John Larson

Thanks for good words and thoughts and discussion. The 50 does very respectable work without any apologies. A one-person studio would be delighted with one as compared to, say, a 50 pound Little Giant. The 75, however, uses the same air cylinder as the 100 and is extremely responsive and the snappiest Iron Kiss of all. Both machines will run on a 5 hp 2-stage compressor, the 50 continuously and the 75 almost continuously. The 75 will actually run on 40 psi, hence it allows the compressor to chug along with the tank almost empty. The 50 wants about 60 psi. The 50 has a 2.5" cylinder bore, the 75 has 3.25" and bigger ports. The 75 is available with an 11" stroke option for $500 more. In my business opinion, the 75 will do more work per day but the 50 is closer to it than you might think. It works better than any 50 I've ever seen. Nevertheless, setting these machines next to the 100 and using them in sequence, like RalphS did, the 100 seems monstrously more powerful. Most smiths don't need this heft. Then again there are those who want 700 pounders for cogging down BIG chunks. The COMPLEAT SHOPPE might use an assortment of power hammer sizes. Personally I like the feel of the 75. Thanks again.

Regardless of how things turn out, Kerry, bring your customer over to my place for fun and games when he is in town. Always happy to have guests. Kerry,my wife thinks I should pick up your older Iron Kiss and rebuild it a bit. Seems like a good idea to me. How say you?

Kerry, if the bull is near new condition is should sell for a near new price. $4000 is stealing IMHO. It will not hit as hard or as fast at full treadle as an Iron Kiss 125, guaranteed. And its mass ratio is not so good as the more modern Phoenix and Iron Kiss. And it is not a centered design; it is off-center like the old I-beam hammers that you are familiar with. I suspect 80-90% of a new Big Blu 155 is the highest price you can expect. I wouldn't be in a hurry to sell it at a sacrificial price. I see the economy related to blacksmithing turning for the better.

Ric, that 160 ended up down in Charlotte, NC and hopefully it continues without a problem. The guy used adequate compressor power and psi. It used a 3.25 cylinder so it needed about 150 psi to run snappily. And that is about the setting you worked with in my shop way back when. Nowadays I'd build it in octagon configuration instead of the old round tup with keys-in-keyways guides, use a 4" cylinder with customized poprts, and a better mass ratio. Ric, the 75 with an 11" stroke option ($5800 fob) is a truly superb machine in terms of all the numbers. It flat out works at pressures as low as 40 psi, more than 80 psi is too much, and is my own choice for day-to-day forging. It is sooooooo snappy. I'll have a 50 and a 75 at blacksmith days. I was also going to have a hydraulic press there but sold that a week ago. Deker will be using the 75 and Glenn Horr will be using the 50. Mark Aspery will be doing things manually. What a darn fine show the guild has lined up!!!!!!!

I think you will find a 36" height for the bottom die about right. If a little taller or shorter no big deal, but you want to work comfortably and not be bent over. As for the horizontal lamination approach, don't let it bother you. Bolted or welded will work fine, but not stacked loose. True, a one piece anvil is supposed to be the cat's meow, but for centuries dies and sow blocks have been wedged in place (a form of horizontal lamination) and have worked quite well and no one ever talks about that fact. You can include the base plate weight to the anvil weight when looking for your magic number provisded they are solidly attached together. Here is one way to figure out the number you want. If you had an ordinary anvil weighing 100 pounds and you used a guy striking with a 10 pound sledge do you suppose the anvil would seem a bit too small? I would and suspect you would, too. That's 10 to 1. You don't need fancy theory. Just use your manual blacksmithing experience as a guide and you'll get things the way you like them. 4" square stock can make a real nice hammer head. Have fun! :-)

The 2" cylinder with a 1" rod is not likely to provide you with enough area on the rod side of the piston to give good behavior, unless you run differential pressures, however I mention this only because you might consider acquiring a bigger cylinder with an air cushion built in by the manufacturer. In the meantime, you might try an inexpensive approach that should work, namely, a rubber cushion from a leaf-spring truck that keeps the suspension from bottoming out. If the hammer head hits it at least 1/2" before the cylinder tops out, and it is anchored to the hammer frame, you should have no damage. Good luck.

