[TheForge] Totally Twisted

[RIES NIEMI]

A while ago we were discussing twisting machines and their application. Dave
M mentioned he was much more interested in seeing the work than the machine
what did it.
I have just posted at the photo access site, in the Twister file, a couple
of pics of the benches we just installed at the new Snohomish Public Library
in Snohomish Wa.
 These benches are 9' long x 4' tall, galvanized steel. They have a forged
framework of 3/4" round, then curved sheets of plasma cut 1/8" plate, behind
which is a hexagonal grid of twists and hex plates.
The twists, of which there are over 300, were all done cold on my Hebo- a
cnc german ornamental iron machine that twists up to 1 1/2" square cold. The
twists were all done by my sons- mostly by Torque, who is 9. He could do
about 50 an hour- they are 3/8" square, 12" long. Dont know if it has
anything to do with his name, but he loves twisting stuff. He loads the bar,
and hits the foot pedal, and a preprogrammed sequence starts- it twists it
740 degrees, then back 20 to end up with a 720 degree twist. Supposedly this
overtwist then untwist helps account for springback, and gives you a
reliable 720 end product. It seems to work, as the ends of the square come
out aligned. 
After twisting, they were cold bent on the hossfeld, then hot upset, or
rivetted, to the 3" hexagonal plates. The hex plates were plasma cut, cold
punched on the ironworker, then had alphabet letters hot stamped in them,
and the holes hot drifted.

So its kind of a bastard mix of forging and fabricating. a layer of forged
work, a layer of fabricated work, and another layer of forged work.

Ries