JNewman

A Treadle hammer is a great tool for single blows with fair bit of power for light swaging that you could not do with a hand hammer. They are also great for the fact that it frees up your hands to hold top tooling. I built one and used it quite a bit over the years but I ran out of room in my shop and it had to go. Now that I have room again I may build one again. But don't make the same mistake i and many others have made. A treadle hammer is not a power hammer. If you use a peen and the corner of the anvil you can draw steel out as quickly or likely quicker than you can using fuller dies on the treadle hammer. If you want a tool for chisel work or occasional top tool work, or slow very controllable heavy blows, build a treadle hammer, if you want to draw out faster build a tire hammer, air hammer or buy a power hammer. For 2 reasons I suspect a hammer using a mechanical advantage would actually do less work. A hammer is not a press, the inertia is doing the work, a mechanical advantage is going to slow down your blow which will lessen the blow. The other reason is extra linkages guides etc add friction robbing your blow of power. My treadle hammer was a simple swing arm type. I used an inline type treadle hammer at a school and was surprised at how much less power it had. It was not the Clay Spencer type with the wheels which would have reduced the losses but I suspect it would still hit less hard than a swing arm type.

http://www.ontarioblacksmiths.ca/ Come out to a meeting.

I am in Hamilton an hour away (assuming no traffic) Have you joined The Ontario Artist Blacksmith Association? There are a number of OABA members in Toronto. We have a meeting next weekend in Collingwood.

There are a couple of places around here that have huge furnaces but they do water or polymer quenching. The parts I am going to continue to send out are only 1" dia so the one place that will heat treat up to 82' long x 21' wide (they have smaller furnaces as well) felt they could not get them from the furnace to their quench tank fast enough. I would love to bring them in house as well and if the right furnace came up for the right price I might consider it as the place I have to send them has a terrible turnaround and has a high minimum charge.

I will just use the parallel side. and may may use test coupons as well. I have sent test coupons to heat treaters in the past. I will not be guaranteeing these to any spec as my customer's requirements do not mention any inspection criteria. The certs I currently get from 2 of the 2 heat treaters I use do not reference any specs I assume because I have not asked for then to be. I have had other more critical parts done to DIN specs in the past but at this point I would still send out these more critical type parts. I have other parts that I have to continue sending out as they are 4' and 6' long and have to be oil quenched and I have no way of reliably heating bars that long all at once. I actually had a hard time finding a heat treater who could oil quench the 6' bars. I had to call over a dozen different heat treaters to find one that could do it.

Thanks for the information on the adjustment tables for round items. I couldn't find one at the link but I found one elsewhere. The drills were 5/16 and 11/32 so i had to add between 3.5 and 2.5 to my results, still softer than I would expect but better. I will print off the chart and keep it with the tester. I have a set of the hardness files shown but they are a little more subjective in use and give a range not a specific number for my customer As well they are starting to wear out. The parts I will be testing have a tapered side and a parallel side so I will be testing on the parallel side. If I use a tapered block between the anvil and the tapered side of what I am testing so the top of what I am testing is parallel with the top of the anvil will that give me a reliable result on the tapered side? I am going to have to make a stand for the end of the piece I am testing to ensure it is flat on the anvil.

I just picked up a new to me Rockwell hardness tester today because I am planning on doing more of my own heat treating. The things I most want to bring in house require hardness testing results submitted to the customer with the parts.. After checking the calibration with the test blocks, I was eager to try the tester out on something so I tested a couple of things around the shop. I was surprised how soft a number of things were. A piece of mild steel did not even register on the RC scale I would have had to use the B Brailer and weights. I then tested a couple of drill bits. Hardware store drill bits were only 38RC and some good quality were about 42. I wondered if it was the fact I was measuring the shank rather than the tip so I measured on the web near the tip and I got the same results. I checked a Sorby chisel that I bought when I started my patternmaking apprenticeship it was only 29RC!! It is about 2" shorter than when I bought it due to sharpening so it may have only been fully sharpened at the end. I think I will be re hardening it. I have an old Marples gouge that is a favorite of mine it tested at 62RC and a solid carbide end mill was 75RC so not everything I tested was softer than I expected. The results were very interesting and I can see how having a better idea of the actual hardness of things will be useful going forward.

