JNewman

I just checked EMJ's stock list. They have no plate but do have 1/4" x 4" and 1/4" x 5" 4140. I don't know where it is stocked they list 4400lb as being regional to me. If you don't have an account and are not looking at $500 or more they are not likely to be willing to talk to you. You are probably best to talk to a local machine shop that has an account with them and order though them.

Finkel has 4340 plate but I don't think they would have it that thin. How wide and flat do you need it?

Ken sells a kit to convert your hammer to a steam hammer valving system http://www.kensiron.com/controlkit.html . One of these days I think I am going to buy one of his kits even though I have pretty good control on my Kinyon style hammer. It is going to be a while though, I just bought another major piece of machinery for my shop and I also have a customer who owes me for about 4 months work and I am not sure I am going to get paid.

I have done the same thing without the carbon paper and I am able to see where the dies are hitting as well. You can easily see the difference in the paper where the dies are hitting.

That would look nice next to its only slightly bigger brother in my shop. Is that a 2Cwt or a 3Cwt?

It was the OP who mentioned 3/4" legs. I just checked and a 36" dia disk of steel or iron that is 300lb is just over an inch thick. I think a number of us myself included were thinking thicker. With it that thin Imight rivet the legs on or mortice and tenon them on. One advantage of bolting is it is easier to move the table for installation.

I have made patterns for gears that were to be cast in steel but I have also made patterns for iron gear blanks. I turned one about a year ago that was over 5' diameter that was being cast in iron. I agree to either build a frame and or bolt it to the legs. With 300 lb I would be going with a much heavier leg than 3/4" round. Any time I am building anything that failure could death injury or property damage. I either want an engineered drawing or I am going to WAY over build it. I would be thinking 1.5" round or square. The other concern is what happens to the floor with 300lb on 3 small legs.

I am assuming you are thinking of doing an iron smelt. You might talk to Darrell Markewitz about this. He has done a number of smelts and has done some local ore searches.

There are spring swages for bamboo

I think it is going to be tough to forge 1.5" h13 with a striker. By yourself I think it will be a real struggle. I have welded handles and or mild steel springs onto both 4140 and H13. I preheat the tool and then weld. If the tool is used a lot the spring often breaks but almost always the weld is not what fails. The handle or spring is usually what breaks beside the weld. I am talking about power hammer tooling though which sees thousands of blows. You would have to use a tool an awful lot by hand to get the same problems

I do use pickups to drag things out of the gas forge so I can get the v bit or round tongs around them. Often there is not enough room to fit the larger tongs in, especially when I have multiple irons in the fire. If the work is entirely on the powerhammer dies I will use pickups to forge with. If the work is hanging off the edge of the dies it it not really safe to use them to forge with.

You should try Metal Supermarkets. I have a cheaper source but you would have to buy a full length. I have a length of 1" and would sell a piece of it but don't have anything but small pieces of larger stock except for a 24" piece of 5" round.

How much are you looking for? What sizes? and most importantly where in Canada? We are the second largest country in the world by area.

Looks good. The low spot you have there is a shrink. You may have an internal void as well. You could have prevented it with a riser except it sounds like you didn't have a big enough crucible and you would have had trouble fitting it in that flask unless you just stuck it on the top.

I do remember Grant recommending that method for your hammer punches but had forgotten it. i know the he recommended a fan many years ago on Keenjunk, i will have to try oil next time I use some H13. I did just find this thread which has a lot of good info. http://www.iforgeiron.com/topic/17430-h13-question/

Thanks Neil and Kyboy. The $234 cone is the one that Centaur used to sell. The base diameter is slightly larger but I found the angle was a little steep.

I agree soaking at heat is better and following the proper HT methods will give you best results. Which is why for work that is going to customers I often send work to a HT shop. They have huge salt pots and vacuum furnaces and can prevent the decarb that can come with long soaking at high temperatures

I am cutting surplus material off the ends so i end up with a consistent product. I do have things I forge extra material out to eliminate the forming of fish lips, I then cut off the extra material. I have other things I hot cut in half to make 2 parts. This leaves me with a conical end on the stock which prevents any folding over. Just hitting the ends in can be difficult when you are working with 2-3" alloy steels. All of these jobs are done entirely with power hammers and presses the material just does not move enough by hand. I have 5 gallons of the Henkel product and I do use it for some things and often use the graphite oil mixture until the tool heats up enough to use the Henkel stuff. I have a job I just finished where I was pushing 2 different shaped bolsters together with a press to straighten the work flatten the one face and upset the material slightly between the bolsters. The bolsters are both hardened 4140 and was having problems with galling between the work and the one bolster leaving metal deposited on the bolster. On some pieces where there was a bit of a twist or bend in the piece the hot work scrubbed against the bolster and this is where I often had the galling. I used the Henkel product and found I was getting more galling than I was with the graphite oil mixture. Maybe I don't have the henkel stuff mixed rich enough. I used 1 1/2 large paper coffee cups worth of the chemical in a garden sprayer with the rest water. It is the colour of canned iced tea or weak coffee. For a lot of the open die tools I use the henkel stuff cools the tool enough that it can be hard to keep them hot enough to flash off the water.

