[TheForge] Ping Ralph Sproul: Air hammer misc.

[Mike]

Spring has sprung, precious little has riz but the 4' of snow that
slid off the roof onto the air hammer has mostly gone.

Last August, Ralph wrote:

> If it helps at all the Nazel has a motor on it that is 10 HP and
> turns at 875 RPM.
>
> If you can't find the motor plate, I can count the teeth on my motor
> gear versus the hammer flywheel it turns - to give you a ball park
> to shoot for.

I found the brass plate from the motor!  It is (er, was) a Canadian
General Electric Type KT induction motor.  There's some info on the
web saying what great motors these KTs were.

No-load RPM is 900.  The small gear has 18 teeth, the big one on the
hammer has 115.  That comes out to 900 RPM -> 141 RPM, which is close
enough to the A&O spec of 135 RPM/blows per minute, assuming that
full-load speed of the motor will be a bit under 900.

Other specs, just for the record:

  Motor: Type KT, 60 Hz, 16.5 Amps, 550 Volt, 3 phase, 15 HP

  Hammer:  Weight of falling parts:                    3 cwt.
           Stroke:                                    18"
           Gap, centre of tup to frame:               19"
           Size of tup pallet face:               8" x 6"
           Diameter of bar efficiently dealt with:     5"

           Test with a cube of Siemens Martin Mild Steel in one heat:

              Size of cube:           5"
              Length when forged:     6' 6"
              Time taken in minutes:  8

No further exciting developments on the air hammer front, given that
the snow is only "mostly gone".  Real Soon Now. :-)

On a tangential note, I dropped in on a retired smith the other day,
one of a family of smiths.  He pointed out, up in the rafters of his
shop's upper floor, a large Alldays & Onions forge bellows.  "That was
brought here from England by my ancestors!"  He knew the history of
his anvil and some other tools back through his grandfather's
generation, he's about 75, and the bellows was from before his
reckoning so that makes it a pretty old bit of local history.

(A&O is very proud of being the oldest company in England still in
continuous operation.  They started out as a one-man bellows maker in
1600 and something.)

- Mike

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer@tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^

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