[TheForge] "DROP" Hammer

[Justin Fellenz]

On droppers:

There was a guy at the MD Renn Fair(e) who was making coins with a
manual drop hammer. The hammer itself was roughly 16" tall by 8" round
with a taper on it, and it ran in a track of sorts between two upright
posts. It was raised by a rope on a crank like a well bucket, and there
was a trigger of some sort that released the ram from the rope. The
lovely assistant did the cranking. The ram fell onto a striker in a
carrier, under which was the top die. The bottom die naturally sat on
an anvil of some sort, which was hard to see because it was down below
floor level. The guy had rigged up a dry-ice machine to blow a puff
when the hammer fell. He had a bunch of blanks and a bunch of etched
dies and generally put on a pretty good show.

I've been toying with what to do with these two 750-lb die blocks,
actually, along this line...If I could drop one onto another dead
square I might be able to set a 12"x15" damascus billet in one go, nice
and flat....

Hmmmm....

JRF