patrick

This grade is not a tool steel. It is a carburizing grade designed for bearings. In its current condition it will be quite soft. To heat treat it effectively you need to have professional heat treat shop carburize and quench it. I'd think tempering at 450-475F would be about right to get typical anvil hardness.

This is a grade timken uses for large bearings that need good toughness. It is a carburizing grade and will need that process folowed by a quench and temper to get the properties you need in an anvil.

I suggest working over with a coarse grinding wheel or sanding disk. I think most of those dings will polish out without welding. You'd have to do that anyway to dress the welds so skip the welding and use if for a while. Even if it is soft, you likely will not put that much wear on it for a long, long time.

Here are the pictures I meant to have in the last post of the hammer my team and I will be making for the Friday night demo. Patrick

I aspire to be an old codger someday and with a lot of hard work and perseverance maybe I'll get there. Die changes are pretty quick. Most of my work only requires the lower die to be changed and that takes about a minute. If I have to do both dies it's about 5 minutes. Getting the top die in is a little awkward because the ram never stops at just the right height. Since my dies are pretty big (my flat dies weigh about 40#) and the Bradley uses a two key system, you really can't hold that die up by hand. I usually just stack wood shims on the bottom die until I can just slide the top one in place. I drive the keys. After a few blows you sometimes have to tighten the keys but once they are set the top die doesn't usually come loose. Because I do a lot of off-center work as shown in the video, my bottom dies will often work loose and have to be tightened up between heats, but that is about a 30 second job. Thomas- Yes Melody and I will be at Quad State. In fact, I've been asked to lead the team doing the Friday night demo. I'm really excited. We'll be doing a double face sledge of French style based on the one in the pictures. It's a bit tricky since the faces are larger in diameter than the body of the hammer. I'll be making some specialty tools to assist with this. Mike Roberts and one or two of the other local Quad State members will be helping me.

In one of the recent threads there has been some discussion of forging thin plates with a controlled thickness. This video shows me forging rain drop mokume 0.220" x 2.625 using a specialty die I made that has integral stop blocks for both the width and thickness. As you can see, I could forge several different widths depending on which slot I use. I have quite a few dies of the same style for forging a range of widths and thicknesses. Patrick

There are no mechanical hammers currently in production in the US. Both utility style and self contained hammers can be purchased new. There are several makers of utility (those requiring an external air compressor) in the US: Big Blue, Iron Kiss and Ken Zitur. The self contained machines are made in Germany (Kuhn), Turkey (Say-Mak/Sinhalier) and China (Anyang and Striker). All have their good and bad points. The challenge you are going to be faced with, no matter what hammer style, maker or vintage you get is keeping uniform thickness to your plates. For that you'll either have to learn how to do that by feel or set up some kind of a stop to keep the dies a fixed distance apart. From a controlability standpoint, you can't beat a Bradley mechanical running on a big slack belt. There are some limitations with this and other mechanical hammers which you don't have with a self contained machine, but for repetitive flat die work they are fantastic.The biggest limitation I see that you'll face with a self contained is the size of the dies. If you are doing large disk type forgings that completely cover the lower die, you will have no way to stop the upper die to produce a uniform thickness. Because of the die orientation used by Bradley, you can make very long dies which means you can still set up stop blocks and have room for your work piece. The challenge you'll have with most mechanical hammers, regardless of make, is that they often need rebuilding (if they're cheap). If that rebuild is done well then they usually very good hammers within their design limits. I'd encourage you to work with other smiths in you area who have various hammer. Get a feel for what you like and don't like about them before committing. By the way, I am running a 300 lb Bradley guided helve, which is actually set up with 460# ram, on a 10 horse, single phase 220 motor. The hammer runs at about 220 bpm when fully engaged. If I want, I can feather that ram back so it just floats. I did this once to forge dragon fly wings from 3/16" square and it worked beautifully. Patrick

I think you may be approaching the 3d printing issue from the wrong perspective. While the technology will no doubt advance to the point where metal parts will be able to be printed, as was already noted, those parts will not likely take the place of forged components for engineering applications and they likely would be too expensive to be competitive with hand forged custom decorative ironwork. I think the more likely situation is that plastic parts printed by this technology will be able to be produced on demand and then assembled in "kit" form to look like ironwork. Recall that this exact approach was something that Yelling and his contemporaries faced with cast iron. Though cast iron rarely if ever looks like forged iron work to the the trained craftsman, it is good enough for the average consumer. With 3d printing you'd be able to make a better replica of true forged work than you could from a casting. Even though cast iron did take over a large part of the wrought iron market, it never totally eliminated wrought iron. I would expect the same with 3d printing. For those who want the look of wrought iron and don't mind that what they have is a "cookie cutter" copy that could show up in the house across the street, 3d printed components will be an attractive option. For those clients who want truly custom work, they will still come to the blacksmith.

We use large (60") diameter carbide tipped cold saws for cutting steel and work. This are lower RPM than the blades for wood but they too are tuned by a local shop that also repairs the teeth. We usually get a refurbished batch of blades once a week.

Since the budget is a concern and you have a penchant for larger machines, which makes sense if your long term plan is to run a shop as a business, may I suggest you consider a larger mechanical hammer? They are not as complex but still have significant machining needs when rebuilding and the cost is usually much less than that of a Nazel, Massey or C-burg. This option may get you started with lower investment and allow you then sell the rebuilt hammer at a profit help fund the machine you'd like to end up with.

Punch presses absolutely can be used for hot forging but unlike a hammer, they have a fixed stroke length with no flexibilty in the mechanical linkage so they will not perform drawing, tapering and forging operations of that type. They will work very well for specialty die and impression forging, but you must have your starting material and your tooling matched up so that the press can complete it's stroke as Thomas mentioned.

