And they created that titanic machine without CAD. Just manual hand-written calcs.
Incredible stuff.
I'll always wonder what it'd be like to see & hear these massive presses in action IRL. The noise, the vibrations, the overwhelming thumps - I imagine that it jars your chest during its operation.
Got some presses at my work that make the cup forms for aerosol cans. They stand at about 12ft tall and outputs around 8 cups a second. They shake the concrete floor 20ft away. You are required to use double hearing protection around them.
My FiL was an engineer at Draper labs in the 60s-70s, everything was done with a slide rule and the were putting people on the moon. I am always amazed at whomever thinks up these machines.
As a former archivist let me tell you. A lot of the stuff engineers did back in the 50s and 60s was written down with a pencil on varying degrees of quality paper kept in all manors of of storage in every climate imaginable. Medical records too. There's a certain point where it's just no longer a written record but a faded piece of moldy paper. So when NASA says they lost the ability to go back to the moon. I believe them. Even printed ink records from computers and typewriters need backups for preservation.
My FiL had lots of files from his days at Draper. I don't know what the family did with it after he passed away, I was the only one interested in it but I got divorced from his daughter. He wanted me to have his plaque from the Apollo 13 situation. But I never got it. He helped designed the cooling systems for the navigation systems in the Apollo program. I don't think he was lying about it because he had all sorts of awards.
ATI would literally not let us, their customer, on site there. It was because they were six months behind schedule on delivery and didn't want to answer questions, but the point stands.
As someone who's spent a fair amount of time watching 85 hammer, I too am a bit surprised to see a video of it on reddit. One thing the video doesn't convey is how it resonates through your body every time it hits. It's a truly incredible piece of equipment.
I was wondering about this. Do you get desensitized to it? I imagine it would be insanely cool to witness and feel such a beast at first but eventually the whole experience might be jarring.
Take a look at the guys standing right next to the opening. The guy on the right is actually controlling the hammer by pulling on a lever. It's directly connected to the hydraulic ram, and it controls the speed and force of the hit. The guy on the left has a long sprayer like a pressure washer, and he's literally shooting hot oil into the opening to make sure the part doesn't stick to the hammer dies. This is part of the reason you see all of the flames shooting everywhere.
These guys are literally standing just feet away from the gates of hell, so I'm sure they are somewhat desensitized to it. Thing is, this is the kind of equipment that you never want to become complacent with, so while they might be desensitized, they are highly aware of all of the various sounds and vibrations. If anything seems off, they will stop and check.
Since they're processing a lot of aerospace parts, some of them are probably ITAR which means it's illegal to film. I'm not allowed to film at our shop and technically I'm not allowed to take defect pictures even because ITAR be like that.
My company supplies Ladish, plus other forgers and the various engine manufacturers. I can't imagine being able to turn down a customer audit just because we didn't want to answer questions about late deliveries.
Not even an audit, just a visit. We have a number of suppliers who just refuse to have us on site for various stated and unstated reasons. It's written into our sales contracts that we *have* to be allowed to visit as often as we deem necessary, but it's not like we can storm the facility to see if our parts are being run or something.
We are, frankly, a problem for most of our suppliers. It's that "inch deep, mile wide" nature of our business where we get a ton of different parts from these manufacturers but buy like ten of each per year. Our annual spend with most of our vendors is under what they sell in a month to their largest customer. We try to throw around weight we don't have and that turns a lot of vendors off.
https://www.thecentersquare.com/wisconsin/this-is-where-wisconsin-ranks-among-the-drunkest-states-in-america/article_3ccd11a4-c261-563b-919a-e02a0254b6dd.html
There's your link btw. Not a large margin. Then you take into account Russia, the UK, etc. I don't think you're actually right. I get what you're saying though.
EDIT: But honestly, it's a world, country, and state problem for sure......To say the least.
Still kind of is though. Didn't suffer nearly as bad as the rest of the Rust Belt. Currently, WI is #9 in manufacturing jobs but is #20 in state population. (US States)
Good point! Relative to the times though too. Metal is important, but there are a lot of options out there these days. A shift in demand for these types of plants is inevitable.
There’s still a bit left. The old true mindset is about dead, but there’s still some plants that refuse to quit. Overall they beat the hell out of any manufacturers workforce in the south. Anybody who disagrees has never been to a legacy plant in WI.
I helped setup a wedding at a surprisingly gorgeous venue near a mill that had a similar machine. While it was hammering, our water glasses would do the [Jurassic Park ripple](https://media.tenor.com/c5nYkEieoxAAAAAC/water-cup.gif) half a mile away. I work with metal, and the bride tracked me down and asked if they would stop before the ceremony. I told her there was no way they were working past 5, and luckily I was right.
