Excentric press to power hammer ?

[BartW]

Hello All;

 

 

 

I found an excentric press - it's not mine (yet) -, but it's for sale.

But looking at the pictures, I thought If I add a linkage to make the excentric less rigid attached to the "punch", add a mechanism to control speed of the flywheel and an anvil; wouldn't that make this thing a small power hammer ? I mean it's already got most parts up to industrial specs like the drive wheel; the axle, the excentric, the guides ..

 

 

[arftist]

No.

A hammer need not complete it's stroke by design.

A punch press must.

Not to say that it couldn't be set up to do something to metal, it most certainly can but the key is "set up" .

In other words the press must be set exactly to the job required. Improper setup will lead to press destruction.

By the way, that is a very small press.

[ThomasPowers]

A press that can't complete it's stroke is a bit like a mechanical bomb with the "boom" parts usually right in your face.  Have you looked at building a tire hammer?

[JHCC]

To quote Peter Parkinson in The Artist Blacksmith, "Because the thickness of the work forged between the hammer head and the anvil will vary, the drive to the hammer head cannot be a solid mechanical linkage. There must be some give to the system. The two fundamental types of hammer solve this problem in different ways. One uses a spring system* between the motor drive and the hammer head, the other places the hammer head at the end of a piston, pushed up and down a cylinder by compressed air."

*This can be either a Dupont linkage such one sees in Little Giant type hammers or a spring-loaded helve (of which the Abno mechanical hammer in Torbjörn Åhman's videos is a good example).

This press as it stands has no such "give to the system" and would therefore tend to tear itself apart if it couldn't complete its full range of motion. I suppose one could theoretically introduce some mechanism into the drive train that would have the desired effect, but I don't really know what that might look like.