Can you identify this?

Looks like one heck of a press - steam powered maybe based on item #2?

Joe - V#8013 - '86 VN750 - joe @ yunx .com Northern, NJ Ride a Motorcycle? Ask me about "The Ride"

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#1 is a tool used to reinstall the back on old stainless-body Casio watches after replacing the battery. Mine seems to need a battery every 8 years or so even though I don't check the time near as often as I used to.

Hi Chunk, I think it's a blacksmith's drop hammer. It's only a small one, here is one a bit bigger.

Our backsmiths shop had two of these, both a bit smaller than the one in your friends picture, 2 hundred weight if I recall correctly. They were made by Alldays & Onions in the UK, and what our blacksmiths could do with them was amazing to watch, and feel ! Ours had the steam replaced with an electric motor driven blower/compressor.

The steam is used to lift and hold the hammer up, then drop it. You can see the cylinder that lifts the hammer weight up at the top in you friends picture. The control of the hammers demonstrated by the blacksmiths was amazing to me, sadly the blacksmiths I knew are gone now, though I recently saw one of our old hammers sitting at a museum.

regards,

John

Power trip hammer?

Gunner

"The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore. True, you can sit outside in Paris and drink little cups of coffee, but why this is more stylish than sitting inside and drinking large glasses of whiskey I don't know." -- P.J O'Rourke (1989)

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I wonder how many of them were stone deaf when that picture was taken?

Gunner

"The French are a smallish, monkey-looking bunch and not dressed any better, on average, than the citizens of Baltimore. True, you can sit outside in Paris and drink little cups of coffee, but why this is more stylish than sitting inside and drinking large glasses of whiskey I don't know." -- P.J O'Rourke (1989)

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I saw one of those working in New Jersey about 10-12 years ago. We had flown in to Newark to visit the Polymer Processing Institute, located at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken. On the way back to the airport, we stopped at a light, and I noticed the most godawful racket and thumping. I looked into a corrugated tin shop next to us. Everything was in silhouette because it was grimy black, but large doors were open on both ends of the building. A couple of black outlines in safety gear, with long tools of some kind, were positioning a huge glowing billet in a hammer like that, only larger. The hammer was striking about 1/second. The billet must have been supported by rollers or something, because it was maybe 10" square and several feet long.

The light changed, and we went on.

Pete Keillor

I bet they trusted each other, though.

Steve

These pictures, especially the last one (railroad carriages) strongly remind me of Russia. We used to play war among that stuff as kids.

I can imagine that looking at the original picture that there is probably just about as much mass under ground that we are not seeing as there is above the ground and a likely reason that it is still there and everything else is gone. lg no neat sig line

Looks like a Nazel Power hot forging hammer.

The Blacksmith guys love these things. The hammers are rated by the weight of the moving part. The bottom or sow block is typically 16x the mass of the moving part. This is all from memory. Check out,

Lipton

It is probably an air operated swaging or forging hammer similar to a blacksmiths forging hammer. The tank showen is likely the air reciever. These things used a large volume of air. The swagers I worked on as an apprentice were used to squeeze down the end of alluminum extrusions which were then pulled through a die to reduce the size and give a better finish and hardness. The whole area around these pictures looks like it was once inside a building probably a heavy fabrication shop or such. One old shop near here ( closed and torn down in the 60's) fabricated railway locomotives. The often used just the rail car trucks to move very heavy peices from one section of the factory to another. Just a guess. Hope this helps. Herb

By the way, the reilroad carriage looks like it came from a locomotive, not a train car, as the photo caption says. Look at the piece around the middle of the axle, the only purpose that I can think of is power transmission from the engine to the axle.

i

That's a powered rail truck - the gearbox you see at the left of the inner axle probably has a set of spur gears inside. And if you look in the middle, parallel to the axles and under the truck pivot point where the train car goes, you'll probably find a traction motor.

The power leads would go up through the hollow center of the pivot point into the car. For an all-electric catenary system the tracks are the ground, for a diesel-electric they would make a full circuit.

Want to build a self-propelled rail car? ;-)

It would take a bigger power source than your little 6.5KW Onan (though that little bugger would be perfect for lights and heat when not underway), and you need one built for 600 VDC or 1,200 VDC output to match the motor voltage (unless you want to start with 480 VAC and build some serious control electronics) but there are the raw materials.

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The first is a steam hammer. The third items are probably trucks from a diesel electric locomotive.

Steve R.

Looks like a steam powered hammer to me. They had one very similar in the old forge shop at Spicer in Toledo OH when we tore it down in the '70s

tHAT

#1 Sure looks like a drop hammer, from a blacksmith's shop.

#2 Trucks off a small industrial locomotive, maybe a Whitcomb or Davenport, I'd have to drag some books out to tell for sure. These were very common around quarries and gravel pits. Many of these were actually mechanical drives, the gearbox hanging from the axle looks small for a traction motor.

Paul

Makes sense.

Sure. We had electric trains in the are where I grew up.

I hope that I could use my transformers there

:)

The thing I thought was a bit strange about these hammers at first, is that the bottom block is not connect all that rigidly to the hammer. I saw one being dismantled, and the cast base looked very flimsy, but buried below it in the ground was a timber structure about six feet square and 6 feet deep. I guess the hammer didn't need to be that rigidly connected to the bottom block because it just drops the weight, it doesn't power the weight down or squeese the forging, just gravity. The buried timber base was there to spread the weight of the impact on the bottom block, and make sure it didnt slowly sink into the ground.

regards,

John

The hammer in the picture is a steam powered open die forging hammer. I'm pretty sure that is the proper name. It does indeed have power applied in the down stroke. A drop hammer, a term others have used here, uses gravity for the down stroke. The drop hammer has the advantage of being very controllable for single strokes such as coining. Crank it up, let it drop.

A Nazel air hammer has an air compressor built in. It's not really an air compressor as much as it is an engine driven piston with air coupling to the hammer. There is always a big lump on the back of the hammer for the piston.

The anvils for steam hammers and Nazel/Chambersburg style air hammers are only attached for positioning. In the case of the hammer foundation you saw dismantled, below the timbers should have been a block of concrete if it was a large hammer. The 11th edition of "Machinery's Handbook" has a section on their construction. The concrete is used to keep the hammer from driving the anvil into the ground.

Cheers,

Kelley