One thing to keep in mind when working exotic materials is how much deformation you do per blow. Some of them require a gentler approach than you use with carbon steels. Also, in some case you need to forge square, octagon square, not just square all the way down. The only way to know is to experiment, but we utilize these techniques on large forgings from time to time and they can work. Also, with some stainless grades you actually need to forge COOLER that you would for plain carbon materials.

Need is just a matter of perspective. I do like the idea of the long stroke that comes with a steam hammer, but I have a 500 lb Bradley to install before I invest in any more equipment. I really want to weigh the ram in that machine because, based on comparison with the 300lb Bradley, this one is probably pushing 600# or more. That's a lot of machine and I will probably be able run it faster than Ric's Niles. I expect to set it up to run in the 200-220 bpm range for fast drawing. Unless my work changes drastically I don't think I'll need more hammer capacity after that one's running.

These are not that uncommon in England, but you don't see them that often here. I made one just like this but bigger a few years back. It was based off of one (739#) that had been imported from England for resale. That particular one was thought to have been a Mousehole and Mousehole certainly did make this style as did Peter Wright and Kirkstall. If you look through the adds various companies ran (see Anvils in America) you will see that they weren't that uncommon, they just weren't imported into the US. The step from face to square horn can be used just like the step in the face of a London pattern anvil.

Nice looking machine Ric. How long until you have it running?

Quite a few years back there was a guy at Quad State with a whole trailer full of big french anvils, some upwards of 600#. I don't recall his name but he was a veterinarian who'd put himself through college working as a farrier. He had that trailer load of anvils for 2 or 3 years before he finally sold them all. That's really the only time I recall seeing french pattern anvils here in the states. It seems the tide has turned to the German and English styles, thought that may be more a matter of the contacts the importers have in those countries than a reflection of the actual interest in the US for French pattern anvils.

Presses are not ideal for production of thin sections because the metal cools too quickly and the tonnage requirements rapidly increase. They are also slow if you don't invest significantly in the valving and controls. I tried doing some 0.220" x 2.625" wide flat bar on a press once and it was extremely inefficient. The best way to do the job in question is with a combination of hammers and a rolling mill to finish, but a rolling mill with rolls wide enough is a huge machine. You could look at roughing out your jobs and then contracting the rolling to an outfit like Braburn.

It's possible, but I don't know if they did any closed die work there. Wrenches like this certainly could have been made by open die methods, but if so, then you'd expect the logo to be stamped in rather than raised as in your wrench. I know of at least one other anvil company (Vulcan) that used the same logo and there is a very famous tool making company (Armstrong) that made tool holder for lathes and similar items. I don't know if they ever used that logo or not.

If you do a youtube search for 300 lb Bradley the first two clips will be of me forging with stop blocks on my guided helve. The dies in use in those videos are only about 10.5" long but they are easily changed. Most of the forging I do anymore is mokume bar and billet forged to precise thickness/width requirements so I have a lot of dies built with integral stop blocks. It wouldn't be hard at all to do the job under discussion here with my hammer. Unlike a Nazel or other air hammer, and even most mechanical hammers, the orientation of the Bradley dies relative to the ram and guides allows them to be extemely long, even when the hammer itself is fairly small. To get dies with the length I use into a nazel or similar machine would require that the machine be in 5 or 6B size range OR that an "I" model hammer (extermally guided machine) be used. To me, avialable die surface area is one of the chief advantages of Bradely hammers over air hammers and other mechanical hammers. Not only can you use oversized dies, but the guides in these machines are extremely robust for just this type of work. Many production dies sets allowed the smith to forge multipe steps in the same die. This eliminated the need for multipe set ups thereby increasing efficiency.

You could set up a big Bradley hammer with oversized dies to allow you the room for stop blocks. I made a 14"long die for mine and could go longer if needed.

We cannot say that casting or forging is a superior method of production without first defining the goals or performance characteristics. Both methods will produce fantastic parts. The general way in which forgings tend to be superior to castings is in applications with fatigue loading such as large gears, axles, shafts etc. The reason for this is because during forming, the metal is forced to flow around corners/contours.This means that the properties (in particular ductility and impact strength) in forgings tend to be non-uniform. Castings do not have grain flow and therefore properties are the same in all directions. The directional nature of properties in forgings means that you can select the forging method to achieve the best possible properties for the application, while with castings, you don't have that advantage. The other value to forgings, especially open die forgings, is that there are no pattern costs so for small quantity jobs, the cost of production may be lower so even though the properties of casting could be fine for the job, a forging is chosen due to lower cost.

Did anyone else look at their "swiss" style anvil. I've never seen one like it. It appears to combine several features from Brian Brazeal's block anvil, Uri Hofi's anvil and another type I can't recall. It looks like an extremely useful design.

Thomas is referring to one of the other popular question and answer blacksmithing forums.

I'm not sure but I've been told the anvil is now located here in Wisconsin.

In burning, not only are you partially molten, you are doing that in an oxidizing atmosphere so you have rapid oxidation and loss of carbon much deeper into the piece rather than just on the surface as I described above. When steel is melted intentionally at a mill or foundry, they using a slag layer to protect the steel from oxidation. Also note that steel is not uniform in composition, even though we look at a heat chemistry and assume that. In reality, the composition of the steel varies from point to point within its volume. This means that the melting temperature is not uniform, but rather occurs over a range of temperature with the regions of highest carbon having the lowest melting temperature. The problem with burning is actually not just on cooling. Since you have rapid oxidation of localized molten areas, you can end up with oxide penetrating into the forging which means the surfaces tend to crack or even fall apart during deformation. In most cases, just hammering the burned steel back together will not really fix the problem, though for some applications that might be good enough.