a lot of these hammers used in industry and your small time hobby or ornamental blacksmith would never know they were out there. I know that when I moved out here to Wisconsin, one of my coworkers told me he used to work on a 500 just like Michaels when he was working at a drop forge shop in Rockford, IL. That hammer was subsequently sold to a machine tool dealer in Ohio, but supposedly was going into the owners private collection. I suspect that there are still 500 lb Bradley out there in industry. As Michael noted, the prior owner of his hammer was using the hammer for and industrial/production job (pointing jackhammers) not for ornamental forging. Bradleys really wore designed and marketed as manufacturing tools and they were built extra heavy for continuous duty work. They were also a lot more expensive than many of the other hammers available at the time so they tended to be purchased by factories rather than local communty blacksmith shops. Patrick

My hammer is very similar to Danger Dillion's. The tag on mine say "300" but the ram weighs in a 460#. I'm not sure if it came from the factory that way or if a previous owner put a heavy ram in it, but I have run into another 300 with a heavy ram like mine. I have forged 4" square on one occasion to make a replacemt heel for a 180# anvil. I decided to make the replacement a square taper rather than the typical london patter. Job was done in two heats and most of the last heat was refining and tweaking. I have on several occassions upset 3" round by 6" long sections of 4340 to make special dye blanks. I typically run my hammer with the longest stroke as that gives me the most flexibility of workpiece size range, but if I need to get additinal space between the dies for an upsetting or tooling job I can shorten the stroke and gain several inches. Lately, I've been making custom dies for my hammer to allow me to forge specific sizes of flat bar, usually 0.210" or 0.375" thick. I am forging to within about 0.010" tolerance on these jobs. This is small scale production of mokume for a regular customer with some pretty common sizes so it makes sense to create tooling for his work. The first die I made will for 0.210" thickness in a range of sizes from 1.0" to 1.5" by 1/8" increments. I sure nice to have all of those sizes in one tool. I am working on a new die for th same thinknes but widths in the 2.5-3.0" range. Bradley's really are a manufacturer's tool and you see that when you get into repetitive work like the mokume I've been doing or the spidles the D. Dillon has recently described. In industry, Bradley's often had custom dies for swaging, drawing, edging, pointing etc. Based on what I've seen of a few buisnesses that ran Bradleys and closed in the last few years, flat dies were actually the exception and form or shape dies the standard. Patrick

I have no idea if the comments regarding UAW involvement at the village are correct or not. However I do know from personal experience that the auto manufactures did have blacksmiths on staff fairly recently. When I interened with GM in defiance Ohio in 2000, they still had a blacksmith in the maintainace department. He had a 50 lb little giant made in 1976 with the OSHA gaurd provided by LG in place. His name was Jim Auer and he was president of the Northern Ohio Blacksmiths group for a time. I saw him once or twice after my intership was done, but I found out that he died in 2003. He told me that once he retired, GM was not going to fill the blacksmith position in that shop again. So it makes sense to me that the UAW could have taken an interest in the wages of the blacksith at the village. Patrick

That hammer is being sold by Bob Bergman of the Postville Blacksmith shop. It is about an hour from Beloit, WI. I know Bob and I'm sure he knows exactly what he has and its value as Bob has been in the trade for 30+ years. As many on this site already know, Bob is THE MAN for Nazel info. I suspect the price he's asking reflects the condition of the hammer. Patrick

Two other sources for Bradley rubber parts: Bob Bergman of the Postville Blacksmith shop in Blanchardville WI and Nathan Robertson of Jackpine Forge-Nathan has told me he knows a shop that casts the contact wells for belt grinders and that they can do Bradley components if given the dimensions. I don't have the name of the shop he was refering too. Danger D.-Can you send me the head rubber drawings via email so I can add them to my collection of Bradley Documents? Also, did you get any other literature with your hammer you could share? I am trying to collect all that can on these hammers since I get asked about them fairly often. Thanks. Patrick

