On Sun, 9 Jan 2005 19:21:39 +1100, "john johnson"
wrote:


"chunk" wrote in message
ink.net...
This is on my friends site... Hopefully someone here can tell
me what it is.

http://www.angelfire.com/oh/muddybog...te/photos.html

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

http://www.catskillarchive.com/rrextra/trib0390.Html

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

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