patrick

As with many things, the price of steel is influenced by multiple factors. Scrap, which is the raw material for a lot of steel, is at record high prices. Alloying elements for all grades of steel are also very high right now. The demand for steel both in the US and world-wide is quite high. The weak dollar is pushing the US to actually EXPORT steel and steel product again. The price of energy, not just desiel, is also rising. All these things combined drive up the price of steel. You wouldn't know it to listen to the news, but certain sectors of the US market are doing great. Steel production is one. So is the production of heavey equipment and the production of power generation equipment. Forge shops and foundries serving the heavey equipment market are booming. There are numerous new steel mills or additions to existing mills planned throughout the US in the next few years to meet this increased demand for steel products. I don't expect to see serious decreases in the price of steel at the consumer level any time soon, but for items being sold, the increased prices can be passed on to the purchaser. That is what the steel suppliers are doing to there customers, and that is what manufactures are doing to thier customers. If you don't pass on your cost's as a manufacture, you eventually end up out of buisness.

Am I right in guessing that this is at Alcoa's Forged Products plant in Clevland Oh? Do you do any open die work with this press or is it all closed die work?

Here in souther Wisconsin the price of low nickel carbon and alloy steel scrap is at an all time high of $500 per ton. That is $125 just in material cost for a 500 # anvil. Then consider the cost of energy to melt the steel, the overhead in the shop that casts and heat treats the anvil, the economies of scale etc. If you assume a mark up by the produce of 50% over cost of production, you can easily see why new anvils are so (seemingly) expensive. Patrick

There are some photos of oliver type hammers in a publication on Chain Making in the Black Country of Britian. These were used on the small diamter chains. Since they are in actual photos, rather than drawings or woodcuts, they may be from a later time period than you're interesed in. Patrick

Punch presses can be very handy for repetitive stamping. Take a look at the tables featured on sandersoniron.com. All the stamped borders are done with a punch press simialar to the one shown, though the flywheel on the press used for the tables is mounted in the rear. Patrick

Quite a few years back there was an article published in Knives Illustrated, written by Virgil England. He had built a planishing type hammer from a jack hammer and was using it to forge and texture bronze "scales" for a helmet he was making. I don't think his setup had the versatility of a more conventional power hammer. Patrick

If you are going to drill and then drift, you probably don't want your drill larger than 3/4 because you won't get flat sides to the hole if you drill it to big. I know because I tried it in some 2.5 or 3" stock I was trying to make into a bolster block for power hammer work. If you have a big enough torch (or torches) you can get the area of the hole up to foring temps, BUT if you don't heat it and cool it uniformly from both side it will warp. Torching a rough square will remove a lot of excess metal, but leave you with a heat affect zone that likely will be difficult to file. You could probably overcome this with a die grinder. Probably the best way is to use the suggestion already posted of a series of drilled holes.

Chris, I have and regularly use a 300 lb Bradley Upright (or Guided) Helve hammer. The ram and top die together on this hammer actually weigh 460#. My hammer sits on a foundation of reinforced concrete 4 feet wide, 5 feet deep and 10 feet long. The soil beneath and around this foundation is mostly small, rounded gravel that you find along rivers and streams. I did dig through some other layers of dirt and clay before stopping in the gravel layer. My hammer sits within 20 feet of my house and you can fee the hammer in the house when I run it. I don't have any close neighbors, so that is not an issue for me. I would strongly advise that you not put your hammer on just sand. The sand will not pack and over time the hammer will work down into the sand. Instead of stand, I'd suggest that you use gravel or a gravel and sand mix if you can spring for the concrete. When I did my foundation about 3 years ago, concrete was $65-75 per cubic yard. I am sure it has gone up, but it is worth the cost to set up a hammer properly. Patrick

One use I haven't seen mentioned for a swage block is as a backup when punching and drifting large holes. I picked up a large rectagular shaped industrial block last fall becuase I was making bolster block for use under the power hammer and needed to drift some holes as large or larger than the hardie in my anvil. The largest hole in the block I have is around 2". The block itself is about 5" thick and wieghs around 300 or so pounds. I would much rather beat on it with a large sledge than on the tail of my anvil. I have seen to many anvils with tails broken off to want to risk that. Patrick

