Alan Evans

@Beth, In the interests of not hijacking Ian's thread I have started another in 'everything else' to debate the identity of blacksmiths, parrots, Michael and things Glossurr!

I also have no intention of hijacking your visitors either!...my offer was prompted by yours. I thought if they were going to be in Gloucestershire visiting you they could improve their FPM (forges per mile) average by visiting here as well.

Hi Beth, ahh those parrots. They are just across the road at my exotic friend and neighbour Mark Anderson, he is referred to as Dodgy Mark by everybody around here for some reason. They will definitely be for sale, I will ask him where they came from and how much he wants for them if you like.



Strangely although I had noticed the splash of colour I had not looked closely enough to identify them. A few months ago he had a whole herd of full size cows, a flock of sheep and some pigs. Last time I moved something for him with the forklift it was the cockpit section of jet plane fuselage, the time before that it was a red telephone kiosk and before that it was a stone trough, interesting man!

Yes, I did attend Michael's gold medal award ceremony, it was very moving, a special day for a special bloke, we were all in tears!

Herewith the spreadsheet if I can work out how to attach it to the post. Ah bother, it comes up saying "Error You aren't permitted to upload this type of file" any ideas anyone? Looks like only images allowed. I think I will have to add screen shots and paste in the actual formulae, see below.
I can email the .xls file or a .csv if you send me a PM.

It will work with any units, provided you are consistent! mm cm metres or inches

The titles should be fairly self explanatory. It calculates the frustrum of a cone or pyramid, frustum means flat topped. You put in the surface area of the TOP end and the surface area of the BASE and the length/HEIGHT. The formula calculates the VOLUME of the frustrum/taper and then the next row shows the length of bar of the base area dimension required to get the taper out of.

In the PARENT BAR row you have to enter the cross sectional area of the bar you are starting with in cases where this is not the same as the base area of the taper. Say you start from 60mm square which then steps down to 50mm square parallel for a section and then goes into a taper to 30mm, so you would put in B4/360 or B4/36 if using cm.

The last two rows show the weight of the taper volume in kilos depending whether you used mm or cm. This is the only time I ever use cm because it keeps the numbers more manageable. I have not worked out the multiplier for inches/lbs but I am sure one of you will be capable if you need it.

Using any form of calculation for forge work has necessarily an element of fudgery! You might need to allow a bit extra for oxidisation / heat loss depending on the atmosphere and speed of your furnace or fire; either a powerful carburising or neutral atmosphere fast heating furnace or having to take lots and lots of slow heats in a hand cranked coke hearth.... If you can do it all in one heat because you have a huge powerhammer...

The other thing this formula does is remind you of the different type of tapers available and their characters. The formula calculates a straight taper, straight sided. If you forge an elegant hollow sided taper from the volume it will obviously come out longer, if you forge a stubby cigar shaped / full sided taper it will come out shorter. I find that if I am going to subsequently bend or form the taper a straight sided one seems to work best, the eye moves along it at a uniform speed.

This is the formula from cell B4 =B3*(B1+SQRT(B1*B2)+B2)/3

The screen grabs show the highlighted cell contents in the formula bar below







What a pallaver for a simple spreadsheet...digital life rules!

I can take neither the credit nor the blame! Where are they?

blackersmith - i know whiteway - doesnt alan evans live/work there?

I might do!

So, how do I tenon and rivet both ends without destroying the second end? (I thought of assembling all the bottoms then all the tops, but the railing becomes too awkward to get into the fire and back to the anvil etc. )

Thanks again!

Your problem is that you tried to form the tenon by just thumping the baluster into a monkey tool from the outset. At no time do you have to hit the end of the baluster.

You tenon both ends by forging them from the side in swage tools, truing up the shoulder with a monkey tool or file. In fact you could just form them with a file any way, you hardly need any shoulder. To true up the shoulder you can just hold the baluster against your thigh and poke the tenon into a monkey tool laying on the anvil then hit the end of the monkey tool.

blackersmith - many voices :) - my workshop is shurdington - thats got to be near you.....

