Gents,

After recently completing a week long course on Damascus at the ABS
school (Taught by MS Steve Dunn, incidentally) I am considering the
procurement of a forging press. However, I am a complete novice when
it comes to hydraulics, which limits my ability to make any sort of
decision.

At the ABS school, there is a press made by Uncle Al of Riverside
Machine (http://www.riversidemachine.net/item16342.ctlg). The two
features that seemed important were 1) it would accept interchangeable
dies and 2) the foot pedal would lower the press at a constant speed,
it would hold at a certain level, or if you took your foot off it
would raise up.

I was with MS Chris Marks (http://www.marksforge.com/) when he used
this press to create a demo billet of damascus and remember him saying
it wasn't strong enough. I believe his press was closer to 50 tons.

Anyway, this brings me to my question. Does anyone have any
experience with or opinions on the Harbor Freight 50 Ton press found
he
http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/cta...emnumber=46768

My thoughts, questions and observations:
- What powers this press? Can you just hook up a compressor? I have
a 5hp / 60 gal / 13.3 cfm @90 psi unit. Would that work?
- How would one convert the unit to be foot pedal operated?
- It looks like one would have to raise the bottom table up quite
high to use this press on a billet of steel that was only 2-4" tall.
- The manual says that you basically use the air supply to lower the
ram to the material and then pump it by hand. Can't you just keep
using the air pressure to ram into the material? Or does it lack
sufficient force in that manner?
- It looks like it would be difficult to fit dies onto this unit.

I'm only aware of two commercially available presses. Uncle Al's, and
the one from Carolina Knives.
(http://www.carolinaknives.com/press/press.html) If anyone knows of
others I would appreciate a reference.

Finally, would I be able to build my own press using the $70 HF 20 ton
bottle jack discussed in the other recent thread? I am a good welder
and a reasonable metal worker and handy sort of guy in general. I
just don't know anything about hydraulics...

Thanks in advance,

John P.