[TheForge] Old Punch Press ... is it worth it?

[Peter Fels & Phoebe Palmer]

There may be a shear pin, but none is evident on mine.
It needs to be remembered that these machine frames were made from 
brittle cast iron that does not fail gracefully.
They are designed to complete a stroke of fixed depth, every time.
If the dies are misaligned or the work too resistant.....BANG!
It's not a power hammer.
OTOH, they are fast production machines for stamping and the like.

On May 21, 2014, at 10:17 AM, Mike Spencer wrote:


PF wrote:

> Let's be clear...If you run the flywheel at speed, and stick a cold
> piece of steel under the die, and the machine can't finish it's
> stroke....  You have a fair chance of a catastrophe!

Which leads to the notion of the shear pin, soft flywheel key or
similar, engineered (possibly for shade-tree values of "engineered"
:-) to fail gracefully before major parts fail catastrophically.

I have no idea when this trick became popular nor where or how widely
it was adopted.  But if one were repurposing something that has the
capability of removeing major body parts on failure, one might try to
incorporate it into the modification plans.

A neighbor here has an old punch press, about 8' tall, non-working but
apparently in restorable condition.  I know he'd part with it for
scrap price or, to a loving home, even less.  Shipping could be a
problem beyond Lunenburg County, NS, though.  :-)


Idle thoughts,
- Mike

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

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