Home is 11 miles, forge at Whiteway is 8. Just up the hill and a right a bit

When forging longer heavier tapers on the power hammer and such I calculate the volumes and divide by the cross section of the parent bar and then centre punch or corner fuller cold depending on the piece. You can then be quite precise in forging down to a fixed size in the middle of the bar and working the tip out last in the subsequent heats which is obviously safer. Opposite way to hand forging a taper where you start at the tip.

I made up a little spreadsheet for calculating taper volumes and have it in my phone. It works on round, square, flat or polygonal section if anybody is interested I can post the formula here.

A really good habit I have got into is to chalk a squiggly line down the face that I have put the marks on, that speeds up finding the mark on the hot piece by a factor of four (or eight on an octagon)! The squiggly line is also useful if you are doing a punching and drifting sequence to ensure that you can achieve the same barrelling offset of the swelling by always starting squiggle up; squiggle down second operation etc.

hey blackersmith, where are you then :) didnt know i had one so near ;) !!

We are legion!

I am in the blank spot equidistant from Cheltenham Gloucester Stroud and Cirencester.

Colleen, If you have a nice long bit of soft rag, say half a meter by about 20-50mm, you can rouge it up and with the item held in very soft jaws pull the rag back and forth rapidly, sort of like how a shoe black polishs shoes and get a fair polish. Soft jaws can be as simple as several layers of corrugated box paper.

I would suggest a similar but opposite technique. Hold the end of the rag strip in the vice, pull it taut with one hand and slide the workpiece backwards and forwards along it. I find I can get more speed and pressure and keep the cloth straighter rather than letting it bend around the corners that way.

I often use this system with a Goddards Long Term Silver cloth, which is impregnated with a mild abrasive, available from supermarkets and ironmongers. While there you could pick up a tube of Autosol Metal polish or Autosol Shine both of which seem to punch above their weight.

@Ianinsa and ThomasPowers

If you need a place to visit / stay and you do not mind 'basic' your very welcome here. However the normally resident home grown and cooked food operative is going on a trip herself for the first two and a half weeks of April so I would recommend a visit toward the end of the month when she is back....

We are about an hour and a half south west of Hay' 10 miles on from Beth

@ianinsa, apropos your son's work, Have you looked up the woof organisation? Working On Organic Farms. There are a lot of big gardens, smallholdings and farms where backpackers can stay and pay for their keep by doing a few hours a day work to help out. Our Canadian godson spent a summer over here and I think in Spain doing a few weeks at each one.

Interesting, sounds fun.

When I have needed to squeeze something that is too high for the hammer to generate oomph I have taken out the bottom block and rigged up something to protect the dovetail. It obviously generates the highest impact at the bottom of its stroke.

I have a 2cwt Massey Clearspace in the yard which has an intermediate sow block which means you can drop the bottom pallet down around 200mm.

I have some Progen which would be quite good to try as an anvil face, it is very tough and requires no temper in many cases.

How did you heat treat your test piece?

@ Mat Blimey I am going to be sixty this year and I have never heard that expression before, sheltered life I guess, Thank you!

@ Basher But I am intrigued about the test anvil, are you reproducing Peter Wrights, or will it be a bottom block for the Alldays?

I'll do some vid soon. forged the base block for a "test" anvil yesterday arvo mild body carbon face. only 20lb . face welded loverly. something I have wanted to do for a long while and I think it will scale up to 50lb OK. Tooling next week ...

"Test" anvil?
Arvo?

Please expand!

At the risk of sidetracking the thread too far away from Owen's hammer christening, the one foot issue is very important. I stress to anybody using my hammer to keep their weight on the back foot even though the temptation to lean forward is great because the treadle is heavy. They must be able to get their foot off the pedal at the slightest sign of trouble...not take the weight off and then take their foot off, that is too slow. I get them to practice dry and if I ever see them starting to lean forward onto the pedal in use I point and shout!

