[TheForge] Trip hammer

[theforge@mailman.qth.net]

I just had to write and let you all know.  Owen Wood and I took the time to re-align the dies in my 100# LG and the forging press that I have.  MAN, I had no idea what a difference this would make.  I have been using the 100# for maybe 15 years as it was until three days ago.  We had been having trouble keeping the billets of Damascus that we make square, they slowly changed to diamond shaped.
  We decided to try making the dies parallel.  We fit checked how close the dies on the forging press were, to my dismay the were 1/4 inch out over 12" side to side and 3/16 " out front to back.  Fortunately I have a knee mill, fly cut the dies adjusted w/shim under them and low and behold they now meet all the way across.
  Next we attacked the LG.  We used telescoping gauges and found that the dies were .05 out side to side.  That doesn't sound like much, but, we took them out and surface ground the bottom die .05 and found that after replacing the dies that we were only .003 out of parallel in 9".  We fired the forge yesterday and Owen made some of his fancy chevron style Damascus and drew out some explosion pattern he had been working on.
  WOW, I had no idea that this minor adjustment would make such a great difference.  The steel drew out evenly and never went out of square at all.  WE had noticed that the top die wedge was not as tight as it should be.  So we made a new one as well.  
  I believe that between the alignment and the wedge we now have a 100% better hammer.  Thinking about it now I think that some of the energy of the blow was lost to the loose die(I had never noticed that the die was loose before)and the kick that the work would receive toward the left from the misaligned dies that the hammer was only working a small percentage of it's potential.
  The press is an absolute dream to use now.  The initial weld in one of the specialty boxes we use to make our Damascus in (I don't use flux NO MORE).  WEnt better than ever before.  
  All in all, I made the press and used it for years with out ever considering that there maybe an easy improvement to make them work even better.
  I have also built several Kinyon style hammers and love the way they work and the ease of construction.  The only thing that would be better would be if they could be made self contained like Mark Krause's design.

Trusting HIM,
Steve Rollert
keenedgeknives.com
doveknives.com