Finally built one.

[DickyPitts]

I’m not a welder, so my welds are ugly as can be, but they stuck. If I had a wire feed or a torch set my welds would look prettier, but I’m just not that practiced with a stick welder.

The hammer has a 17.8 lb head and the springs are a set of 90 lb garage door springs. I didn’t expect there to be two in the box, and that took some experimentation to get the hammer up where I wanted it. 

I’ve cut in a slot for punch outs to fall through under the anvil which is made from an extra heavy 7” casing bull plug. It weighs over 40 lbs, and I picked it up on a well site doing my day job. 

The tool hits hard, the chain pull from the treadle allows the hammer to keep Moving on inertia after the treadle bottoms out, which it wouldn’t do if I had built it with a ridged connection. 

It’s not a grasshopper, but that’s intentional, I’m looking forward to trying to get stuff done with set tools the way it would have been done prior to shops working with electricity. 
 

Now it’s time to build some tooling and get the thing working.

Thanks for checking out my build. Have a great day!

[Frosty]

Welds? Uh Dick, Isn't it about 90%+ wood? Nice job of improvising a treadle hammer. Keep your eyes open for a piece of casing to replace the anvil's sow. (wooden part supporting the anvil) Sow probably isn't what it's actually called, someone will hopefully post a correction and maybe I'll remember the term.

Anyway, once you get an all steel anvil under the hammer you'll be surprised how much more effective it'll be. The post supporting the helve being wood doesn't matter so long as it doesn't wave back and forth when you use it. If it does a hip from a few feet up on the hammer post to near the bottom of the anvil will fix it. A hip being an angle member, if you use two and cross them you'll be overkilling it perfectly. Ah, I don't have to tell you about structure and triangles. 

It was great talking with you this morning. We'll have to do it again.

Frosty The Lucky.

 

[Irondragon Forge ClayWorks]

I've heard it called a Sow Block or Anvil Block.

[DickyPitts]

I’ll keep an eye out for a support for the anvil that isn’t made of wood. The anvil weighs a good bit though, and I’m very happy with the performance I’ve seen so far. I forged down the tang on the sword blank I’m working on in two heats. It’s very much an improvement over working  larger stock by hand!

[Frosty]

The video wouldn't play. This one had some kind of LAV file format attached to the .MOV file format. The sound came through fine though. "Thump thump thump. It sounded good. 

You have a working treadle hammer, you'll want to alter and improve it as you use it. It puts a smile on my face to see / hear you're getting hammer time. 

Jerry