John Larson

The hammer linkage and the hammer's operation are very sweet, indeed. FWIW, I saw an historic pump linkage of this sort, nearly identical, on a water pump in the museum of the Tuckahoe Steam Museum near Easton, MD. I took pictures (that are now hard to locate) with intentions of building a treadle hammer using the ideas. Now you've saved me the trouble of reverse engineering. I can steal your ideas directly. :-) Thanks in advance. :-))

I like your drop-out port on the anvil tube.

Just open the hand valve slightly at first as if just barely pressing the treadle under usual conditions. If your dies bang together then they bang together under your usual conditions, and I doubt you have your machine set to do that. So there should be no problem. If you want to play with hot metal, just get somebody to assist. If there is little difference, then you'll sense it, just as if there is substantial difference. No stop watch work needed. You can be the judge.

I used a test today to satisfy myself that my Iron Kiss hammers work best on a throttled exhaust as opposed to a throttled inflow of pressurized air. You can do the same test on your exhaust throttled machine. Your results may differ from mine. With the inlet air hand valve turned off, I blocked the treadle so that it was down. Then I started to turn on air inflow using the hand valve as a throttle. And, of course, the hammer reciprocated. All the variations of the exercise showed me that air-inflow throttling does not produce as crisp a hammer blow as air-outflow throttling does. Try it and see what you think. [i use very responsive Nugget 500 spool valves with air-actuation and spring return.]

Nazel and Hazel ought to be pronounced the same, probably, but like so many words it depends upon the social group and the time and place.

Thanks, Ken.

Thanks for the reply, Ken. I know you are busy. But I'd like to learn a bit more. I still don't grasp why you need the dump valves given that the cylinder can exhaust through the spool valve exhaust port. My logic says the spool valve dump port ought to work without the dump valves. I suspect the dump valves are faster, but why is that important? Are there other reasons? Thanks for the clarification about the spool movement extent versus its speed of movement with respect to the slot setting. I figured that when set all the way in the spool wouldn't move far enough to enable reciprocation, that is, the treadle hammer setting is not a reciprocating setting.

Thanks Phil for mentioning my quest. Fact is, it is the "quest to be best" that gets me through the day, the week, and the years of building these machines. Forging is far more interesting and fun than machine work and fabrication and even welding. I have no aspiration to do professional forging; never have had that bug.

Let me add a few comments intended to be totally positive, lest anyone think otherwise. First of all Ken I admire your work, no doubt about that at all. When we spoke once on the phone months ago I remarked to that effect and to how you were one of the very few people who could claim extensive steam hammer experience and know in that way what you wanted to accomplish with your own variation of steam hammer valve linkage. Grant Sarver was my friend and mentor to some degree for many years. It was clear he respected what you have accomplished,especially given his steam hammer experience. Secondly, I also respect John N who has been advisory to me and who I know has much experience with a wide variety of machines. I very much understand pros and cons of back pressure control. He has spoken to me via e-mail about his instrumentation to tune up industrial machines for higher efficiency. Third, back in '96 or '97 I did experimentation on air-inflow-throttling versus air-outflow-throttling, and also using 3-position versus 2-position spool valves. My experimentation was undoubtedly less extensive than I would do today, but I learned to my satisfaction at that time that inflow-throttling gave me less snappiness and control than air-outflow-throttling. A friend uses inflow throttling but he too has less snap and control than he could achieve if he switched to backpressure Kinyon style throttling. So, Ken, your results are definitely eye opening and as an air hammer designer and steam hammer reverse engineer you get an "A+". I believe that the slotted arm in your spool valve control linkage has allowed finding a sweet spot for reciprocation behavior that my research could have certainly benefitted from 15 years or so ago. Fourth, setting your air inflow valve to a constant position is pretty consistent with the constant pumping cadence of a self-contained hammer. It is a tuning feature given your linkage controlled reciprocation. That you are moving the linkage pivot up and down by treadle position obviously works great, though to call it throttling is not quite accurate. Actuation control, maybe is a better phrase. Even a self-contained hammer uses bleed off of pumped air--a form of back pressure controil--to throttle. Position of your manually adjustable pivot pin in the slot affects amount of spool movement and hence inherent reciprocation stroke length, air flow, and tup beats per unit of time. That is more stroke tuning than throttling, I guess. Finally, I look forward to your reply.

I look forward to the video material. On your web site your kit shows a pair of dump valves and your spool valve also has a muffler on the exhaust port. Can you explain your exhaust plumbing a bit please?

John Nicholson, utility hammers and self contained hammers will use pretty much the same "silly" amount of air for a given amount of work. Square inches of piston area, pressure of the working air, length of piston stroke, and speed of piston movement pretty much make hammer physics what they are. There are no free lunches here.

I shipped the Octagon 150 today. I also received word that the 200's customer has located a tall enough box truck to be able to ship it standing up on the heavy duty pallet (crated). Most of the weight is in the bottom 3 feet, so stability is not much of an issue. This project has definitely been a long one, but when several waiting for parts and research episodes are deleted the construction time is quite reasonable. Nevertheless, big hammers take much longer than the Octagon 50s and 75s.

I machine my wedges out of 4140 using the same master taper gauge for all the wedges, and use it to set the taper on the sowblock dovetail pin as well. I heat to high red and let cool to normalize, a good practice after machining. Then heat to orange and oil quench. I temper them at 400 degrees F for a half hour. The ends do not mushroom, which is why the wedges are heat treated.

