[TheForge] Re: Purty power hammer

[Mike Spencer]

Lee> Its mighty purty Mike
Lee> now you can see it in the snow

Yes.

Lee> looks like a pretty permanent pad its sitting on

You could say that. It's 5' deep with cast-in anchor bolts.

Lee> will you put a shed roof over it all?

That was the original plan: Put it outdoors because if it was too
rusted up or abused ever to run, I wouldn't have to chop a huge hole
in the roof and upper floor of the new shop to get it out.  Extend the
building over it if it proved to be usable.  The wall of the shop next
to the hammer is framed so that it's possible to tear out a 10' x 10'
section without weakening the building.  The notion was to unite a
hammer shed with the forging area.  I may not do that now because I've
gotten used to having my main workbench along that wall but yes, some
kind of weather protection is in order.  Shed, lean-to, car port,
canvas car tent, something.

Ries> I just noticed in the pics that the dies in the Alldays seem to
Ries> be aligned in a straight front to back orientation.  Is that
Ries> right? Are they adjustable?

Yeah, that's the way they are.  No adjustment.  So to draw a taper,
(or do anything with a longish bar) you have to stand at the side.
Half of each die is flat, half -- the right half -- is beveled or
chamfered at maybe 10 or 15 deg.  I have no idea what the hammer was
originally used for when new.  Last-but-one owner used it to point
survey stakes from (cold?) rebar. Dies shown in the A&O ads are flat,
no chamfer.

Ries> Seems quite bizarre, as most every big hammer I have ever seen
Ries> has the dies at 45 degrees, so you can work both axis of them...

This is a good time to think about that.  I've had a vaguely
formulated notion that I would have the dies milled flat and
dovetailed so that they acted as sow blocks for new, smaller, more
versatile dies.  It didn't occur to me that the dovetails should be at
45 deg.  Excellent and timely observation, thanks.

Ries> ... and so when you put in swage tooling, you are not standing
Ries> on the side of the hammer.

If the big dies are milled flat with smaller dovetails, swage tooling
could be inserted when the smaller dies were removed.  I do that with
the 25# Jardine.

At the moment, I'm making a clamp for the lower die to hold tooling on
top of the flat part of the die, just so I can have something more
than "squash" or "taper" for learning purposes.  I won't muck around
with altering the existing dies until I've had some practice and get
some feel for how the thing behaves.

RobertH> Some hammers had an opening in the cast iron structure so
RobertH> that the steel you're working with can pass through the
RobertH> opening, and continue out the back.

Yeah, the Palmer Power Spring Hammer has that:

    http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/old-hammer.html

and I've taken advantage of that feature when i was using the PPSH
pictured. 

RobertH> I can't tell if this one does or not. 

Does not.  Ca. 19 in., center of tup to main casting.

RobertH> Do you know what it's rated at, pounds wise?

The specs say "300cwt".  The tup weighs 300# (not 336 = 3 x 112) with
the die out but the die probably weighs 40 or so pounds.  Specs also
say: 

     Diameter of bar efficiently dealt with      5"

and  that, in a test, a 5" cube of "Siemens Martin Mild Steel" was
drawn to 6' 6" in eight minutes.

RobertH> I'd kill to have what you have though.

Don't do that.  At least not until I find out if it works as good as
it looks. :-)

RobertH> I wonder what it's value is?

Well, at 16 cents a pound, a couple of grand just for scrap.  I paid
$100 (in 1968) for the PPSH (and drove to western Mass. to fetch it)
that I swapped even for this one.  For the concrete pad, assorted
hardware, machine work etc. but not counting the diesel, I have about
$2000 into it, perhaps a quarter of which I can recover if I sell the
stuff I bought that didn't prove to be useful in the end.

There's a guy near Truro who collects reed organs.  He had a Texan [1]
show up in his door yard wanting to buy one of the least ornate and
unpreposessing of his organs for a couple of hundred bucks. No sale.
$500?  Nope. Not for sale.  The Texan offered $1,000 and, before long
was up to $10,000.  No sale. Nope.  Won't sell it.  Seems that there
were only three of these particular organs ever made and the Texan
already owned two of them.  The Texan finally went away in a snit and
the Truro guy loves to tell the yarn.  Nobody has trucked into my
dooryard waving ten grand for my collectible A&O but I don't expect
it, either.  Should I?  :-)


- Mike


[1] No offense intended here.  My parents were both Texans.

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