patrick

I forgot to mention that when our hammers were converted to air they redid the seals. The seals for air hammers have a closer fit than those for steam hammers. I' sure you can run them on air without this alteration but they won' be as efficient.

A couple of things: 1. Steam hammers can be converted to air and run just fine that way. Scot Forge made that conversion to their hammers probably 8-10 years ago and they work great. No lose of power and the operators actually like it better because then don't have hot water dripping on them while they are working. 2. Large forgings are still produced for the navy. Scot Forge makes many of them now as do some of our competitors. 3. Material handling in a modern forge shop is nothing like what you see in the old black and white videos. Tongs are still used but only for very small parts or for small tools. Otherwise various specialized machines are used. This is both for improved safety and efficiency. 4. Forging and anvil is a wonderfully romantic idea and I've thought about it myself many times. To get to a traditional anvil form you need a two piece construction that is either arc or forge welded at the waist. Casting an anvil is a much more efficient want to make one and, provided the heat treatment is done correctly, will give equally good performance to a forged anvil. 5. I'm pretty sure the Navy shop pictured earlier in this thread didn't have that many smallish hammers in it. It has been known for a number of years that this shop was going to be sold. I believe one of my collegues was able to arrange for a 300lb hammer to be donated to the university of Missouri-Rolla, to promote their metallurgy/materials courses. In general, shops like this did large scale work and the small hammers that were in the shop were there to make tongs and test bars. There are still a few shops around with this type of arrangement. Clifford Jacobs and Ladish are a couple of examples. For those interested in seeing really excellent videos of modern forge work, both on presses and hammers, visit the Scot Forge website

What a cool hammer! Thomas did contact me about this since I am running Bradleys which use a similar rubber cushion system. I did not have to replace my cushions but when I was looking into options for that (just in case I would need to) I found most sources to be quite expensive. I believe Bob Bergman can get them, I'm sure that the folks at Cortland Machine in New York could also do it since they supply parts, including cushions, for Bradleys. I know that Stuart Giesler had some new old stock cushions for Bradleys available at one time. I would measure the ones you have and compare with what he has. You might be able to modify the Bradley cushions to fit your machine. Another method is to make your own. I have heard that RTV pourable resin works very well in this application. I would contact Ray Rybar, a very talented knife maker, for info on this product and the process he has used. I'm told he's made new cushions for quite a few Bradleys with this product and has had very good success at very reasonable prices. Good luck.

The hammer makers I know buy round bar and convert it to the sizes they need. Nathan Robertson has made something like 5500 hammers this way.

For M2 you really do have to get it extra hot to heat treat it becuase you have to dissovle the complex alloy carbides prior to quenching. With simple steels those are just iron carbide and will dissolve around 1450 F but once you start putting in vanadium, molydinum etc you really have to raise the temperaure.

