patrick

Stressproof is a trade name which encompasses more than composition. It is cold worked a certain amount and stress releived. If you intend to forge the material then you are really only concerned with the comosition and how it will respond to further heat treatment. If you are going straight into a machinining operation and want the dimensional uniformity and machiniability of a cold worked resulfurized grade than this could be and excellent starting material. Patrick

1144 is not proprietary, at least not the version being discussed here. It is a plain carbon, resulfurized steel. It will forge and heat treat pretty much like 1045. We forge a lot of this and similar resulphurized steels at work. The one big difference is that is it much easier to develop centerline tearing in grade than in 1045. Probably not a big issue unless you plan to make a lot of small round cross sections like tenons. Even though this does have sulfur added back to it, it is not usually considered red short in the same way steels of old were when they had high sulfur. The high manganese combines with the sulfur and prevent the formation of iron sulfide which would make the steel red short.

D2 annealed is soft so it can be machined so this is not a good test to distinguish it from other grades.

My 300 lb Bradley has aram thar weighs 460# and I know of another one just like it so I do think this was common for them but I know they changed over the years too because I have a spare ram for that 300 # hammer and it only weighs 325# sans die.

Thanks for the compliments on the anvil Thomas. I certainly do enjoy it. As far as anvil ring is concerned, it is (or was) a crude method of quality control, but didn't really have much to do with face hardness. It was used to ensure that the forge welds holding the anvil pieces together were good. A "dead" anvil would indicate incomplete welding of the face or other parts which likely would result in early failure of the anvil. This same method of quality control used to be used to verify good forge welds in chain and is used even to this day when evaluating anchors (I know this having just had a conversation with the chief metallurgist for the American Bureau of Shipping on the subject this morning). As far as fabricating the anvil as described above is concerned, it certainly could be done. If it were my project, I'd probably try to weld on the horn and carve the heel from the block described (assuming a London pattern anvil is desired). Trying to carve both out of this block would result in a fairly short anvil. Also, you'd be surprised how much metal you lose when you carve out the horns from a solid plate. If you cut out the entire anvil from plate I'd expect you to loose about 40% of the starting weight of the plate.

When carbon or the carbon equivelent of a steels gets above about 0.43 you'll want to preheat before welding. The 4150 will absolutely require that so I'd avoid it unless you are using mechanical connections. A36 or 1020 is fine for all but the tooling on a treadle hammer and these grades can be welded without preheat. Since you have limited shop space you may want to consider some of the in-line treadle hammer designs rather than the Clay Spencer design simply because it takes up a bit more space.

Double Keys- One goes on each side of the die. That way only one end has to stick out beyond the die, thought in reality my keys are long enough for both to stick out a few inches. It's not a problem though because they are space apart by whatever the width of the die dovetail is so you can easily hit just one. Because the dies on a Bradley are oriented in line with the long axis of the hammer, you can really only access them from one side which means I strike one to tighten and the other to loosen. For hammer that has easy access on both side you could set up one long key for both tightening and loosening and a short key just to provide the matching taper.

Double Keys-Yes, two keys of the same degee of taper driven in opposite directions will effectively hold a die with straight/parellel dovetail sides. That is how every Bradley I've ever seen was set up. I can't say that that method is any better from a function standpoint than the single key method, but it is easier to make and works very well indeed.

I had a request for a branding iron for a fraternity once. I told them the branding iron would be free but I'd change for screaming. No takers.

The entire anvil is available as a tool and to fully access it, you will have to change your stance depending on the work being done. I think the important thing to remember, and it sound like this is really what your example was getting at, is the need to keep your body/arm/workpiece in an arrangement that is as compact as possible. I've noticed beginners often tend to stay back from the anvil and reach with their hammer. This is an inefficient way of working because, the greater your arm extension, the less power and control you will have. A compact stance should be used whenever feasible to maximize efficiency and avoid injury.

If you want to use a dovetail dies system, which does work very well, I'd suggest using the two key per dies system like what Bradley and a few other hammer makers did. The advantage of this style is that dovetail in both the sow block and the die is a straight dovetail. On a single key per die system the dove tail also is tapered along its length. This means you have to machine a compound angle on either the sow block or the die. With the two key method, you can machine the dovetail with a dove tail cutter on a mill and the stock held paraellel to the mill table- a very easy set up. On my Bradley, the dovetail angle is 5 degrees so I had a local tool grinder make me a mill with a reverse taper to match. I have made dies with integral dovetails, which is my preferred method, but I made several sets where I machined the dove tail and welded it to the die block. Both methods work and if you don't have access to a mill, it should be fairly inexpesive to have a local machine shop make up a flat bar with the dove tails cut on the edge. You can then cut what ever length you need and weld to the die block you're making. I don't have much issue changing dies and I do it a lot. A few smacks with a sledge and everything loosens up.The keys in my hammer are tapered 1/8" per foot which is fairly common. Before I had my own mill, I actually forged several dovetailed blocks right in the sow block. A little clean up with a grinder and they were ready to be welded to my die blocks.

Clearly those are fullering dies, but what exatly are you planning to accomplish with them that could not be done with spring fullers?

You know, I've been a member here for a bunch of years and that is the first time I can recall anyone pointing out that I don't have my location in my profile. Thanks for pointing that out. We're in Janesville, WI.

