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I Forge Iron

really really really old drop hammer


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That looks in pretty good condition for something thats 700 years old.
I'm waiting for the OHS guys to start making comments, along the lines of "he should be wearing ear protection, he should have safety glasses, he should'nt be drinking alcohol", come on guys don't let me down.

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Several hundred, not seven hundred that I saw :D . But still it is really old. Yea, I reckon OSHA and every other big brother safety org would freak if they saw that in operation over here in the US. He is probably being true to form though. Safety was not that much of an issue that long ago. I needed hearing protection just watching the video!

Thanks for sharing. That was a treat.

Mark <><

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Well the front part looks fairly old---pretty much the same design as used at Saugus----the back end looks to have been modernized in the last 100 years or so...

There are a number of the old schwanzhammers still in use in Germany being run off water.

For an interesting "modern" variant one of the SOFA members built one that used the guts of an old hay baler to supply the power and used it to forge a small anvil.

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could have wore a shirt at least i don't wanna see singed chest hair or other sensitive extremities.
still be cool to have one tho,
I'm wondering if i make a hamster wheel big enough for, lets say my little sister i might be able to have one of these.

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It's actually not a duck.........It's a trip hammer, the incorrect name also given Little Giants and scores of others. Trip hammers are the original ''power hammer'' and are tripped (lifted) by a cog (cam)and abruptly dropped, but not a drop hammer. Shown is the mother of all drop hammers! How the heck did they tie those knots in the cable???

5443849959_ffc090556b_z.jpg

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Schwanzhammer translates as a "tilt hammer". If you search for images of such you will see that they are indeed the *same* as the one you posted.


I'm not quite sure if we agree or not Tom, nomenclature always seems to get a bit stretched.........I do know that a LG is not a trip hammer and the monster in my post is a drop hammer........:)



Search Results

  1. trip ham·mer
    Noun: A large, heavy pivoted hammer used in forging, raised by a cam or lever and allowed to drop on the metal being worked. More »Wikipedia - Answers.com - The Free Dictionary
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It's actually not a duck.........It's a trip hammer, the incorrect name also given Little Giants and scores of others. Trip hammers are the original ''power hammer'' and are tripped (lifted) by a cog (cam)and abruptly dropped, but not a drop hammer. Shown is the mother of all drop hammers! How the heck did they tie those knots in the cable???

5443849959_ffc090556b_z.jpg

What's in a name? See, to me this is a "stamp". Used for low volume sheet metal stamping.
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Found this on youtube thought it might interest some here. I really want one.



That is Sepp Ibel in Ybbsitz, Austria. He restored that shop and has another one that is not running. Those shops along the "Smiedemeile" or mile of smith's are over 700 years old and are located beside a creek, and they used to all run on water wheels and belt systems. They now run on hydroelectric. They used to make shovels in that shop with those hammers.
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what I find really fascinating about this video and others i have seen of vintage trip hammers is how much work a really heavy slow hammer can do with a long narrow top fuller like flat die.
I have often thought of having a hammer equipped the same.

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I would offer that the first hammer in the US would mostly be called a Trip hammer or a helve hammer. The big drop hammer show by Macbruce would be a rope drop hammer. Other types of drop hammers would board drop air drop steam drop and the one of a king Mule drop hammer.

I have worked with Erie Steam drop hammers used for closed die work. We had the old remains of the Mule drop hammer in the boiler shop.

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I'd say that "drop" hammers are strictly gravity powered ones for the down stoke (no matter how the up stroke is handled) and powerhammers are one that have a power assist to the down stroke whether it be energy stored in springs, steam, compressed air, etc.

Tilt hammers are a type of drop hammer as are board hammers cable hammers etc.

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I'd say that a "power" hammer is anything that is powered by something other than yourself: water, electricity, wind, donkey, whatever. The other things describe the power mechanism or mechanical attributes: tilt, helve, spring, etc.

Following this nomenclature, Drop hammers would be gravity hammers, where the upstroke is powered by whatever, and then the downstroke is gravity powered. Tilt and others would be examples of drop power hammers.

As I think of it, the process I'm laying out is trying to follow the way the NIGP code is built: "bigger" classification to more detailed.

Powered/unpowered
work-stroke type
mechanical attributes

Which is not to say that I'm trying to be definitive. Just thinking about how the names would make sense to me if I were coming up with them from scratch.

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Schwanzhammer translates as a "tilt hammer".

At the risk of sounding pedantic, it translates as "tail hammer". What it means is another thing entirely, and I trust you are totally correct here. But Schwanz translates directly to 'tail'. In colloquial use it means something else. Not quite vulgar, but you wouldn't use it in front of your grandmother either.
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I like the term "gravity hammer".

MacBruce, how do you then differentiate between hammers that have a "powered" down stroke vs those that are simply gravity accelerated? (and then the hybrids---some of the old tilt hammers had a "spring" on top to help to get them started on the down stroke. Sometimes just a board that would flex much like the simple leg vise springs)

As I recall the first steam hammer was a gravity hammer with a steam return---but didn't take them long to figure out that it could work better as a double action system!

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There's some discussion of these differences in Pounding out the Profits, but I don't remember exactly how he describes them. He does mention the same thing about steam hammers, that they were originally used for lifting the ram only.

I actually had the book upstairs when I posted my earlier comment, but I was too lazy to go and grab it. Part of the discussion in the introduction is about the way that names have been used "incorrectly" for a long time, and trip, tilt, toggle, power, and lots of other names have been used interchangeably over the years. Then, as now, manufacturers chose names or marketing slogans that conveyed a theme, or made an impression, regardless of how strictly-speaking "true" it was.

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Sort of like some people getting really fussy about calling pattern welding "damascus" even though it's been done for far longer than their country's been called the United States of America. (I prefer to use the separate terms pattern welded and wootz just to avoid confusion now that we have folks making both kinds and sometimes using both kinds in the same blade!)

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