It's been a while since I've posted here so I'll briefly provide my background before answering the original question. I am a professanal metallurgical engineer and have been working as the plant metallurgist for one of the Scot Forge facilites for the past 14 years. We make forgings up to about 150 tons these days. Prior to that I worked for Timken for 2 years. I've been forging by hand and with power hammers for the last 20 years. Hat tip to Thomas Powers who got me started... The orginal question had to do with a precieved difference in strength between forged blades and those ground directly from bar which lead to a more general discussion of the various merrits of forged products vs. those produced by other methods. To properly answer this question we first have to define "strength". There are multiple types of strength and ways of measuring it. Tensile properties are determiend by stretching. There are 4 properties tyically obtained from a tensile test: Ultamate tensile strength, yield strength, elongation and reduction of area. Utimate tensile strength: The maximum load applied before the specimen breaks Yield strength: The load necessary to cause permanent deformation of the specimen Elongation: The % change in length from the starting length to the final length after the specimen breaks Reduction of area: The % change in cross sectional area from the starting area to that after the specimen breaks. Additoinal Types of Strength: Fatigue Strength: The ability to withstand repeated bending when the amound of bend does NOT result in any plastic deformation Imapct strength: A measure of the amount of energy needed to break a notch bar specimen of standard dimension. This property is temperature dependant for the carbon and alloy steels under discussion here. When comparing forgings to products made from machined bars, assuming that is the only difference is in how the shape was achieved, the differences in "strength" will not be differences in utimate tensile or yield strength. Nor will there be differences in the elongation, reduction of area or impact strength. The difference will be in the fatigue properties. The reason for this is becuase in a forged product, the metal is forced to flow around corners. This flow around the corners does align the non-metallic inclusions in the streel in a preferential way which results in resistance to fatigue failures. It is true that steel today is not like steel from years ago and is particularly different from wrought iron. It is much cleaner so the behaviours we see in wrought iron are not encountered when hand forging steel. However, inspite of the much cleaner materials we have today most steel still has some amount of non-metallic inclusions. These are microscopic, but they still do affect properties. In particular they affect the elongation, reduction of area and impact properties. If you are dealing with a forged or rolled bar these micro inclusions are oriented in line with the long axis of the bar. If you cut a specimen parrellel to this axis you will get one set of properteis. If you cut your specimen at 90 degrees to this axis you will find that ultamite tensile and yield are about the same but the elongation, reduction of area and impact properties are reduced. Today it is possible to produce steel that is so clean you have very little difference in properties regardless of test orientation, but those materials are more costly to produce and are not as widely used. With respect to the original question where the starting stock is a rolled bar which is then either forged into a blade or ground into a blade there will be almost no measureable difference in properties assuming that is the only differnece in manufacturing. IF there are difference in heat treat then yes you can get major differeces in performance. Additional questions were raised about grain size and grain flow and there seems to be some confusion on these subjects: Grain size is the actual size of an individual crystal of iron. This is measured via standard methods and is given an ASTM size rating. The larger the number the smaller the actual crystal. In general smaller grains are prefered for most applications because smaller grained materials will have better elongation, reduction of area and impact properties. Industrially grain size is controlled through a combination of heat treatment and chemistry. Provided you have elements in the steel that limit grain growth during heat treatment (aluminum, vanadium, niobium) you can refine the grains by normalizing prior to austentizing for the quench. In industry there are times when multiple normalizing cycles are used for the purpose of refining the grains. Generaly we don't see a benefit to doing more than two cycles, and even that is a special case. Most of the time a single normalize cyle is sufficient. Grain flow is what I noted about about forcing the metal to go around corners. Edge "packing"-This is really a confusing term because you are not making the steel more dense. What you are doing is locally deforming and breaking the grains into smaller sizes. It is a technique that is not necessary with modern steels since grain refinement can be achieved through heat treatment.

the primary reason to add nickel to the non-stainless steels is to increase their hardenability. Two bars of the same size but different compositon will have different hardenability. If the bars are large, say 10 inch diameter and one is 1045 and the other is a nickel bearing grade like 4340 you'll be able to make the 4340 much harder at the center than the 1045. This is important for industrial applications. 1045 has almost no nickel while 4340 has about 1.75%. Look up jominy testing and results for these two grades. That will help you understand what nickel does.

Another good choice is Hobart hard alloy 58. This is the rod Hobart recommends for anvil repair. The southern ohio forge and anvil group has been using it for a couple decades at least for anvil repairs. It goes down hard and grinds easy. It is not work hardening. One thing you have to watch with work hardening rods is the fact that they go down soft and require deformation to get hard. The very abrasion resistant rods tend to be too brittle for anvils.

The letter "E" prefix means the material is made by Electric Arc furnace steelmaking processes. There are other steel making processes such as those which make steel directly from Iron Ore. That would be what's done at the integrated steel mill using a blast furnace. Most steel today is produced by taking scrap and re melting it using an electric Arc furnace and so that "E" designates that the Steel has been made by that process. Patrick

It reminds me of the Goliath hammer which I think was made in England.

Years ago I took a power hammer class with Steve Parker in NC. John Larson was also in the class. All the hammers in the school were Big Blue. The first thing John did was to change out the air lines on the BB to what he used (bigger diameter) and there was a noticiable change in performance. The BB and IK hammers are completely different and have different philosophies of design behind them. John builds the IK to be more like a small steam hammer in is size and construction. They are very robust and super solid. The BB is not designed to mimic a traditional steam hammer but to be a bit lighter duty. It seams to me based on the class I took and the movies that BB has done featuring their hammers that they are designed to be used with relatively narrow dies that give a heavy texture to the work. Nothing wrong with that approach at all. The IK is designed to use a bigger die to accomodate many more tooling options, so in that sense is it more like the old industrial machines. They both are good machines, but they are designed with different principles and functionality in mind so you really need to do some good research and spend time running both machines before you make a decision. Because of the way I work, I would go with the IK, but there are certainly many satisfied BB customers out there, so it really comes down to personal preference. Patrick

I have lots of info on Bradley hammers and can advise about them if needed. I too am interested in seeing the pictures.

Most high speed and tool steels are forgeable given the right parameters. There are cobalt based super alloys which are also forgable but very challenging. I've never run across purchase cobalt so I don't know how it works.