I very much appreciate the nice comments about me and my hammers. I set out to produce the best utility hammer on the planet in terms of every dimension that mattered. I'm there or darn close. When my smallest rtwo hammers can run on a 5 hp compressor and a 60 gallon tank without compromising your forging pace I'd say you have to look far and wide to find something better. Not to be snide, but China is a communist regime with no plans for being anything else. To me, that matters tremendously. I know Walmart is full of Chinese products. So what's the big deal? Has your standard of living gotten better or worse since trade with China mushroomed?

I seem to recall that Nathan has TWO 150s AND at least one 75. If that is true we have all three 150s accounted for.

Very nice workmanship!

In my blog #69 I've attached some pictures of my hammers, some anvil production shots, and some pictures of the delivery/demo trailer that I promised Monster Metal a while back.

Really glad you solved a lotta the problem. I've had the very same cracked tube problem and when I found it all I could do is laugh at myself for being so slow to check out an obvious thing. Ya know, behind the flywheel, outta sight, outta mind, AND I'm hard of hearing. On the stroke length thing, I betcha you can study the lever system and determine a stroke shortening experiment. For example, on the Phoenix (not the Bull) the top cross arm may have more than one hole where the back rod connects. Using more distance between the back pivot and that rod pin should do it. Again, it has been a long time since I looked at a Phoenix. If another hole is there it will only take 10 minutes to try; 20 if you have to drill a hole or two.

Tom Clark and Sahinler use 7 degree dovetail angles. I use these two different dovetail lengths on my hammers. Clark's Turkish hammers are Kuhn knock offs. Hey, Grant, I just picked up a large high quality machinist protractor. On one side the pivot is in degrees, on the other side the markings are in 1/2" per foot. Is that back in the day, or what?

Like Grant, I have not reviewed your math. No matter, your compressor is adequate. I appreciate that you could use my past info. That's why I'm here. The speed of the hammer is directly related to the speed of the shuttle in the 5-port valve. I don't really remember my attempt to help you but the advice may have been to change the shuttle valve. Cleaning it may seem to be a fix, and I've done this more than a few times, but some valves don't work as they age like they did new. I just spent about 105 for a 5-port so in the cosmic scheme of things a replacement is cheap compared to time spent trying a cheap fix. Second, I don't think the hammer was ever up to that speed. It strokes too much IMHO and thereby has high air usage. It may be slick to mimic a self-contained hammer, but then maybe not when all the effects are understood. If your shuttle moves too slow then too much air flows into the cylinder each stroke, the stroke length increases, and the beats per minute fall. In addition to old age 5-port frictions, it is possible that the air flow to the ends of the shuttle from the roller (aka trigger) valve is too impeded. I use 1/4" id hose and I suspect Phoenix uses 1/8". It may not end up making a difference, but little hose barbs, clamps, and hose are cheap. BTW, check out the roller valve to see if it is exhibiting friction so that the spring loaded flapper (as I recall) is moving too much to actuate the roller valve. The cost may be about $80. (It too is a shuttle valve but it is lever actuated/spring return whereas your big 5-port valve is air actuated/air return as I recall.) Essentially, the shuttle has to move snappily for the hammer to be snappy.

Others have said similar things about uniting presses and hammers, the presses for the bull work and the hammers for controlled drawing and planishing. The hammer weighs around 1800 pounds. That number is pretty close. Feel free to contact me via the www.ironkisshammers.com contact page.

Over at www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=710505 you can see some discussion of Iron Kiss hammers and on page 2 Rob Deker has a button to see the Octagon 50 being run by Sam Salvati, drawing down a bar of tool steel on flat dies.