As the wife of a blacksmithing addict, I want to confess that I am an enabler. But really, I never have to wonder where my husband is. If he is in the shop, I can hear him! Though it is an addictive habit, it has very few negative effects on his health and lots of positive ones on his attitude and social life (with his smithing buddies). And once in a while, I catch the benefits too. He made me a beautiful bench that is the envy of every passerby and several lovely sculptures have taken up residence on our front porch. We did have to come to the agreement about no anvils in the living room (though I made an exception if he ever makes a full sized damascus anvil that we can use it as a coffee table) but over all blacksmithing is a blessing! --Melody, Patrick's wife and enabler

The data is out there. You need to get a hold of the ASM Heat Treater's Guide. That has all the charts you need for dealing with 1045. By the way, 520 Brinell is about 52 HRc.

There are some advantages a concrete floor, namely the ability to easily move things around on it. The anvil does not need anything special for support. Power hammers and other large tools will as already noted. When I moved into a building like your, I poured an 8" thick floor so that I could easily use drop in anchors for things like post vices. If I hadn't been in such a time crunch I would have made T slots from channel iron and laid several of those parellel to allow even greater flexibility in anchoring things. I have a couple of friends with this type of arrangement and it offers an extremely rigid anchor point that is flush with the floor. If you set up several of these 8 or 10 feet long you really have a great many options to rearrange things if needed.

We use the ring method too, but that is a heavier tool to handle so they only do it when the tonnage needed to get the extrusion they want is so much that it would squash the flat bars.

Ferric chloride can be used. Another very pretty result can be obtained by polishing and then using heat to develop the patina. This technique can be used to very good affect on plain copper pieces too.

Thanks for all you input guys. I don't think we have a formula at work for this either. We do much like what forgemaster does only with larger parts. We will often use two ring tools to make pinion type forgings. The first has a hole the diameter of the shank and the second is taller than the first with an ID that will just fit over the OD of the short tool. We forge a round bar and drop in in the short tool. We upset one end to fill the larger tool and then flip the whole thing over and put 1/2" flat bar between the smaller tool (now bottom up) and the top die. The bars are on either side of the hole in the tool and with this arrangement we can get just enough extrusion to fill in the corners of the hole. Too much extrusion and you will rivet the two tools together. For purposes of this particular tool the shank length was not critical, I just didn't expect to get that result and if I did need to control the shank length I'd use a bolster block sitting on the anvil. Here are some pictures of the hammer I want make. The plan is to start with 3" round. I'll forge the middle section down to about 2.25" square, then punch and drift the eye. It is at this point that the fullers would be used to refine the profile of the hammer.

Frosty- I think maybe you mis understood what I did. I drew out a shank with a length of 2 5/8" inches leaving a 1/4" shoulder all the way around . This shank went in the hardy hole leaving a block of metal 2x2x4.5 above this anvil face. This was upset, but during the upsetting process, the shank grew an additional 1.375" in length. I never hammered on the shank during any of the work after initially drawing out the 2.625" length noted earlier. The question I have is how to predict how much to allow for extrusion of the shank if I do something similar again. I'm sure I lost some metal to scale but not 10%. At work we us a factor of 3% and since this forging is relatively small compared to that and the heat up time relatively short I think it was probably less than 3%, but scale losses are not related to the extrusion issue I'm describing

My favorite hammer right now is about 4.5 lbs, but I do most of my work with a power hammer and use this hand hammer for straightening and touch up. I can swing it all day, but the need for that in my shop is quite rare and I don't hesitate to change hammers as needed to suit the work. I did have occasion last night to upset some 2" square to make a hardy fuller and for that I used a 14# sledge. It was the first time I'd done any sledge work of that weight and I will say it really took a lot out of me. I did get the job done and I could really see the difference between using a big hammer like that and my regular sledge which is about half that weight. What I realized is that if you were doing sledge work full time as we see in some of the old videos you really could make some pretty big things by hand and you'd be in incredibly good shape to boot.

Thomas- There is a very slight bevel on the hardy hole. I think the reason I got the result I did was because the hammer I was using for the upset was a 14# sledge and the anvil was the one a made a couple of years ago that weighs a bit over 1000#. I'm sure this let me transfer the vast majority of the hammer's energy to the work piece, I just didn't anticipate that happening because my past experience with upsetting has tended to only affect the metal very near the struck surface.

I am in the process of making the tools to forge a large, French pattern sledge hammer. One of those tools is a pair of 2.25" fullers. I have the bottom one already, but need to make its mate so tonight after work I started on that. Since I'll be hand forging the hammer, I wanted to get a feel for doing work of similar size so in this case, I chose to use a 2x2x6 inch piece of alloy steel. I sectioned off 1.5" of that to make the striking end and then upset the balance (2x2x4.5) to a block 2.25 x about 2.5 x 3. When I was done it was T shaped with a rough radius forged in. I did this in the anvil as if I were going to make a hardy tool. At 1.5" square the shank will be plenty big enough for the striking end of the tool. What I found surprising was that the shank grew in length from 2.625" to 4" during the upsetting process. Has anyone else observed this and do you have any rules of thumb for how to estimate the amount of extrusion you'll get on a job? I've seen this extrusion effect many times at work where we are press forging, but I didn't think that I would have sufficient power to do that by hand. I expected all the metal that started above the anvil surface to flare out. That did happen, but apparently not as much as I'd anticipated.

Take a look at the Scot Forge website to see what is currently going on in the open die forging world.