17-4 and 15-5 are both Martensitic Precipitation hardening stainlesses. The chemistries are very close. In our shop, we usually see 15-5 as a remelted ingot, which typically gives higher cleanness than a single melt material since secondary melting is either done under vacuum or via a process called Electroslag Remelting. In any event, both grades are handled nearly identically from a forge and heat treat point of view. Upper forging temperature will be around 2200 F. Air cool. Solution anneal as soon as possible after the pieces cools to 90F. The grade does develop martensite upon cooling and if not either tempered or taken directly to a solution annealing step, the pieces have a high risk of cracking. To solution anneal, heat to 1900-1950. Fan cool. For larger sections, say 6" and over, a short quench of around 30 second per inch can be used. Cool to 90 F and load back into a furnace for aging. Typically aging temps are between 900 and 1150 F. There are expected hardness and strength values that go with each temperature. Note that with this grade the thermal cycle following the quench is referred to as AGING, not tempering. In the case of tempering, you are taking an as-quenched part and making it SOFTER. With aging, the opposite occurs. You end up with a HARDER part. I would not suggest working with this steel unless you are able to either do all the heat treat yourself or at least get the part tempered after forging to prevent cracking before shipping it to a shop specializing in heat treating. Patrick Nowak

Monstermetal- I am having trouble seeing the pictures you referenced. Can you point me to them please? Thanks. Patrick

Firefarm, Probably the way these were used would be to preform a round our flat bar on the right hand side, then go to the left hand side to create the hinge. Moving from left to right the jaw would be sized. Depending on the starting stock used, the tong reigns could have been drawn out on the right had side where the dies make contact. I have some flat jaw tongs that look like they could have been made with dies like these. These would be particularly good for forging tong blanks that could later be worked into more complex jaw designs. What size Bradley did these dies go in? I have a 300 lb machine with a few extra dies, but mine are either set up to take inserts (which I don't have) or run chisels/ breaker points. If you need literature on the hammer, I may be able to help with that. Feel free to send me an email: pnowak@scotforge.com

Michael, Unless the beam in in really bad shape, just use it. The beam in my hammer is a used beam from the 1926 hammer I mentioned in an earlier post. When Steve Parker started at Clifford Jacobs on that hammer, he made them get a new beam, but they kept the old one and a spare. When I got my hammer, Clifford Jacobs had already sold their Bradley to Mark and Mindy Gardner, but for some reason had kept the beam that Steve took out and a spare so I ended up with both. Those two are both cut from a single block of what I think is maple. When I got my spare ram, I also got another beam which is laminated maple. If you are going to make a beam, I'd do it by laminating 5 or 6 layers of maple with the laminations running vertically. I don't think the one I have has bolts holding it together, just glue and maybe some wooden dowls, but I'd hesitate to drill any cross holes in a beam like this. If you're afraid the laminations will come apart, make some steel clamps. Patrick

Michael, I forgot to comment on your question about making new dies to allow you to work from the front of the hammer. There should be no problem with this approach, but you will be limited by the spacing between the guides, i.e. the to die can't be any longer than the distance between the guides. That is still a pretty good distance on this hammer, but you could actully make a longer die if you kept the orientation as it is. This is how Bradleys were designed to be used and they had such big guides because the expected users to make up specilty dies in which there were a lot of off-center blows. Typical applications would be the forging of breaker bits. A dedicated die for this type of product might have 3 different components-A taper, and edger and a trimmer. To get all of that in one die, you had to orient the dies in line with the length of the hammer. In your case, where I presume flat dies are the primary tool, this may not be as important, but a big flat die does provide a lot of options. If you do choose to change the orientation of the dies, I'd suggest machining the new ones so that the dovetail is slightly short. This will let the top of the sow block support the majority of the die area. Patrick

Michael, I know of another "300#" Bradley like mine that has a 460# ram. I have a spare ram for my hammer that weighs 325#, so either my hammer has the ram used on the 500# machine, or there was an option to buy "heavy duty" hammer or the company changed the design over time. The hammer I have was built in 1944, the other one I referred to was a 1926 machine. I'll send you a PM shortly with my mailing address. Grant- The hammers we're talking about are the Guided Helve type. Patrick