patrick

If you're belt is slipping too much, belt dressing can be used to improve things. Normally, you don't want a hammer cluthch to be too grabby because that can make it difficult to control. On the other hand, sometimes you don't get all the speed or power out of the hammer becasue the belt is just a tiny bit too loose. This is when belt dressing can be helpful. The best belt dressing I've used, both for splip belt clutches and regular flat belt (and even V-belt) drives is plain old honey.

You're right. The force necessary to upset the mass needed to create a swage is subtantially more the the force applied to the tool in use. Unless you have al arge anvil wth a thick heel, it is safer to perform this type of upsetting in a seperate block designed for that type of work. Such a block could be fabricated and then set over the middle of the anvil rather than the heel and it would work fine.

The really important thing is not whether you use tongs or a bar. The important thing is to hold the work so it doesn't escape when you're forging it. I use both methods, though most of the time I am set up to use tongs. What I will do is weld a short bar to larger stock to serve as a tong hold. For example, Sunday afternoon I forged a 4x4x8 block into a sqaure taper for a square horn to replace the heel of an anvil that broke off. I welded a piece of 1" round to the end of the block since I don't have tongs for 4" square. It worked beautifully. Patrick

John, I am located in Beloit WI and just this summer bought 4 tons of steel in a variety of sizes. Most of it is 1018 and a lot of it is pretty large if you don't have a power hammer, but I do have a quantity of 3/4 round. I also have 4140 in 1 11/16" round that would be a good size for hammer/ handled tools and anvil tools. You can contact me through this site or feel free to send me an email directly: [email protected]. I am planning to be at the Centau event on Nov 14 and the week after that, Nov 21 I am hosting a tong making workshop at my place. Hope to see you there. Patrick

In industry there are still some steam hammer run on steam. Up until about 2 years ago we had 6 ranging in size from 4000-8000 lbs rams running off of a couple of very large boilers. These have since been converted to running off of compressed air because it is more cost effective to do so. Patrick

Sulfur certainly will make steel hot short as will and excess of copper or lead. Sulfer and lead are both sometimes added to improve machinability, though lead is not as widely used any more for environmental reasons. Steel with several % of surlfer, such as 1117 or 1144 is still quite forgable though. I had a somewhat similar condition occur recently when forging H13. In my case, I had previoiusly overheated and melted some copper in the forge. The H13 was sitting in the pool of liquid copper and I think that some of that copper wicked up along grainboundries on the surface of the H13. This weakend the grain boundaries and allowed tearing to occur. As far has having a chunck of Aluminum or a bearing in a bar and that causing problems-this is very, very unlikely due to the way steel is produced. Aluminum has such a low melting point that if it were in the scrap metal, it would melt and be absorbed into the liquid steel like any other element. The same thing would happend to a bearing. Even if the bearing didn't melt, the original heat treatment would be completely undone. This is not to say you can't have hard spots in steel, because you certainly can. But they are much more likely to be the result of non-uniform cooling at the mill than to imcoplete melting and homoginization of the the raw materials. Patrick

Grant/Ironstein, I would agree that most of the time high speed steel is not a great choice for hot work tooling, but remember that I qualified my recommendation with a specific hardness -50 HRc. Even 4340 will get that hard and that is a typical hardness for anvil faces, hammers and hammer dies. In the tool I made, I intentially tempered to a hardness SOFTER than it would normally be used at since I wanted to pound on it. I also radiused the striking end. The reason I suggested this grade over H13 is that in some cases, such as the long, fairly narrow hole described earlier, H13 will get hot enough to bend in the work. Certainly bending is preferable to catastrophic, uncontrolled failure, but in the right applications I think that high alloy steels could safely be used. When you suggested press forging I envisioned a process in with the punch is pushed in mechanially or hydrallically. In such an arrangment, the dimensions of the dies would be set to prevent bottoming out a tool and you wouldn't have the impact loading associated with hammer forging. As you know, service failures are not all material related, but can also be related to tooling design, including hardness. Patrick

Vascowear was made by Teledyne Vasco, but I believe they are no longer in buisness. I think a similar product is avialable from Carpenter Steel. If you do a google search for Vascowear you should find it. You probably could also use any of the commonly available high speed steels such as M2 or M42. Just make sure you get your tooling properly heat treated. I was aiming for a hardness of 50 HRC with my punch. This gives a good balance of hardness and resistance to deformation at high temps. Depeding on your needs you could temper higher for increased temperature reisitance. Make sure you DON'T heat treat too hard. The normal hardness range for these grades is pushing or exceeding 60 HRc and that is just too hard and brittle for forge tooling. Patrick