A bit more on hacks and snaps: I use them both quite a bit. For a long time I just used the hack, but when the hack is taller than the work you are cutting, you risk driving the hack into the lower die. There are several problems with this. You can damage the hack, damage your lower (and or upper) die and the piece can shoot of like a rocket. If you use the hack to cut about 7/8 through the stock the flip the work over and use a snap the is SHORTER than the thickness of the work you can't damage your dies and the pieces being cut are trapped by the top and bottom die so they don't fly around the shop. If the alignment is correct, you also get a very clean square edge on both ends produced by the cut. A hack is tapered and a snap is square or rectangular. The ideal thickness of the snap would be just a little less than the big side of the notch that is created when the hack is driven into the work. I like to make my hacks and snaps from H13 because they hold up well to the type of work I do, but other alloys such as 5160 or 1095 will also work. Since the hack is tapered, it can be used as a taper tool in a pinch. Also, if you want cut round bar without creating flat spots, you can support the bar in a V-block and use a hack. Rotate the work a bit after each blow and it should come out round. Patrick

There is a very good tutorial on making an anvil from steel plate and hardfacing it on the metalwebnews site. Perhaps someone can post a link. I think that would be an excellent method to put a hard face on the subject anvils. As for machining or welding up a swayed anvil, there are some significant risks. The steel used for facing anvils does not harden vary deeply so agressive machining could result in a somewhat softer face. The face could be removed if it already thin, or reduced in thickness to the point of making it more likely to break with continued use. The risk to buiding up a face that is forge welded is that it could cause a seperation of the face from the body. Also, if not done properly, the face itself could develop cracks. I can definitly appreciate the desire for a flat anvil, as that is my personal preference. I'd rather the anvil be flat and then make a hardy tool as needed for specific straightening and bending applications. I had a 300# Hay-Budden that was swayed much as you describ. I ended up trading it for a 390# Peter Wright that had less sway, but had been badly abused by a cutting torch. Someone had notched the face of the anvil at regular intervals down both edges and had cut about 3" from the horn. The torch damage had been well repaired by the man I got the anvil from and I have been happy with it. He had intened to use it as a student anvil rather than his personal forging anvil so he was pretty willing to trade. If you really want a flat anvil, you may look for a trading opportunity as I did, or sell it and put the money towards an anvil that suits your needs better than the one you have now. Patrick

Our maintainence departement uses a dry ice blaster to clean equipment and they love it. It seems to be designed as a cleaning tool to remove grease etc but it does not appear to have the abrasive qualities needed to remove scale. Patrick

DD, I have excellent control with my Bradley 300 lb Guided helve. I use a spray on belt dressng, but that should not be necessary to give you better control, it just reduces some of the slipage and gives you a quicker start up since you have so much mass to get moving with on of these hammers. Make sure the belt is tight enough, or that you can make it tight enough. There is an adjustment for the postition of the idler arm and wheel located just in front of the drive wheel on this hammer. You may need to move this so that the idle are puts more tension on the belt when at rest than it does now. On my hammer, the belt will constantaly cycle, even when the hammer is not in motion. Patrick

Here in the US there are still several commercial manufacturer's who are using Bradley hammers and they depend on Cortland to have replacement parts on the shelf. Cortland only stocks small items like nuts, bolt and the eccentric shells. If you need a large casting made, it will cost you mega bucks. I was contacted last year by a company looking to replace a part of the big clamp on a 150# guided helve, and they had been quoted a price of $4000 by Cortland to make the part. Danger Dillon- Congrats on the aquistion of those hammers. I had second dibs on that pair. I was hoping to replace my 300 with the 500. If you have questions about using the hammers or tooling etc, feel free to email me at pnowak@scotforge.com Your question about commericalizing the production of a mechaincal hammer is interesting. I suspect that it is not being done, (in the US), because the costs of an American made hammer would be so high that no one would buy it. (This assumes a qualtity of construction on par with the Bradley). The last commercial hammer produced in the US was made by Chambursburg and their 100 lb model last listed for around $100,000. As to why no foreign company is making a mechaincal for market here in the US, I would have to guess that the perception is there is not enough demand, ie the demand for new hammers is for the air hammers. If you look at the prices being paid for old mechanical hammers, even in good shape, they are no where near the prices of new air hammers, so there is probably more profit to be made in supplying the new air hammers rather than new mechanicals. Even old air hammers will bring prices on par with new ones, but you rarely see an old mechanical hammer, even a big Bradley or Beudry in good shape, bring more than $6000-8000. patrick