I don't have to do anything to balance forces. On my blog I've discussed how I establish the lifting forces needed for a given tup weight. The push-down forces give hammering power, the more the merrier. With poorly sized cylinders the lifting piston area is simply inadequate. The Mike Linn setup shown long ago and still archived by the Alabama Forge Council saves poorly designed hammers by essentailly reducing push-down psi. By running really high pressure on the lift-up side and moderating the pressure on the push-down side you can achieve extremely snappy rebound, but your hammer actually tends to be come weaker. Far better IMHO to put a big enough bore cylinder on the machine to begin with. Generally, for a given tup weight, I think you will find that increasing cylinder bore (within reason) lowers operating pressure and (this is the big deal here) your compressor spends less time pumping air. The reduced pressure more than offsets the bigger piston's cfm demand. And this can lead you to consider using big cfm, low pressure compressors. Many guys let budget consciousness dictate the technical design issue and so they end up with low-buck, low- performance. Solve the technical problems on paper and then figure out how to pay for it. Once a hammer is running right, you won't remember the dollars you might have saved here and there. I've been down that road and can safely say that I am pretty tight with the dollar. My entire spate of grief with the first build of the 50 was caused by trying to use a reject 5-port valve with random performance problems. Many hours of shop time were spent chasing a problem caused by a $115 valve. Being cheap is not smart, usually. I'm here to testify.

Superb shop! Thanks for sharing it with us.

Nazelhammers, are you sporting a Nazel tattoo on your bicep? If so, I think I met you at Dave Fisher's PABA meeting a few years ago and then you showed me your shop and your machinist's shop.

Very nicely done video. The hammer frame and anvil are totally solid. The dies have a fullering crown so you may not have to change them at all; they'll even work with tooling more commonly identified with flat dies. Keep up the good work! :-)

I've used check valves on Iron Kiss Hammers since 1997. They do indeed tend to reduce the spikes. Mine cost about $70 each and have needed durability. Others have used them as well. Congratulations on recognizing that the inertial movements of the tup cause the tup cylinders to be pumps once the shuttle valves have moved. You are exactly correct that the effect is meaningful, though subtle. There are others who have advocated using the check valves, for example Mike Linn of the Alabama Forge Council. It would be very interesting to hear more about your hammer's conmtrol features and how you achieved them. Thanks. Sounds so far like you've really donme some serious design thinking.

An advantage of the new Kinyon design, and also of the Phoenix design, is that the piston area for lifting the tup is not reduced by the area of the rod. I am reluctant to criticize the spring idea of Ron Kinyon if it doesn't kink where the cylinder rod attaches. I thought the picture of the one taken to ABANA Seattle showed such a problem. I have never broken a cylinder rod. But hey stuff happens. It could easily happen. I have had an NFPA clevise break and from that point on I avoided cast iron clevises. Shop-made steel clevises have never failed me. I no longer use clevises per se. The two-axis top mount comes close, though. I have had one ball connector fail, but the cause will never be known. I can only do machining that minimizes stress risers. Power hammer try their best to rip themselves apart. Any looseness becomes worse over time. Should a connection start to flex away from vertical, it will bend-flex-crack-fail eventually. Vertical alignment of everything seems pretty important to me, even though helve hammers have been hugely successful through a very long span of time. I just came off a week end of guys using my Octagon 50 for all it was capable of doing. I kept thinking how Jesse James and Grant Sarver have shown how their monster machines cog down big stock rather effortlessly. Highly stressed small hammers cannot possibly be as durable as big old hunkers that aren't pushed to their limits.

I sure am glad we got the picure. Learning more about these hammers would be fabulous. Having an owner of one participate in this industrial archaeology would be icing on the cake.

In my opinion a jointed cylinder is better than a solidly mounted cylinder. Massive old steam hammers without joints seem to have worked, however. Without adequate alignment precision there will be problems. I have used spherical rod ends and found the body stretched and the ball became loose. Heavier duty spherical rod ends can be used with less or no stretching. But you still have the tolerances between the cross-bolt and the bore of the ball which allow click-clack noises. I've never cared for that noise. I eliminate it in my joints. I use a 2" ball on the end of the cylinder rod and capture it between two hemisphers that can be bolted together to eliminate all slop. On the top of the cylinder I use a 2-axis pivot analogoue to a truck U-joint where again tight bolting eliminates slop. My joints offer flexibility, but they are quite stiff. In personal conversation with Ron Kinyon he said that the life of one of the flexible alignment couplers is limited. Also they are quite a loose joint and the click-clack noise can be an issue, at least eventually. Under reciprocation, there are forces that try to unscrew cylinder rods. I now use factory pinned pistons and C-clip the rod to its mount.

It is not at all commonly agreed that mechanical hammers hit harder than air hammers. It is too broad a statement. Some mechanicals hit harder than others, ditto air hammers.