I was here at work and looking through our scrap bin, which made me think about some questions. What is the biggest piece of metal you have worked on in your personal forge? (Right now I'm looking at a piece that has about a 6 inch OD and about 8 inches long)

 

How would you handle something like that? Or something that was 3 feet long, weighing around 100 lbs?

For me anything I can not hold with one hand and manipulate is too heavy!   But that is just an old girl talking. 

biggest piece of stock i've forged was 2.5'' round...would i do it again? not without a sucker ;0 i mean striker.I know in industrial settings they have robots to do the lifting/moving of large pieces and in the old days they had all manner of suspension equipment to "lift" the material and the smith "guided" the material.I would think the average smith could work anything they could manage to lift onto their anvil with their tong hand how efficient that is depends on the hammer hand.my 2cents.

curse of the disappearing post strikes again!

 

 

1 hour ago, RDSBandit said:

I was here at work and looking through our scrap bin, which made me think about some questions. What is the biggest piece of metal you have worked on in your personal forge? (Right now I'm looking at a piece that has about a 6 inch OD and about 8 inches long)

 

How would you handle something like that? Or something that was 3 feet long, weighing around 100 lbs?

By hand I would not bother to go above 20mm (3/4") square. Much too much like hard work. Most of the spoons and bottle openers I make from Ø10mm (Ø3/8") stainless are made under the power hammer with only a bit of hand hammer tweaking.

By power hammer and press I have regularly forged 80mm (3 1/4") and occasionally 100mm (4") the biggest section I have forged was a billet of Progen tool steel which was 150mm (6") square but only 300mm (12") long.

Handling and forging heavy stuff is not too bad with the right equipment. Much less grunt than forging a bit of 25mm (1") square by hand.

3 feet long and 100lbs...the weight is less of a problem than the short length. I would tend to double the length and work one end so you always had more weight on your side of the power hammer anvil.

The anvil is always taking more than half the weight. Using a trestle or crane on a hand anvil or power hammer is much the same, all you then have to concentrate on is stopping it from bouncing sideways.

Getting it to the anvil is sometimes a grunt.

I always have my little joke that metal doubles in weight when it gets hot....as we all know it does not really,  but because you cannot hold it close to the body on the hot bit or because you can only hold from one end the leverage is all against you. The muscle power required to lift and carry it is greater.

One way to help is to use a porter bar or even a one hand hook. I have a couple of carry hooks, which are sort of squared off S hooks. You can grab the cold end of the bar in one hand and the hot end with the hook so preventing the cantilever effect against you of the hot end. One of my hooks has a heat shield welded onto it for the bigger lumps.

Alan

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. 

A long time ago, I began to realize there are many, many things you can do, ... and a much smaller number of things you should do .....

The trick is in knowing which is which.

 

.

Leaves from 25mm (1") round. Hardy tool to help with penny end scrolls from 40mm (1, 1/2") square. Helped a fabricator mate put 6" half turn twists in 30mm solid.

I forged a snake out of 1" rebar. Would I do it again? Not without finding a mate with a power hammer.

Ausfire where are the pics and measurements???

I'm really enjoying reading everyone's responces!

 

It seems as though 3/4 to 1 inch is about as big as most people want to handle. At least by them selves, by hand.

 

If you came across a piece of steel, say the 3 foot 100 lb piece I mentioned earlier, what would you do? Do you just run it across a band saw and make it into much smaller more manageable pieces? Do you attempt to hot cut it ( I think that's the correct term)? Or do you pass because it's just too much?

What is the cross sectional size of the bar? One needs three dimensions to know. 3 foot of 3" square would be around 100lbs but so would 3 foot of 9" x 1" as would 3 foot of 6" x 1 1/2"...different cross sections would call for differing approaches.

Alan

I generally design projects to use resources I have to hand.  Working large items requires me to visit someone who has the big toys and is willing to share---I had my 2.5" sq stock for several years before the chance to work it came along.  Cutting such down would waste way more in time and bandsaw blades---like Look I saved US$50 by spending 50 hours working on it---not a good trade off for me.

I also would save the big piece for a future project. Or I would find a scrap yard that might trade me even up for smaller stuff, I have one of those close by that I have been a regular at for about 15 years.

I used to try and save all of the drops that I could find at work. Thinking that I can just forge weld these pieces together to make whatever I want. I would wager the old time smiths did this as standardized sock might have been hard to come by. I can see the pattern of different pieces forge welded together in some of the older pairs of tongs that I have. And after my experience I know it works. But after one project I learned that my time is better used by buying standard stock and making that into what I want. 