Forgemaster, For the work you are doing, you may want to look at using a steel like Vascowear or similar. This is a much more highly alloyed steel than H13, almost on par with a high speed steel. Normally you wouldn't use these grades for this type of work, but if you have the means to do a proper heat treatment and you design the tool to resist spalling, it will hold up even better than H13. I made a slot punch from this grade last year and punched through 2 blocks of 2.5" square wrought iron with it. The end turned red, but the square edge never rolled over. It was a great tool for that application. Unlike H13, this grade is NOT good for cold impact tooling. Patrick

By the way, there is an account in "Pounding Out the Profits" of a 300 lb Bradely guided helvle hammer being used to forge one thousand of these bars from 1.5" square in one day. Patrick

We have these at work, also for rollling steel. The most recent batch we got was forged in India. The work fine, but they do get bent up occasionally. I have made simialary bars, but when I do it, I forge the foot and bend it to get mor leverage in use. The biggest one I made was forged from 1.625" round 1060. It is big and heavy, but it works great when you need a big lever. Patrick

I have forged quite a bit of H13 and I like it a lot for detail tooling, some power hammer tooling and hardy cut off tools. It is harder to move under the hammer than spring still and has a somewhat narrower working range, but it is not prone to crubling like the highly alloyed tool steels. Work it at a yellow heat. Stop hitting when it won't move any more. If you are starting with annealed stock, which you should be if you are buying it new, heat only the end that will be the working end. Forge to shape and air cool. DO NOT HEAT the striking end. If you do, it will be very hard and prone to chipping which is quite dangerous. If you have only a short piece of steel or do heat the end, you can make a mild carbon steel sleeve and press fit or weld it over the striking end to provide a soft striking surface. H13 can be welded, but needs to be preheated. When I've done it, I heat almost to a red heat, weld and slow cool. Ideally this would be followed by a high temperature tempering cycle. H13 is a great tooling material, but you can make great tools from spring stock too. You just have to cool those tools more frequently than the H13. Patrick

James, You may want to consder putting the hammer on a timber pad to help with shock loading. My Bradley is on 10.5" of hardwood timber with 5 feet of concrete under it and, while it still shakes a little, it's not bad. You probably wounldn't need as much concrete or timber for your hammer since mine is a two piece machine with a larger ram, but the pinciples are the same. Patrick

Update to my earlier comment disagreeing with Grant on differneces in temp accross large cross sections: I was just shown data this morinng froma 10" square that agreed with Grant's statements. The differneces on heating were not greater than about 40-50 degrees F. I still think that that differences will be more pronounced in larger sections. Patrick

The defect shown, as Grant noted is forge pipe. In this case, it is almost certainly caused by the rounding up process. If the corners of the square/octagon are not perfectly in line under the dies, a shearing action is created at the center of the bar and, depending on the grade and type, this will result in the centers being torn apart. This can be minimized by forging corners at a high heat and then rounding up in a V spring swage. Grant, I must disagree with the idea that the surface and center of a bar will not have significant variation in temperature. This may be true on a relatively small size like 3", but it is abosultly NOT true for large scale forgings. A surface temperature of 2300 F, does not mean you have a core temp any where close to that. It is common practice to allow large billet and ingot to soak at 2300 F for 10-30 minutes per inch to insure uniformity of temperature. This has been verified experimentally and can be shown mathematically by looking at the thermal conductivity of a given material. If steel is not heated evenly, you can get both bending and piping conditions. I have seen both, but I am talking about large scale stuff. On the small scale I'm sure you are correct.

Grant, I haven't seen Clifton since last September at Quad State, but at the time he was doing pretty well. He's as talkative as ever, but he's not forging too much any more. I still like talking with him though because you can learn so much. He called me one time to talk about a couple of articles I'd written. He talked and I took notes and I was happy to do it too. Patrick

Hey Grant. I knew it was you all along since you've used the nakedanvil moniker for such long time. I am still looking forward to you coming out here for a visit. Patrick

Will, I am the same Patrick that was selling the Moloch last year. My Bradley is of the upright guided variety, that is to say it is a helve hammer, but it is configured such that the ram is guided and therefor the dies are always parrellel. If you look through the old photos on forgemagic.com in the "Patrick Nowak" folders you can find picutures of the hammer and it components. Patrick

Will, Another person you might want to contact is Jim Fectaeu. He can be reached through the forgemagic.com forum. He broke the spring arm on his Beaudry last year and with the help of Steve Parker and Ralph Sproul was able to get new ones forged and machined. You might want add their notes on the process to your literature in case you run into the same problem. By the way, Bob Bergman should be able to give you any help you might need with rebuilding this hammer. He just did some machining for me on my 300 lb Bradley. How far are you from Beloit, WI? That is where I'm at. Patrick

