[TheForge] Air Hammer Anvil ?

Mon Oct 16 19:09:22 EDT 2006

You still have a little odd punctuation but I 
understand you fine. I wouldn't get too carried away 
trying to get things perfect, it's more fun to talk 
instead. <grin>

If it's too much trouble to weigh the counter weight 
you can approximate it's weight figuring cast iron to 
weigh around 485lbs/cu/ft. This will be close enough, 
considering a couple factors. First, I don't know just 
what cast iron weighs and don't know the carbon content 
in your counter weight. Second, there will be lots of 
odd shapes, rounded corners, holes, flanges and such 
that will be a lot of trouble to calculate. You're not 
building a fighter jet, reasonably close will be fine.

1" rubber pad is way too thick, it will make the hammer 
walk around. Use something much thinner.

Be careful with the crusher tooth steel, it's likely to 
be unpredictable. Depending on the crusher, the "teeth" 
can be very impact resistant unless they've been 
rebuilt a few times, then they're likely to be 
dangerously brittle. I'd use 1" new mild steel for the 
mounting plate between the dies and cast anvil with a 
lot more confidence than a used crusher tooth.

The old crusher tooth is also likely to be VERY hard or 
impossible to drill holes in. Then there's attaching it 
to the cast anvil. If you wanted to weld I can forsee 
all kinds of problems. Crusher teeth are typically high 
vanadium and or manganese alloys and tricky to weld. In 
fact, high manganese steel has a specifically limited 
hot life. There are charts to tell you exactly how many 
minutes you can keep it at a given temperature before 
it fails. Most contractors replace the plates, shoes, 
hammers, teeth, rolls, drums, etc. just before the 
chart for that alloy says it's going to fail. Then 
there's welding vanadium and or manganese alloys to an 
unknown quality cast iron. It's just a counter weight 
so I doubt the manufacturer was very picky about the 
quality of the alloy. Way WAY too much trouble and 
chance of failure after a lot of work.

Okay, so those are my reasons for not using the crusher 
tooth in a power hammer. As has been said, you'll want 
to match the mounting plate to the cast anvil as 
closely as you can. Start by grinding the casting as 
flat and square to the ram as you can. (forget the 
floor, it's the ram that has to be square to it!) Then 
use your mounting plate with soot on it to mark the 
high spots. Smoke the plate and lay it in position on 
your cast anvil, tap it lightly with a hammer and lift 
it straight off. Soot will transfer to the casting 
where it's high. Once you get the casting ground so 
it's about a 90% match with the mounting plate it'll be 
time to glue some 80# +/- sand paper to the mounting 
plate and use it to do the final hone. (yeah, use the 
mounting plate like a sanding block and apply elbow 
grease) Give it the smoke test every now and then and 
when it's matched close, finish it off with fine sand 
paper, 120-200#. You don't need to polish it so don't 
get carried away, I'd stop with 120#. Don't worry, this 
will go faster than you think, it's cast iron and not 
very abrasion resistant. <grin>

Using mild steel for your mounting plate means you can 
easily drill holes where ever you want them. Drilling 
and tapping holes in the casting shouldn't be too much 
trouble unless you run into an inclusion. (dirt, slag, 
etc. in the casting) If that happens just move the 
holes.

Easy easy easy.

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

Meadow Lakes, AK.

http://www.artmetalradio.com/

From: "Madmike" <madmike at tiscali.fr>

Fortunatly my mails didn't fall in an e-worm's hole, 
erk...
But all the ' like in I'm, were transformed in '=92', 
problems with the
'european encoding of rough text', i've disabled the 
option and now it seems
to work fine ! But I still don't hnow if it was only 
when receiving my own
mails or if you were all receiving it like me with 
'random punctuation'...
Well as it works now...
Ok, so this morning (it's twenty 8:00 AM) I'll give a 
phone call to the guy
who's got the forklift counterweight to be sure he 
still has it, next I'll
call a friend who makes flour, he's got an enormous 
balance (i'm not sure of
the name of that stuff to calculate the weight of 
things)to weight his
trucks full of flour so I will know the weight of the 
'anvil' and will be
able to calculate the weight of the ram. If the block 
is too light I've seen
he's got a second forklift out of use but the 
counterweight is still on the
vehicle and it would be much more tricky to pick it up 
but as I plan to use
at least a 135lbs ram and as my shop is under a 'dry 
wall vault' (I'll try
to explain if my translation is bad) weighting at least 
30Tons, I really
need an oversized anvil to dampen the vibrations (not 
those Good Vibrations
the Beach Boys loved, those terrible vibrations that 
make the bridge break
off when the soldiers walk to the step). I plan to put 
3x 1inch thick rubber
pad made for the walls of 'lashing out' horses' boxes, 
and hope it will
suffice...
I've got a 4 inches thick tool steel plate (a foot 
wide, square) from a
'stone crusher' tooth which will top the anvil and 
support the bottom 'bolt
on' bottom die, and a slightly modified 'Kinyon 
style/Abana style' air
scheme (oh, thanks a lot to Phil Rosche who helped me a 
lot to understand
the system, and who told me about you here @TheForge), 
I will post the air
scheme if it works as I hope, but will not earlier as I 
don't want to change
anything on it now and can't spend more time thinking 
to it...
Voilà, I needed to talk this morning...
Will tell you more when more to tell, if you've got 
ideas, advices, warnings
or questions or even corrections to improve my English, 
I will be happy to
read you all.
Friendly Madmike.

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