Ductile iron will ring as will steel. You will not be able to tell the difference between ductile or steel by the as cast finish. Gray iron does flow better than steel or ductile and is easier to get a better finish both due to fluidity and the fact it pours at a lower temperature than steel. It can be cast in much thinner sections than steel or ductile can. Ductile is in between steel and gray as far as fluidity goes and does pour at a lower temperature than steel. Steel is the hardest to get fine detail on. However there are lots of other things that impact on finish such as the quality of the sand, the binder used, washes used, moulding method used and the metallurgy of the heat. I would say the two cones are the same. I doubt you would ever wear out a ductile iron cone mandrel unless you were using it to make thousands of the same piece over and over. In which case you would hopefully have enough profit to be able to buy a new one or make some dedicated tooling. Full disclosure, I supply Blacksmith Depot with ductile iron cone mandrels and am currently forging 4140 smaller cone mandrels for them.

I use the heat treating method Grant posted on Keenjunk many years ago. Heat it to yellow and let cool in air, if it is not really thin I either wave around or put in front of a fan. Once it is cool enough to touch I temper it to where you can just barely see a red tinge when held in the shadows (under the forge or in the dark corner of the shop). H13 is odd in that it actually gets harder with that temper. I never bother with any sort of normalizing. I cool it in water in use as long as it is not hot enough to have colour in it. I have found that it is often hard enough for hot work without the tempering but it can also be used for cold work as well if tempered. The heat treaters guide calls for Austenitizing at 1825-1905 but calls for soaking. The higher temperature helps to compensate for the lack of soaking.

I just put some square holes 3/4" and 1" through some pieces of 4340 and 4140. The method I used was. Drop off at the wire edm shop. Pick up from the wire edm shop. Mail a cheque to the wire edm shop. I went with this method because the bolsters I was making were going to be used for 100s of tools and I wanted to make sure the hole was the right size and perfectly perpendicular to the faces. As well 2 of the tools needed machining after the hole was put in and I have never had great luck with annealing 4340 in vermiculite and machining setup was much easier without the distortion from forging.

I am forging a bunch of tools right now and one of the last steps is to nip off the cutting edge. I have my small hydraulic press set up with top and bottom 90degree cutting edges. The edge is only just over 1/8" thick but is 2" wide. I can easily cut 1" square in one shot with this setup but the extra width and the fact the heat dissipates so fast because they are so thin, I need a really good heat to cut these off in the thin narrow pieces and even then I have to bend them back and forth a couple of times or quench them and break it off. After the first 75 or so I decided to try lubricating the cutting edges with a mixture of oil and graphite. Now some of them pop right and the rest break off with a hammer blow or two. It is amazing the difference the lubrication makes.

It depends on what you are using to hit the tool as well as the profile of the tool. For swages and large radius fullers used under a hand hammer or treadle hammer you can get a fair life out of mild steel tools. You might even get a decent life out of them on a small power hammer or used with a striker. Anything with sharper edges needs to be a higher carbon steel. As well a large power hammer will quickly destroy just about any mild steel tool unless they are used gently for minimal use.

While fast and powerful are both good things. As a bending press slower and less powerful are sometimes as important. My horizontal bender is adjustable for speed and I will slow it right down for one offs and setting up the limit switches. It has electrically operated valves so they are either open or closed a manual valve does allow feathering for sneaking up on a bend. I have a press that is only 8-10ton but is fast. I do hot bending jobs in it but if it had high tonnage after the bending was done it might start forging the bar. The bending dies are forged and sometimes fabricated swages and don't bottom out perfectly and would have to be built much heavier if they were used on a 100 ton press. I wish my horizontal press had easily adjustable pressure and it is something I may add in the future. I have to be careful when it bottoms out as it will crush stock and I don't like the way it bends the pins (not permanently) The adjustable pressure is something the newer versions of my press has. For repetitive work limit switches are really useful and allow you to use high speed all the way and means your tooling can be much simpler as you don't always need to build in stops.

Was cooling my tongs in my slack tub today, the water is getting a little low and while I was swirling them around I hit something. So I grabbed it with the tongs and found the cordless phone I have been looking for for the last few weeks. No wonder the paging didn't work.