The gravity powered hammers were known as Drop Hammers or Board Hammers and often used sizable top dies to produce the oomph needed.

Also the old water powered tilt hammers were gravity hammers; though I have seen several of those that used a spring board to increase the speed of the downward blow.

These type of hammers have a fairly low cycle time though. OTOH a 500# top die hitting slowly can do a lot of work vs a 25# top die hitting fast..

Arftist, no question that mechanical hammers can hit hard...I was speaking more generally about home made hammers...I answered a question from another poster who asked why i did what i did.....basically because it was what i could do. Others can do other things. Lots of ways to skin a cat. Not sure what geometry problem you think i had; i worked that out in the design stage by observation. I am happy with how the hammer hits; i will post another video when i forge with it. BTW, James Helms' "Gunnhilda" home made mechanical hammer hits pretty impressively, but the die arrangement takes up more space than i would prefer.

So earlier there was a discussion about the orientation of my leaf spring helve; after some tests, I did see the need to place a strap around the leaves to keep them together on the side closest to the ram. Thanks to Buzzkill and JLP Svcs....the strap lets more of the input to be output, thus a harder hit and less flex. This necessitated some changes in the arrangement of the switches and actuation arm thingy; will do more testing today and maybe video.

Love to see a video of it forging some metal.. I think it's great. Little different than I had originally figured when simply using the imagination but looks great. 

So I did some more testing, while forging down and old cold or hot cut into a hammer eye punch; when the hammer was playing nice, it was doing a good job off knocking down the stock.  I somewhere misplaced my tripod, so no video yet.  Still have some issues with the control mechanism to work out, as the "button" on the rod that goes up and down with the ram to act on the solenoid switches keeps messing up the upper switch.

Nice build, Steve.  You solved quite a few of the problems the same way I did.  Cool idea going with air for the drive as well.

I ended up making a new control rod and wood "buttons" to actuate the switches, with the buttons being threaded to allow for adjustment, and the lower button able to move to adjust stroke height for working with tooling under the ram. I used koa for the buttons; time will tell how well they hold up...I can always remake them from aluminum later if needed. Thanks, Jason.

How’s it working out