[TheForge] Re: Alldays and Inions [yarnin']

[Mike Spencer]

> Tell us about your Alldays and Onions Mike.
> Sounds interesting.
> Steve Howell

Well, Steve, that what it mostly is so  far: interesting. :-)

Yarnin' follows:

This hammer is a 3 cwt. Alldays and Onions with separate anvil and
self-contained compressor.  It's about 7' high, requires a specially
formed concrete pad and supporting timbers.

It was owned by a local surveyor with a rep for crankiness who used it
mercilessly to hammer out survey stakes from rebar.  Gossip says he
made more from selling stakes than from surveying.  Several years ago
he got the notion that he was going to stake a claim to some very
rough gold bearing terrain and set up some kind of mining operation.
He had this hammer and a big punch press offloaded at the side of a
main highway in preparation for moving them into the woods for some
mining-related purpose.  Then the provincial authorities dropped in
and told him that, although he could stake a claim there, he couldn't
do any digging because that land, including old 19th c. mine workings,
was within a reservoir watershed area.  Full stop.  So the hammer sat
out there for a bit until I found out who it belonged to and called
him.

I guess he's a hard core wheeler dealer type because he wouldn't budge
from a price that would have been fair for that hammer, sitting in a
shop all tuned up, working on single phase power and nicely painted
but was waaayyy to high for a rusty heap on the roadside.

A year or so later, some dorques tried to steal the copper from the
15HP motor.  It was too well built and it defeated them but they
wrecked the motor in the process.  Tim Bolivar, another smith near me
and with some kind of family connection to the surveyor, worked a deal
for some cash, swap etc. and got the hammer.  Tried to get it going
and failed.  By now some parts were missing, too, but nothing was
critically rusted, seized up inside or smashed.

This spring, thinking about my new shop, I dropped in on Tim and
learned that he really needed some kind of power hammer and had pretty
much given up on running the A&O.  Happens, I had a big old 100#
mechanical hammer that I hauled here from Massachusetts that was very
clunky and imprecise but would certainly bash iron.  So we swapped,
which solved the problem of how I was going to move the clunker to the
new shop and what to do with it when it got here (seeing as I haven't
used it even once since I got a 25# Canadian Little Giant knockoff.)

So next week, Lord willing and the crick don't rise, I'll get the big
ol' lump of concrete poured for the A&O.  After the siding is on the
shop, I'll get the thing hauled home on a septic tank truck.  Because
the hammer body has to be set over the anvil, were I to have put it
inside the building and were I to have the same bad luck as Tim did
getting it going, I'd have to tear a piece out of the building to lift
it out.  So it's going on a pad just outside the wall next to the
forging station.  The wall is specially framed for a 10' door there.
If the hammer eventually runs, I can tear out 10' of wall and build a
shed around the hammer and it will be only a few steps from the forge.

First I have to partially disassemble it and learn how it works, get
any water out of it, make sure everything is free, sealed, etc.  I'll
never get 450V 3PH back here (see earlier lat/lon post) so then I'll
have a nice (?) project figuring out a way to drive it.  Phase
converter?  Singlebanger gas engine?  Small tractor?  Old car engine?
Who knows.  That's for winter or next year because this summer I have
to move and install a whole shop full of smithing gear -- 30 years
accumulation of ferrous stuff.

The most encouraging bit has been the the Spires Group, owner of the
Alldays & Onions marque.  They are very proud of their history and
still support the hammers.  A&O started as a bellows maker in the 17th
century and stopped making hammers in the 1960s.  Spires sent me an
owner's manual and fully detailed installation blueprints along with a
history of the A&O name, company and products.  Another bit they sent
me appears to indicate that they also made the Blacker hammer.  There
is one of those around here somewhere but I've lost track of it.  The
previous owner offered it to me when he decided to sell off his
welding/fab shop, go to Vancouver and become a street person (which he
subsequently did.)  But again, he wanted top price for a machine that
he had beaten to rat sh*t and maintained with chewing gum, recycled
dog food cans and Red Man spit.

I'll be happy to pass on more technical details about the A&O (try and
stop me :-) after it's sitting here in the yard and I can get some
wrenches on it.


---
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada 
                                 
mspencer@tallships.ca            
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/