5CWT Massey. Falling weight is 600lb. Roughing it down I am just tapping with the hammer but when flattening with the taper dies I am hitting pretty hard forging that large an area all at once takes a fair bit of power. I am surprised at the amount of scale coming off roughing. It does not look like much from my viewpoint when forging.

4140

Here is a video a friend filmed of me forging hardies.

Yes I would really like to see some movement on this. it seems a waste all the work Josh put into it and now it has just stalled.

Biggest I have done much of by hand without a striker is was 1" but Allen is right 1" was too big. Biggest at all was drawing out a stainless steel half ring it was about 2 1/4" thick by 7 or 8" and the diameter of the ring was around 36" . It had been a seamless ring that a machine shop had cut in half and machined a job out of. They discovered the other job they wanted to make out of the ring was about 195 degrees of the ring but not as wide as the ring was. I had to draw the ring out longer but narrower. They had minimal machining top and bottom so I could only forge out any upsetting in the height. I turned the job down at first then figured out how to do it and took it on. Delivery for a new ring was 8-10 weeks and the job was needed right away. I charged almost as much as a new ring would have cost including material. The first day I forged it by myself, using my forklift to take it from forge to my horizontal press to draw it out with 2 fullering dies. Unfortunately I lost too much heat of my in the time moving from forge to press and I did not get as much done as I had hoped. The second day I had another smith come and help me and we lifted it in and out by hand to finish on the press and then forge out the upset edges under the hammer. We used tongs on the 2 ends of the ring and used a piece of pipe as a porter bar to support most of the weight. When I was done it went for rough machining then heat treat then finish machining and finally mag particle and possibly xray as it was going in a steam turbine.

When is the jib crane going in? I wish I had put one in when I installed my hammer but then I wonder if I want to forge things that heavy.

I deal with several foundries on a regular basis and occasionally quote on making styrofoam patterns and none of them do anything but pull/dig them out. The gating for the castings is usually done as separate pieces from the pattern, If the pattern is mounted on cope and drag boards or a matchplate the gating will be mounted as well but they are normally separate pieces so they can be changed easily. . Every Foundry I have ever dealt with has their own ideas about gating and risering. I have made hundreds if not thousands of moulds for making duplicate patterns over the years that are just like those moulds. They are not finished around the outside because they are just for use inside the pattern shop for likely a one time use.

Could not post this in the other thread Lost styrofoam is good for very high volume parts like your manifold where they make aluminum moulds for the styrofoam. It is also good for big one off castings, but for the one off castings where the styrofoam is machined to shape the surface finish is not as good as a conventional pattern. The larger styrofoam patterns are also actually pulled out of the sand rather than having the metal poured on the styrofoam due to the fumes and gasses from burning the styrofoam. The high volume shops can capture the fumes because they are pouring in a small area and then the moulds go down a conveyor of some sort to cool. I tried to merge the threads, but I can not locate any threads titled "fiber glass pattern",... I accidently found it , If people would at least attempt to help themselves it would make our jobs easier, the title used here has absolutely nothing to do with the title of the target thread. How can you expect any of us to know what you were thinking, next time I wont bother. there are way too many important thing needing done.

The white fiberglass is a mould for making a fiberglass, cast epoxy or urethane pattern. A wooden pattern will not stand up as well for higher volume parts as a plastic pattern will. I had a long post with way more information about master patterns aluminum patterns and plastic patterns but it disappeared when I hit submit

I used to post over on Keenjunk and then on Forgemagic.

Here is hold down that takes pretty much no work to make and I liked more than any other I have used. Take a stand or saw horse that is the same height as your anvil plus the thickness of the steel you are working (roughly) and place it a couple of feet from your anvil. If using a sawhorse shims and some nails or screws are your friend here. Then take a piece of heavy square or rectangular bar and lay it across between the anvil and stand, hang a heavy weight (40-50lb) from the bar. The closer you can hang the weight as a percentage of the length of the bar the more it holds. If you want to get fancy you can forge a v or bend in the end of the bar you are using to clamp. To use the hold down you just lift the bar and set it on your work it is less prone to vibrating loose than the J shaped types of hold down and it is really fast to set as you are just setting the bar down not hammering screwing or stepping into a stirrup. In most shops you could make up this hold down in 5-10 minutes and it will work with any anvil. I saw hold down illustrated in some newsletter or magazine, I forget where but it is really handy.