This 200 doesn't have tup-up-at-idle. I use a little Humphrey 3-port valve to actuate the feature and it did not flow enough air for this hammer's trigger circuits. Also, I wanted the initial light reciprocation when the treadle is touched lightly and that would not be there with tup-up-at-idle because the throttle valve would be opened slightly to exhaust upper chamber air when the treadle is released to actuate a bigger version of the Humphrey valve. I decided it is not a needed feature; I built hammers for a long time before I added the feature. A 20 hp Quincy reciprocating air compressor drives the machine for continuous forging. The 5" cylinder is large enough to permit top performance at 40 to 60 psi. All the lines are 1". I tested with an auxilliary compressor on several occasions. Before I installed the poppet valve and was using a large spool valve it used much more air and the auxilliary compressor was needed. The poppet valve is a much faster acting valve and the inherent stroke length of the hammer head is shorter, hence using less air per blow. The 150 uses a spool valve, but smaller than the one I tried on the 200, and as you can see it works great. It would not work with the much bigger cylinder on the 200. Much, much time went into development of the 200's air system. The 200 can be available if anyone else wants one.

Duh! Here are the other addresses in a sequence of posts. http://youtu.be/Od68oAofqbs

I folled my own advice and it didn't work. So try http://youtu.be/Z7GPBam0Gx4 and you'll find the other 5 videos from Firday there as we...

Dave finished the video production work and has them on youtube. I don't know the IFI policvy on posting addresses, but you should be able to look for iron kiss hammers to find the bunch of them from last Friday, plus others. The 200 is awesome.

One important additional point to make. When you guys watch the videos note that the machines are pretty solid in their stance. Neither one budged all day. Heck the 200 hasn't budged ever since I set it down weeks ago. I firmly believe in the 20:1 mass ratio and the rather firm 3/4" plywood between the base plate and the concrete floor. Dave has mentioned he'll be finishing the video editing and formatting work over the next week or maybe a bit longer. I'm as anxious to see them as you guys are.

Friday I had my buddies Dave Hammer and Rob "Deker" Dekelbaum over to run the Octagon 150 and the custom 200 for filming for near-future showing on YouTube. The 150 ran pretty much as these guys expected, having run this size of my machines before. On the 200 their eyes widened as it handled Deker's billets in one heat where the 150 used two heats. They each gave it a thumbs up. Not only is the falling weight bigger, the cylinder is a 5" bore instead of a 4" bore for greater pneumatic effect. Usually, I've been told, a 200 is rated to do 4" stock. So I had a 4x4x4 chunk on a long handle and took it to 3x3x7 in one heat. It could have gone longer but I accidentally hurt the handle and had to stop. There was very little fish mouthing so that it was hitting penetrating blows as desired. The dies were 6.5"x2.375" S7 Brian Russell combination dies, the biggest he makes for Sahinler. Had I used full length fullering dies the outcome would have been more impressive. I also did a rr spike "knife" and at the end held it edgewise vertical lengthwise with very light taps to demo the super control of this machine. Even Nazel guy Dave Hammer was impressed. This work was done using only my 20 HP Quincy shop air compressor with the regulator set at 80 psi and it ran sustained at 50 to 60 psi. That is almost the low pressure territory of the old steam hammers. Fearing the pressure would drop below 40 psi, I had a 10 hp auxilliary compressor running, but I had forgotten to turn on the ball valve into the main line. Hence the finding on the adequacy of the 20 hp Quincy was serendipitous. When the video material is accessible I'll be letting you know. Being that this 200 is a new size for Iron Kiss, I'm a very happy guy.

I was thinking of basher's pics of the alldays and onion hammers. But there is also a british self contained that has an inclined power cylinder. However I do not know its name anymore and whether or not its tup has a pressurized underside. Also, quite a long time ago Grant Sarver said he had a friend with a 700 pound self-contained Williams and White. John Larson

No pictures I'm afraid, no camera at hand. The smith did turn it on for me but no demo other than clamp mode. Reflecting back I suspect the "smith" was not really a hammer man nor much into blacksmithing per se. (The dies were loose and he seemed to ignore the fact.) More into the forging of large bent objects on the platen floor in front of the mammoth gas furnace. But I have no way of knowing. He did say that blacksmithing in ship building is very different from other places. I think there may be pictures of another such machine here from months back with some disassembly shots.

Today a friend took me to the U.S. Coast Guard Shipyard in Baltimore. He wanted me to see the blacksmith shop. It is now seldom used. Mostly it supports a tool making role for the huge floor of welding platens that is used for shaping large ribs and such which are heated in a gas forge about the size of a one-car garage, and then bent to shape by hand using lever-type persuaders that pivot on pins inserted in to the platen holes and against forms pinned to the platens--think of a scrolling jig. In the blacksmith shop is a 1938 Williams and White 400 pound self-contained hammer made in Moline, Illinois. The tup is about 12" in diameter and the stroke about 9". The flat dies in it are 5" x 11". The top die recedes into the bore when idling. The tup is round with a V-groove on each side to keep it from rotating. The front half of the cylinder for the tup is joined to the back half (integral with the cast iron main hammer body) with four bolts on each side facing forward. There are three smaller bolts on each side that may be for tensioning the guides into those grooves. It appears to be a design that uses air flows only at the top side of the tup so that it is "sucked up and blown down". The power cylinder is inclined toward the tup cylinder and (based upon casting dimensions) of about the same bore size as the tup. The huge motor (about 18" in diameter) drives a 6 V-belt drive along the driver side of the hammer and the driven pulley is 3' or more in diameter. There may be an equal diameter flywheel on the other side of the hammer (under a metal shield). Both extend below floor level. A lever moves a rotating head on top of the power cylinder to achieve a clamping function and normal operation employs a foot treadle independent of that lever. The anvil is round, maybe 15" in diameter, extending below the floor, and clamped to main hammer body in a very precise way (no wood shims, etc.). Bottom die height is about 24". Condition of the dies and sow block and wedges suggests the machine has not seen hard use.