Just bought a 50 lb dupont. Am trying to remove the wedges that old the top and bottom dies. Can someone chime in about the best method for tapping these out without making them tighter?
Thanks

Hi there and congrats on the hammer. Where i used to work we had a hammer with the same situation, we tried penetrating oil, a little heat on the sow block but to avail. One guy came in with some plastercine and some dry ice, he made a small bowl around the die with the plastercine and some cardboard poured in the dry ice and walked away. Twenty miniutes later he took a small piece of mild steel and pushed out the wedge. Almost embarrasing to us.

I have not worked on a Dupont hammer, but one side of the key should be thinner than the other. The die may also be wider on one side than the other which would indicate way to push out the key. If the key is sticking out further on one side should also indicate how the key was initially driven in. Usually, a couple of long blunt punches or metal bars the size of the keys or smaller will work. I had a ram die that took quite a pounding before it came out. Good luck.

I've seen wedges where the part sticking out *was* the "thin" end and you had to be most careful tapping on it to not mushroom it! (I had a friend once with his first triphammer who had spent hours trying to remove the die wedges. He asked me to stop by, I looked it over carefully and then pointed out that the was trying to drive them the wrong way---15 minutes later *ping*!)

If you have room on the fat end I liked hooking a come-a-long to the fat end and bracing the hammer put a pretty good tug on the wedge while tapping the system (and lots of penetrating oil) and had them ease out. Warming the outside while cooling the inside parts is a traditional method to gain space too.

Heat or cold can be very helpful. The sow block key on my Bradley was stuck solid and had been for years. That was never a problem until this spring when the sow block and key started shifting together but remained so tight I couldn't loosen them. I tried welding flange on the big end of the key and bracing a portapower jack on one side but that only bent the key. The next night I cut off the flange, made a new one and welded it up so I could get a jack on each side. Before I installed the jack I tried tapping with a hammer one more time and low and behold out it came. The maintainence manager of our hammer shop had told me heat was the way to go and he was right. After a bit of clean up machining and adding a shim everything was reinstalled and is running like new.