[TheForge] Air hammer

Sat Jul 26 07:03:00 2003

At first I was going to make it a down draw design like the Kickass. It was
so compact and clean looking, about 5' tall and about 3 1/2' long. Then a
list member I was bouncing ideas off of gave me a review of using a Kickass.
He liked it fine except dirt, scale, etc. kept contaminating the rams and
greatly slowed it down. I can also see increased wear to the seals and
piston rods.

So, I went back to an overhead "C" frame design with two ram pistons. There
are a couple reasons I'm going to give double ram cylinders a try:

First is height. If you want a modest 12" of stroke over (for conversation
sake) a 36" anvil, once you add up all the component lengths you end up with
a hammer near 8' tall. Using double rams eliminates the need for guides and
knocks a good 18" off the height of the hammer. The Kickass proves this
works nicely.

Then there's the simple fact I have a bunch of hydraulic cylinders salvaged
from the scrap bin at work and a number of them with 14" strokes work out to
the equivalent of a 4 1/2" cylinder if I double them up. A 4 1/2"  ram
cylinder driven by a 6" compressor piston seem to be what's being used on
100 lb. hammers.

I'll have to open the ports on the cylinders some but they'll work just fine
on air instead of hydraulic fluid. The compressor cylinder will be more work
as I'm going to follow the Massey design and will have to machine it myself.

The compressor piston in the Massey design is quite thick, close to the
compressor piston's stroke length. The reason for this very thick piston is
to allow air ports at the center of the commpressor cylinder with the piston
itself acting as the valve. These air ports allow for makeup air if the
compressor is low and vents excess if it's high. All this is to keep the
hammer from either starving for air or compressing it unnecessarily.

Another way to supply makeup air is by machining flats on the compressor
piston rods near the piston. At the top and bottom of the stroke, these
flats pass through the seals in the cylinder caps and open the cylinder to
the atmosphere.

Once again, I'm going with the centrally located piston ports on the
compressor cylinder because I was able to salvage a largish slab of 2"
aluminum plate and have a lathe. I could be entirely wrong but I also feel
it'll be easier to adjust the volume of makeup air by either drilling more
ports or plugging them as necessary. Intuition says I can't overdo the
makeup ports.

Frosty
------------------------
If it ain't forged
it ain't real.
Wrought iron is.
The FrostWorks

Meadow Lakes, AK.

----- Original Message -----
From: <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, July 25, 2003 9:46 AM
Subject: [TheForge] Air hammer

>
> Thanks for the patent #.  I really enjoied looking at the drawings.  I am
however desiring to better understand the double piston idea.  Are you using
two cylinders to lift the tup? Or are you using them to push it up as in the
Kick Ass hammer?  I really want to get away from relying on a compressor to
to run the hammer as in the Kynion (sp) style hammers I've built before even
though they work well, I still want to not run my sqeezer anymore than I
must.
>
> Trusting HIM,
> Steve Rollert
> keenedgeknives.com
> doveknives.com
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