49 minutes ago, RDSBandit said:

If you came across a piece of steel, say the 3 foot 100 lb piece I mentioned earlier, what would you do? Do you just run it across a band saw and make it into much smaller more manageable pieces? Do you attempt to hot cut it ( I think that's the correct term)? Or do you pass because it's just too much?

I must admit I have always worked from the opposite direction. I think up the thing I want to make and then acquire or produce the metal section appropriate to make it.

I would not start from a big bit of steel to make a small item. However, splitting off and drawing out a small piece which is still attached to the parent size bar can be very effective and fine illustration of the properties of the material. Think heavy base and fine tendril candlestick or support for fire tools.

There was a German phrase, popular  when I started, along the lines of "Alles aus einem Stück geschmiedet" which encapsulated the desire to forge everything, especially things like flowers from one piece of steel. With the advent of power hammers and presses we are luckily able to explore forms which would be difficult by hand from one piece. Which is some compensation for losing the ready fire-weldability of wrought iron which gave rise to the 18th century heyday vocabulary of scrolls and waterleaves.

Alan

1 hour ago, Alan Evans said:

What is the cross sectional size of the bar? One needs three dimensions to know. 3 foot of 3" square would be around 100lbs but so would 3 foot of 9" x 1" as would 3 foot of 6" x 1 1/2"...different cross sections would call for differing approaches.

Alan

If memory serves me, I want to say the bar is 3 feet long, 2.5 inches tall and 3 inches wide. But I have only eye balled it, never tried to really measure it. So i could be off by a bit. And no clue what type of steel it is.

Sounds like, when you stand it up on end, it is an anvil

Once you have the project, then look for the material to make the project.

1-1/8 inch material is my limit by hand. Even then you need a striker and a way to hold the stock. The reason they make different size hammers and different size anvils becomes apparent real fast. You can slide into power hammer country and not know it. And like hammers and anvils, 25 pound power hammer and a 10 CWT power hammer require different size stock materials. Choose your tools to fit the job at hand.

Might look at some of the large Cristolph crosses made by PTree and friends...The open and forge them by hand in team striking.

2.5" x 3" sounds like a lot of tooling possibilities. 

Or, slice bits off the end so you end up with 2.5"x3"x .375" or whatever you need. Simply make little plates out of it if they will work better for you. 

Top tools and hammers sounds like to me. The biggest using either me or another as a striker I've made is along the lines of a 8.5 lbs hammer for another blacksmith. So that'd be close to that other piece of steel mentioned above, heehee. I think 1.5"R 1045 (might of been 4140) is the biggest by myself and hand hammer. No clue why I had to make that hammer without a striker, but for some reason I did. I do not recommend it either.

Biggest we can fit in the furnace is 370mm round or square, but that can only go to 1000 long, or we have done a piece of 130 dia that had to be swaged out to 6.100 metres long,(it started at 5.800 long).  We have a back door in the furnace which will allow about 310mm dia up to about 4.000 metres to be forged.  That is in my own personal forge!

Got a feller here that works for Scott forge; take a look at their web page for "large" stock forges.  1000mm is on the small side for them!

biggest for me was the 3+ lb hammer that Brian and I made.   Me being the striker.    Him being the brains and the guys with the tools and expertise...

After that, by myself, biggest was two ~4 foot leaf springs that I heated in my rarely used, home made... and poorly maintained gas forge.   Basically I just straightened them (took the slight curve out) for a friend knife maker.

Not biggest but quite annoying.   I have a piece of 347SS that I would like to do something with.   But it is extremely stubborn and does not care all that much about being heated and getting soft.  It tends to want to stay... not very soft!

10 hours ago, ThomasPowers said:

Got a feller here that works for Scott forge; take a look at their web page for "large" stock forges.  1000mm is on the small side for them!

Yeh, was wondering if Patrick would pop his head up and top my effort.  We are only hit and giggle blacksmiths/forgers compared to his guys.

4x4x12 with some help..forge welded and drawn out on a power hammer. Quite a bit of 4x4x6 alone.

I have a 200 pound billet of titanium I have been meaning to forge into something.....nothing useful, just a bit of "artisish thing"

I would like to work in Phil's size for a while, but not all the time.

I have toured Scot Forge with Patrick and the end cuts off one billet are more than most of us work in a month........watched them trip the spur off a stainless ingot about 3x3x6 foot , upset it to 4' tall and then draw it to about an 8" square x maybe 25 feet long in one heat under the 3,000 ton press. It was good to see.

 

Ric