The worst hammer I ever used was responsible for my slipped disc. One of Brian Russell's, a 3cwt Massey with slides had the frame set at floor level so the anvil was very low and the pedal was so high you knee was round your ear. I demonstrated punching a hole through a bit of 50mm square at a forge-in on it and the combination of bending double, right foot up in the air, and lifting my end of the 50mm up with tongs was too much for my back!

Be warned!

Herewith some snaps of the 3cwt, taken hastily with my phone I am afraid, sorry about the lack of quality.





At the risk of opening up another can of worms I can see there are a couple of other modifications shown that may be of interest:-

The flip over spacer blocks and the tool carrier frame courtesy of Clifton Ralph and others.
The crane jib pivoting around the tup so you can move in and out radially, idea for the bars which are too heavy to work by hand all day but not heavy enough to overcome the inertia of the bridge crane, think 50mm 60mm square (or 75mm if you are still in your twenties!)
The rubber buffered snatch block on the swing jib which reduces the shock.
The safety shelf to stop heavy bars and stuff falling on the pedal bar, I have put them on all the hammers and presses
The clip on foot pedals so you can operate it with both heels on the ground (essential)
The bracket to hold up the tup so that we can take out / reseat the bottom block and tool carrier etc. It is there at the moment because I needed to swing a long bar into the hammer throat that I was bending on the horizontal press next to it...the perennial problem with small space and lots of toys.
The tup normally rests on the the bolster block (which is sitting on the nearest corner of the Reiter base seen in 279) it is about 125mm high. That means that the machined surfaces of the tup and cylinder are not exposed to grinding spatter.

Alan

The thing I remember from using one of the little chimny-ed gas heaters was we were told to look for a green flame which would show the copper was up to temperature.

Just looking at your earlier photos again you appear to have the model like David Petersen's which has the exhaust port on top of the rotary valve chest, so it should be quite easy to link that and the inlet port to a box on top or through the wall.

Mine has the exhaust port on the side which made it a bit messy to route the pipework. Mind you the advantage was that it gives another foothold when clambering up to undo cylinder head bolts and such!

Alan

Here is a sketch which shows the baffle / air flow route. I must have made this contraption in the early 90's and this is from memory. The mdf seems to have stood the oil okay.

The reason for trying to contain noise and oil mist was that I had a neighbour/planning problem when I built the shop to house the hammer. I have to forge with the doors closed and as it is a soundproofed and almost air tight building the noise and oil are all in there with you bouncing around!

I have a fan which gives positive pressure ventilation and a velux roof light to let out excess heat. The big furnace is out in the yard and we carry in unless we need to handle the piece on the crane.

I am at home and meant to be doing my VAT books today (instead of this!) but when I next go over to the forge I will take some photos of the systems specifically.

@Dan 'green with envy'...I used green Hammerite to cover up the multitude on all the kit and it became the company colour. I had read somewhere that green surfaces were good at absorbing the nasties in Arc glare.

My hammer stopping routine on the 3cwt is always to let the tup down with the decompression valve at the back so there is no chance of trying to start up with it under load. I either use a hook from the cylinder head to hold it up or lower it to a block on the anvil to keep the piston and cylinder surfaces sealed against errant grinding dust. Starting routine is, press start, wait for the star delta timer to switch over and then close the valve to lift the tup. First start up of the session I oil the flats on the back of the tup and delay lifting the tup until the oil pressure guage starts to pulse.

The pressure relief valve on the Master cylinder on both the 1 and 3cwt does chuff out oily air so I I have those pointing down with a bit of rag tied around them to catch the oil.

Alan

After trawling through 6500 images in my iphoto library I found these which may give some clue.

(Myloh67 in the background I was helping him on one of his commissions) You can see the pipe which went on to the hole in the side that had a mesh filter thingy originally, and the pipe from the plenum chamber back to the air inlet valve which I turned upside down. It just sits over the valve and was sealed with silicone sealer. The plenum chamber was an industrial extractor fan housing which I sealed at the base with a sheet of mdf and then mounted four mdf discs under neath the sheet that formed the lid. I spaced these a few mm apart with washers. Two of them fitted tight to the tube and had a ring of holes drilled through near their centre and they alternated with the other two which were 10mm smaller in diameter than the tube so the air travelled around the outside of them. The lid was also spaced off the flange with a couple of washers.