I do a lot of power hammer work and work exclusivley from a gas forge. Like metalmangler, I tend to cut stock ahead and hold it with tongs because it is more effeicient for me to work that way. I also tend to make a lot of small pieces like leaves and I try to use drops and scrap from other projects rather than going to a long bar for these items. I too prefer a good V-bit type tong when ever possible and, even though I spent my first several years forging with Thomas, I only use flat tongs when I can't find a V-bit or round jaw pair that fit. Early this year I bought several pairs of very heavy jawed flat tongs and converted all of them to a straght v-bit type. They are so much more useful that way. One tip on holding flat stock that I learned from Clifton Ralph's videos is to take a piece of angle iron and weld edges of both "legs" to a piece of flat stock. Bend a lip on two edges of the flat. Now this will fit into one half of a V-bolt tong and can be sized to hold very wide flat stock securely. Another thing that Clifton does a lot is to use link type tongs to hold flat work. He will often upset the edges of the work a little bit to create a lip. The lip engages with the link tongs near the back of the jaws and the tips of the jaws grab a little further in giving you four poins of contact. I have seen him forge a lot of pieces this way. He also uses what I would call a pickup type tong quite a bit. The jaws are rather long and very narrow and the very end is shaped like a link tong. He uses these when handling odd shapes. The very narrow jaws allow you to tip the work to many angles without having to change your grip. The Upper Midwest Blacksmith Association has 7 DVDs of Clifton doing demos going back to 1987 up to the summer of this year. The DVDs are $5 each ($7 for the first one). I do not think there is a handling fee. Visit the UMBA website for contact and order info if you're interested.

I have a large home built propane forge that I use in my garage (it just looks like a garage, it really is a dedicated blacksmith shop). My forge is a 2 burner forced air model that can heat up to 300lb of steel at once. It is connected to a dedicated 100 gallon propane tank. I do have a regulator on the line coming in from the tank, but I don't pay attention to what pressure I run. I can tell you that when I asked the propane company about running a seperate line from my existing tank, which feeds the house, to the shop they said it could not be done since I needed much higher pressures at the forge than in the house. That may be a limitation of my set-up and not true for all propane arrangements. From a "catch things on fire" point of view, the ceiling above the forge is 8' tall. I have yet to burn the cieling, but I can melt the sap out of the trusses. I do have Kaowool on the wall behind the forge since it has a rear port. I would be extremely reluctant to run any but the smallest forge in a residence for all of the reasons mentioned above. My forge is not small at all, but I have run mini-forges built from soup cans and a plumber's torch indoors. This will handle stock at least 1/2x1/2, but they are not convienent for large or long work. Also be aware that leaking propane has caused housed to explode. We just had one blow up near me yesterday morning. Our house shook from the blast and we are several miles away. The local authorities did not have a cuase of the explosion as of yesterday morning, but I have heard rumors that someone attempted to light a propane furnace, had trouble and left the house without shutting off the propane. No one was hurt since the house was empty when it exploded. I suspect that given the right precautions and attention to detail you could safely run a propane forge in the basement. But the risk of an accident is real and it only takes one mistake to have a serious accident. Patrick

The die holders of most hammers are not heat treated, in fact, on most mechanical hammers they are cast iron. There is no need to heat treat the die holder, regardless of steel type. The dies themselves should be heat treated, but sharp corners in the dovetails will act as serious stress risers and can result in cracks either during quenching or in service. If such a sharp corner is absoultly necessary, it should be machined in after heat treat is complete. I would recommend that you look into having the heat treat work done at American Steel Treating in Perrysburg OH. They used to do knives for me and for any job under 20 lbs the price was $20. That was about 10-12 years ago, but I still doubt they would chage $100 to do your dies since they will batch them with other work to make a furnace load. There is no advantage to using induction heating on your dies since they are not of uniform cross section (round or square). Custom coils would have to made for the dies, and there is just no reason to do that. Patrick

Roger, I have some questions that you may have answered in previous posts. How long have you been in the forging buisness? How many people work in your shop? Is there one particular type of work that is your main production or are you what we in the states would call a job shop, doing relatively small volume work for whoever needs parts? Are there many (or any) other shops like yours in your country, or is the demand for work like yours pretty small? Thanks for your posts and particularly the pictures. I really enjoy seeing industrial tooling and projects. Patrick

All band saw blades are NOT made from L6. Here at work we have blades up to 2.5" wide and 1/16" thick for cutting large steel ingots and billets. These blades are usually carbide tipped. The backs are a high carbon chrome/moly alloy with very little Nickel. L6 has Nickel as the major alloying element and a variable carbon content depending on the application. Often found in large blades for sawmill applications, these blades were not tipped (in the past) so the blade needed both edge holding abiltiy and toughness. Patrick N