- Joined
- Aug 6, 2007
- Messages
- 5,060
Came up with this design after studying alot of different videos, and started to notice trend in die setups. A similar shape is on the upper die on a Japanese hammer, and also I have seen this die on video of a Mexican farming implement blacksmith's setup and a Taiwanese swordsmith's hammer also. I needed to forge alot of elements for a railing at work, exactly the shape of knife blank: thicker spine, thinner edge, tapering profile etc. I would draw taper under flat dies then beat out the shape by hand with a 4 pound hammer with a heavily crowned face, was not slow going but there was quite a few to do in a short time. So I came up with this saddle that bolts to the upper die of the big Say Mak at work. The working face is 2" round (1045).
And it worked like this:
And here's one of the elements:
All I had to do was just clean up and even out everything, but I as basically able to do about 80% of the forging of each shape under the hammer.
I remember Don's demo at Ashokan, here he talked about the lower clamp on type tool that had crown that matched the crown on his hand hammer, and while my upper die only setup was accurate to the Japanese and Taiwanese style hammer setup, it is obvious to the slight pitfall you can see on the paint program sketch. It worked out sort of well that my boss liked the design so much, he thought it might be useful for another project we were working on, texturing 3/16" naval bronze. Under the single upper die only the distortion would be bad, spreading the metal only on one side it would warp in a big curve, so it needed a matched upper and lower die. I made up a lathe cutter to cut the crown on both, chucked and faced and cut them then dressed and mirror polished each one, welded and heat treated them. They worked fantastic! So far they are designated for soft metals only with the highly polished faces, but I would like to make another set for general forging as you can probably guess the significant improvement over the single upper die on a flat lower die.
Dies in the hammer:
I did do some experimenting with just the upper crowned die on a lower flat die, I was able to forge down plain mild steel to about 1/32" it was almost able to cut paper from the forge!
Interested in everyone's thoughts and comments.
And it worked like this:
And here's one of the elements:
All I had to do was just clean up and even out everything, but I as basically able to do about 80% of the forging of each shape under the hammer.
I remember Don's demo at Ashokan, here he talked about the lower clamp on type tool that had crown that matched the crown on his hand hammer, and while my upper die only setup was accurate to the Japanese and Taiwanese style hammer setup, it is obvious to the slight pitfall you can see on the paint program sketch. It worked out sort of well that my boss liked the design so much, he thought it might be useful for another project we were working on, texturing 3/16" naval bronze. Under the single upper die only the distortion would be bad, spreading the metal only on one side it would warp in a big curve, so it needed a matched upper and lower die. I made up a lathe cutter to cut the crown on both, chucked and faced and cut them then dressed and mirror polished each one, welded and heat treated them. They worked fantastic! So far they are designated for soft metals only with the highly polished faces, but I would like to make another set for general forging as you can probably guess the significant improvement over the single upper die on a flat lower die.
Dies in the hammer:
I did do some experimenting with just the upper crowned die on a lower flat die, I was able to forge down plain mild steel to about 1/32" it was almost able to cut paper from the forge!
Interested in everyone's thoughts and comments.
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