Alan commercially pure titanium forges like marshmallows and I mean that literally. When it's hot it takes very little effort to move. That means that it bulges much more to the sides than steel so you have to make more passes to get to the same size than with steel. Also you can work a much bigger pc of ti than steel with the same equipment. We probably would not work such a large cross section of steel with our 3000 ton press. We frequently run 40 inch diameter ingots in steel weighing 40000 pounds on that press and it's probably 20 to 25 minutes to take that size ingot to 24 square.

Some of the most impressive examples i can think of from Scot Forge are forging a 40" diameter bar of H13 from a starting cross section of 47" x53" ingot. The challenge with that job was getting all the ingot porosity to forge weld together. Another example of big work is breaking down a rectangular titanium ingot 54x40 that weighed about 50000 pounds. We took it to 24x24 in one heat. That heat lasted 45 minutes. That is the longest continous forging cycle I have seen without reheating.

As far as I am aware no one is making Bradley hammers. Courtland Machine owns the drawings and will make parts. I think Bruce Wallace does the same but I've never dealt with him, only Courtland. I think that Little Giant was the last commerically produced mechanical hammer and I think the ceased production in the late 1970s or very early 1980s.

My first hammer was a 50# Moloch just like this one. I even painted it the same color. The only difference was that the motor was mounted over head rather than to the side. There are no babbit bearings on this hammer. The shaft rides in bronze bushings which are pressed into the frame. I recall finding some casing flaws in the spider section of the clutch which I weld repaired with the help of a friend. The clutch is a cone clutch with a leather interface held on with flat head copper rivets. I often had issues with the clutch not disengaging so I had to get a stiffer spring to seperate the spider from the clutch drum. Once I got that tuned correctly it worked fine. The ram guides can be a bit finicky to adjust if there is uneven wear, which is pretty common in hammers like this. The die keys are pretty narrow so pay close attention so that you don't drive them in instead of out. I did this when I first got the hammer. Because the keys are so thin they don't really project beyond the dies so I had to make a special tool to assist in driving out the keys when I needed to do that. The clutch spider is held to the shaft with a round tapered key that has a flat on one side and threads on one end. There is a matching flat on the shaft that the key mates with. To release this pin take of the nut and drive out with a lead hammer or leave the nut on but loose and use a steel hammer. Just be careful not to let the threads get banged up. If you can get them, I recommend the videos by Dave Manzer for guidance on tuning this style hammer and making tooling. At one time they were available through the anvilfire website, but Dave died a few years back and don't know if the videos are still available.

I disagree with the sentiment that you have to learn hand hammering before you learn power hammer work. That is the way that most people learn it because most people who forge are hobbyists or started as hobbyists and they are usually exposed to hand hammering first. At Scot Forge, where we use use huge hammers and presses, no one is taught hand hammer work. The issue is that at work they are trained by other more experienced men. If you have to learn on your own hand hammering is certainly less risky than power hammer work. That being said, I strongly recommend that whatever style machine you settle on, you either take a formal class on using power hammers or connect with local smiths experienced in power hammer work. There are also a number of good videos on power hammer work and they too are helpful, but hands on tutoring will cut your learning curve like nothing else.

Chambersburg published the ram/anvil ratio vs. Efficiency chart that is widely used as the basis for your statement. Find that chart and you will be able to quickly determine how much difference there is in efficiency between the two scenarios you describe. Though I don't remember the exact details I can tell the graph is not linear. Once you get to about 20:1 additional increases in anvil mass have a negligible effect on efficiency. You need to keep in mind the difference between mathematical efficiency and getting work done. Even with a smaller ratio I think you will still be able to do more work faster withe the 100# machine.

zinc is readily attacked by hydrochloric (muratic) acid. Lead and zinc have significantly differnt densities and lead is probably more valuable from a scrap metal stand point.

Manual has been sent.

PM me and I will send you the owner's manual. Feel free to ask any questions you have. I've completely torn these hammers apart and have had some new parts made on occasion. Patrick

The skill is not so much in pounding them out but in designing the tooling and determining the starting stock size. That is not what I would describe as basic blacksmithing knowleged. Once you have the tools and know how to use them then yest, the job is pretty straightforward.

One feature I would want would be an electonic limit switch to set specific stroke position and return distance. I've seen a couple of damascus makers with presses like this and that was a really handy feature. I'd also want foot pedal control and the abilty to set the press for continuous cycling so the foot pedal doesn't have to be tapped for each stroke. These are features I would want, but I'm not in a position currently to purchase a press. However, if I were and I had these opitons on one make and not another I'd be wanting these, even at a higher price point.

Frosty- you are still limited to a 3:1 aspect ratio when you upset. If your piece is longer than 3/4" then it will buckle when you stand it on end to gain back what you lost due to buckling when you worked the edges. You could upset in very short sections, but why?