New Shoes

[archiphile]

Just thought that you all might need some new shoes. This video shows how keg shoes are made:

[Rob Browne]

Boy, there must be some money in horse shoes to allow tooling up like that. Imagine the overheads and the cost of a different set of dies are used for each size.

When comparing those shoes produced to the hand forging no wonder I used to modify commercial shoes when I used to shoe horses.

Cheers

[Bentiron1946]

Considering the number of recreational horse owners there are, especially here in the USA, there is money to be made but not a whole bunch according to my neighbors farrier. He says he does alright but he ain't never going to be rich, paid for two years of schooling, bought the truck, tools, insurance and on it goes. He is one busy fellow from early in the morning till late at night, six days a week and Sunday emergency shoe service, but not rich.

[archiphile]

Considering the number of recreational horse owners there are, especially here in the USA, there is money to be made but not a whole bunch according to my neighbors farrier. He says he does alright but he ain't never going to be rich, paid for two years of schooling, bought the truck, tools, insurance and on it goes. He is one busy fellow from early in the morning till late at night, six days a week and Sunday emergency shoe service, but not rich.

My Farrier is a very busy man. But like you said, is never gonna be rich. He gets about $375 for both horses to do winter shoes (all four feet) and $175 in the summer b/c only one of the horses in shad in the summer. So just a trim on the other. But it is back breaking work, could not pay me to do it.

[Sam Thompson]

It doesn't seem very quick. I'd have thought that they would have done away with the bloke. A robot would, surely, be much faster.

[Francis Trez Cole]

I was looking at shoes the other day Size 00 runs about $5.00 and size 7 (draft horse) $17.00 that is for each. Then there is the cost for the farrier to put them on.

[ptree]

I have worked in comercial production forge shops that produce high volume forgings from closed dies much like in the photo. The heating process is resistance. That one machine, with adjustments probably does the entire range.
The first die, is EDM sunk, that is the process shown with the oil fluid. The ram comes down and has a carbon electrode. As the die wears you grind it down in a surface grinder and just resink the impression enough to restore the impression.
The next step was the hot trim, to remove the flash. You always use a billet with more volume than the impression to ensure complete fill.
After that is probably a combo coin and punch die to give the final shape, including clips and nail gutters and holes.
The dies and tooling for a given pattern shoes are probably about $100,000 for the first cost in this case, but will probably make 80,000 forgeings before a resink. The resink is a $5000 type job and would give another 80k forgings. So the tooling over say 500K forgings is $0.24 per forging.

Now that is tooling only. Looked to be about 3 shoes per minute. At a total cost of $100/hour for labor and bennies, and overhead etc, another $0.55 each.

Probably use $0.05/shoe in electricity.
We are up to $0.84
Now you have cost of the equipment, and that is probably $2.00 each shoe over that 500K forgings. So $2.84 to make those shoes. How many can you forge at that rate, even using your open die powerhammer?
When looking at production forging, think volume, and spread all the costs over that volume.

In the first shop I worked in we made about a 100 different forgings that weighed from an oz to 28# that we made in high volume. Some were run continously, and the setup never changed. CHEAP. Hard to forge and a bugger, but cheap cause we made 5 million a year and had auto forging tongs.
We also made stupid simple forgeings, but they cost a fortune because we made them in lots of 50, every few years. All the set up and tooling cost over a life time run of maybe 1000 parts.

Some one else asked about robots, been there done that. Robots are plain stupid. They have no ability to adapt or adjust on their own. A man can see and change, adapt or stop. A robot has to crash to stop, and is going to do exactly what it is programed to do. They are also pretty delicate.
All production forge equipment tends to be VERY HIGH MAINTENANCE due to the environment. Everything breaks wears, or fries.
We used robots, and they did speed things up, but we also had a maintenance staff on three shifts that cared for same.
Again have to run the volume numbers and see if the cost is right.

[archiphile]

Thanks ptree that was really interesting. I have seen robot welding in action and I agree. Sure robots can speed up the precess, but you still need to maintain them and the like. I don't really see the cost savings.