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

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 18:11:50 +1100, "john johnson"
wrote:


wrote in message
roups.com...

chunk wrote:
This is on my friends site... Hopefully someone here can tell
me what it is.

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

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,
http://images.google.com/images?q=na...=Google+Search
Tom Lipton


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