I was in a Dana axle factory some years ago. Their process for making axles started with induction heating and upsetting to create the flange. Next the shaft portion was cold stretched to increase length and decrease diameter. It was interesting to see. I am not certain why they used this process, but I think it may have had to do with the volume of steel needed to create the flange vs. the OD needed in the finished shaft. I suspect that the finished shaft diameter would have been to small to allow for an upset of sufficient length to create the flange. (3:1 aspect ratio would have been exceeded). Charlotte- The tube mill you were in didn't happen to be one of the Timken facilities? I worked for Timken for a couple of years on the bearing side and had a chance to tour their piercing mill in Canton OH. It was just as you described. Patrick

At this very instant I have my Bradley jacked up 11" off the floor. I am resetting the hammer at this height which is a good 7" higher than the original installation to overcome the issues of bending that Grant mentioned. After 4 years of service on a hardwood timber pad 3.5" thick, the anvil had worked down into the wood about a 1/4". When I reset the hammer I will be using white oak timber that are salvaged from under some of our big steam hammers at work. Depending on how flat everything is, I may need to shim some areas and I do have some convor belting for this. I will be using epoxy to anchor threaded rod in the foundation. This method was recommended by one of the engineers here at work. I had the done the original installation this way and it worked pretty well. Just make sure you have a deep enough hole and that it is very clean before you fill it with epoxy. All the epoxies I have seen recommend cleaning the hole several times with a wire brush followed by a stiff blast of compressed air. Patrick

I do not own an air hammer, but have run both Big Blue and Ironkiss machines. I own and regulary use a 300lb Bradley mechanical. A hammer of this size is not a good comparison to any of the smaller air hammers. That being the case, I still have an opinion and experience I'd like to contribute to this discussion. I had the good fortune to take a power hammer class at the Big Blue Power Hammer school and would highly recomend that for any owner or potential owner of a power hammer. One of my classmates was John Larson, the builder of the Ironkiss machines. During the class, John recommended that the valving and hose sizes be increased on the hammers to change their performance. This was done with one hammer, and it did make a difference in how hard the hammer hit. Since John does custom build his machines it is easier for him to experiment and change from one machine to the next than it is for a higher volume shop. The owner of Big Blue stopped by one evening during the class and in conversation said that his hammers are not designed to take the place of or compete with a large industrial style machine like a Chambursburg or Nazel. They are desigened to handle smaller work, which they do very well. John's machines are based on the industrial equipment and are therefore a heavier machine. They are also designed for a different style of forging. The flat die forging techniques taught by Clifton Ralph and Steve Parker are adapted from large scale forging. These techniques really require wide dies and a substantial stroke length to be most effective. It also requires quite a bit of power in many cases since the tools must be forced to move through the steel or steel must be forced through narrow gaps in the tools. I see Big Blue hammers used most often for drawing and "Free Form" forging and they do an excellent job with this type of work. The narrow dies allow for rapid displacement of metal and since the metal is not constrained by tools, less power is needed to create the finished form. However, the narrow dies are not conducive to working with tools. When comparing these two hammers, keep in mind that the Ironkiss is designed as a flat die utility hammer and is built to work well with lots of different tooling configurations. The Big Blue is marketed heavily for "Free Form" forging which is completly different and therefore has different requirements in machine design and construction. Both hammers are good tools. The question really comes down to what you as a user want to do. Having used both tools, and given MY style of forging, I would choose an Ironkiss if money was no object. Keep in mind that if this is your first hammer, you may not have your own style yet so without a doubt your work will adapt to the capabilities of the hammer. I would highly recommend that you contact both companies and have them give you the specifics for their machines. They are friendly competitors and would probably willingly offer you their opinion of their competition. Patrick

There are a wide variety of steels that will work well for dies. Some of the more common grades are: 4140, 4330, 4340, S7, H13. Hardness on hammer dies should be around Rc50, about the sames as a good hammer or anvil. Patrick

I have them all. Get them all. They are only $5 each. If you have to be selective, get the one with Clifton Ralph, Steve Parker and a third guy whose name escapes me. It was filmed in Indiana in 2007 or 2008. I'd also plug the one with Pat Nowak (me) from November of 2007? The audio is good and there is a lot of blackboard drawing/explanation to explain why certain things are done the way they are. The Clifton DVDs are great, but it helps to have a bit of power hammer background already when you watch those since some things are shown but not always explained. If you are willing to spend a bit more, contact Clifton directly and you can get a 10 hour series he did in 1990 on power hammer work. That one is just him and another man runnng the camera. Excellent information that is very well explained. Patrick

I second the recommendation to start with flat dies. Those are my primary dies. I have a tool holder for the lower die which lets me use spring tools etc. I have made a pair of crown dies which I've used once. My next set will probably be a combo pair primarily to give me the flexibility to go from a 4" width down to a 2" width. My design would keep the flat configuration, but the narrow section of the dies would make some jobs a little simpler to accomplish. Patrick