Shows the pipes from the front.

The Reiter plenum is just a 3mm plate box which has the inlet and exhaust valves routed to it.

The little Alldays modification was to bolt and silicone a steel sheet to seal off the exhaust gap between the cylinders and drill a Ø30mm hole through the side and use a piece of marine toilet waste pipe (!) to connect back to the panel I fixed on the back of the crank chamber. Did I hear Heath- Robinson mentioned?

I will do a sketch of the plenum chamber and filter discs to make it clear if the above leaves you puzzled!

Alan

I will dig out some photos and / or do a sketch of it.

I actually did much the same modification to both the little Allday's and the Reiter, it was prompted after I heard how much quieter the later 'all encased' Kühn hammers were.

I remember the wonderful feeling when I finally installed my 3cwt Allday's, it had been in the yard waiting for a building to house it for the best part of ten years!

Please excuse me if you already know about the stuff I mention below, once I started remembering things about the Alldays it all came in a rush!

One thing I notice from your picture is the lack of air gap between your inertia block and the floor. It may not be a problem for you but I found I had to cut a gap in the floor to prevent the vibrations being transmitted to the walls via the floor and they then acted like a sound board. Not good news for me or my neighbours.

I actually left a gap around the 3cwt's inertia block when I cast the floor, but thought I could just run the 50kg Reiter and my 1cwt Alldays directly on the floor slab because they were on 8 and 10 Ø150mm rubber buffers...wrong. I had to hire a diamond saw and cut down the sides and front and stitch drilled across the back in order to have them sitting on a floating platform to reduce the racket.

The other thing I did on the 3cwt to reduce the chuff noise and the oil mist in the atmosphere from the exhaust was build a plenum chamber on top of the master cylinder and pipe the tup exhaust and the air inlet into it. The same air then pretty well shoots backwards and forwards through the machine...an almost closed loop. I made a baffle system inside the chamber out of MDF in order to smooth the vent to atmosphere. I guess it is a bit like the one illustrated on the enormous image earlier in the thread, only more squat in shape. If you do not have near neighbours, David Petersen's 3cwt Pilkington (or early Alldays) had a pipe connecting both inlet and exhaust and that poked out through a hole in the wall.

I am afraid I came to the thread 6 months too late to offer the handbooks and installation info in time but If you need any info let me know...you have sourced oil and such I presume?

As far as the damage to the frame goes, if it is at all reassuring after 5 years use my top tool and wedge come loose one day and I discovered the front dovetail lug had cracked from the root of the dovetail to the front! I thought that it would be the end of the tup if not the hammer. I then discovered the crack was along the line of a welded repair so instant relief...if that weld lasted for 5 years then I could weld it again...that was 10 or 12 years ago. I veeed it out carefully and tig welded it with 312 rod, been fine ever since. The slave cylinder head cracked and I machined another out of mild steel. We reproduced the hollow dish form by rowing the capstan of the lathe with a piece of scaffold pipe and a heavy boring bar! That was the classic instant repair, it failed at 3pm I managed to persuade my local profile company to cut and deliver a 75mm thick disc that afternoon, we machined and drilled it the next morning and had the furnace up and forging again by 3 that afternoon! Happy days!

Incidentally noticing your slings around the tup when you were investigating it, I found that the eye bolt that fits the cylinder head thread also fits the thread in the top of the tup.

Lastly, the little cushion and primer valve at the top of the slave cylinder you rightly identified (as far as I know) can sometimes get sticky and not seal properly if you over oil the air ways. That can sometimes cause the tup to hit the cylinder head.

And finally lastly, I had to rewind the motor a few years ago because a well meaning assistant had dutifully given the motor bearings a couple of pumps of grease every time he did the plain bearings and slides on the other hammers, unfortunately it ran into the armature windings and burnt them out...

Hope something helps, Alan