Theoretically there is a small section in the transition between the hardened tip at 50-55 RC and the rest of the bar that is pre hardened to 35 RC that is tempered softer but effectively it has not caused any sort of problem in the over 2000 bars I have forged for a steel mill using the outside heat treater. Using the pre hard material with the forged and hardened tip was specified by the head metallurgist of a large multinational steel manufacturer. Grant Sarver also used to talk about keeping a short heat on breaker points when re sharpening them so as not to mess up the heat treat on the rest of the bar. http://www.iforgeiron.com/topic/11861-paving-breaker-forging-amp-heat-treating-101/#comment-153804 Thanks for all the replies it sounds like I would be OK but I am really hoping to talk to someone who is using Low temp salts. I will look up and try calling Jerry Larsen a call once the holidays are over, thanks for the name.

Does having a Nitrate based low temperature salt pot in the shop increase corrosion in the shop? I am reading conflicting things about this online, but I wonder if some of this is nitrate vs chloride type salts? Now that I have some more space in my shop I want to bring some of the heat treating I currently send out back into the shop. The one I want to bring in the most is heat treating the pry bars I forge in the shop. I want to austemper them in salt right after forging them. The reason I want to do that is they are forged from Pre hardened 4340 (around 35RC). The end that is forged has to be hardened to 50-55 RC. I keep a short heat while forging so I don't further temper the length of the bar. I have to certify that they are between 50 and 55 on the end so I need a consistent tempering process and I have to buy a Rockwell tester. A Ht furnace is not a good solution because I am only tempering the ends of 6' and 4' bars. Keeping the internal temperature of the furnace consistent would be difficult while keeping the door open. This is why I am thinking Salt is the best solution. But if it will cause corrosion in the shop I cannot do this as I store a lot of raw castings in the shop that I don't want rusting .

Three things cause fishmouthing working too cold, blows too light or working too close to the edge with straight down blows. The first 2 things cause you to move the outside of the Nothing is worse when rough shaping a piece than light taps with not enough heat. As others have said work the corners in first, but make sure you do that with solid blows and with a good heat. A couple of good blows then flatten maybe a couple more corner blows then back in the fire. When you are cutting your stock you can cut enough for 2 blades then either cut the stock in half on an angle or hot cut it. That way you are pre forming your steel but not wasting any. When you forge the end of the bar in like that you are actually upsetting as you thicken the bar while making it narrower. That bar looks like it exceeds the 3:1 rule for upsetting which can make it difficult to forge in the taper that way on a flat bar.

Here is a link to my description of the Massey t bolts. As well lots of good information on foundations for hammers, mostly larger than yours but still good information. http://www.iforgeiron.com/topic/35178-preparing-to-install-my-massey-3cwt/

Look up the Massey anchoring system. It has been described here by me and I think Allen has posted a Massey installation guide. i don't have proof but I suspect most mechanical anchor bolts will fail eventually on a hammer. The advantages of the Massey system are the fact you are not trying to set the hammer over raised bolts, there is some adjustability, and if you ever have a bolt fail it is relatively easy to replace the bolt.

Re read Grant's post. Letting the points air cool allows the heat in the tip to soften up the shank. I have not had any complaints of tools breaking using Grant's technique. I have only done a few hundred breaker points as there is a shop about an hour away that sharpens bits for $3.50 and picks up and delivers for that price for large users. I have other forging work that is more lucrative (some not so much) so I have not chased the breaker point work aggressively.

Read this thread started by the late Grant Sarver. He owned a forging business and after retiring, did consulting for breaker point manufacturers. http://www.iforgeiron.com/topic/11861-paving-breaker-forging-amp-heat-treating-101/#comment-153804