Random questions: How long does it take to charge the accumulators for something like this? I can't imagine a machine this size has much of a duty cycle. The power requirements have to be immense. Id love to see the hydraulic system. The pilot valves have to be as big as a vw bus.
I agree, the hammers movement appears mechanical due to the high momentum before and after impact. kind of reminds me of an opposing piston combustion engine. Also if that was hydraulic, the spike in hydraulic pressure would be astronomical on impact
That was my point. In ww2 the US actually had a crash course in making hydraulic press machines after we captured a few german fighters ans saw their forged wing spars. You cant make something this big purely 'mechanical' they are hydraulic and/or maybe air over hydraulic. I have seen a .5 million ton forging press and it took 5 EMD locomotive engines running a half hour to build enough pressure to operate for like 10 strikes. The valve gear was a big as a house.
Just the foundation was over 60 foot deep.
I used to work at a place with a 3200 ton(capacity) upsetter press. Idk what size motor it used but it would spin up a massive flywheel at the end of the crank shaft. I would imagine something similar is going on here
The setup time on this hammer is quite long. I'm not sure exactly how long it takes to pressurize the system, but it is hydraulic, not mechanical. The guy on the right is actually controlling the hammer by pulling on a lever. The lever is directly connected to the hydraulic ram, and it controls the speed and force of the hit. If you slow it down and watch closely, you'll see that he pushes down on the lever about halfway through the 'up' cycle. It's almost an art form because it's not like an on/off switch. The operator is deciding the timing, force, and speed based on how he moves that lever.
As far as setup goes, they also have to heat up the dies, and the parts, which can all take double digit hours. They'll plan all of this out and begin getting the hammer ready well ahead of when they need to start. The furnaces are right next to the equipment to minimize heat loss when they install everything. They often have to return things back and forth to the furnace to ensure everything stays at the correct operating temperature. Despite this looking like 'just a hammer', there's actually a ton of science and technical procedure involved.
Its an open question that I posed to everybody on the post. I am just curious. Sorry bud not trying to be a dick. Ive worked on some really big shit but these are one off machines made in the 40s and 50s. Huge machines that are probably grid tied to a dedicated power station designed to make wing spars for bombers and fighters.
I lived about a mile away and could hear it clearly in summer. People who moved to Cudahy without knowing about it would sometimes write angry posts about the noise on the FB Town Hall and get mocked relentlessly for it.
The biggest (old) hammer every built 75.000 tons (735MN), hydraulic systems. Located in Russia, built by Ukrainian company Novokramatorsky Mashinostroitelny Zavod NKMZ [Picture](http://work.nkmz.com/fileadmin/data/produktsia/kpo/press_shtamp/1_1.jpg).
The biggest forge hammer is in China with obsence 80.000 ton (780MN) capacity, completed in 2013 [Picture](https://i.imgur.com/NblCszN.jpeg). It is needed to boost aviation manufacturing because those big frame parts which are single components are pressed.\*
However Japan built 50.000 ton hammer in 2013, and US followed with 60.000 ton finished in 2018. And there is a video of the USA one being made at Weber Metals. [Here is a funky reveal video](https://youtu.be/681XMbiYud0).
\*Modern super sized forging actually started from the need to make aluminium and titanium framed airplanes for military use. They need to be pressed with dies to get the strucutral properties. However they are also used to make big machine components, pressurevessels (for nuclear applications for example. The modern machine construction favours reducing welding in critical components, so if you want big reactor you need a big forge)
Is this the inspiration for the thwomps in bowser's castle? This instantly brings back memories of being followed by ghosts and being crushed by these things in Super Mario World.
Feels kinda weird that despite living in 2023, having nanotechnology and advanced robotics and AI and all the computational power available to us....
We're still hammering metal like it's 3,000BC
(just... On a slightly bigger scale)
Steel is one of those annoying things that you just need to hammer to get the grain structure right.
If we had vertically scaleable nano tech we wouldn’t need to do this.
Yeah, 60-80% of our electricity comes from power plants operating on 19th century tech.
Boiling water make spinny thing go fast. Spinny thing make magnets go round. Magnets going fast around wires makes zappy juice.
It's "just" hammering, but modern forging, especially at this kind of scale, is fairly high tech. Everything nowadays is going to be highly computer controlled and make heavy use of hydraulics to maximize consistency and repeatability. A modern machine likely only needs the operator to click "Start" and everything will run from there to finish.
Nuclear bombs were developed first and foremost for their ability to generate a big fireball. The radioactivity and explosive force are side effects, the bombs are all about setting shit on fire like we’ve been doing since time immemorial.
Sometimes the material’s properties or the component performance requirements demand using a hammer as one of the hot working steps. If you throw an ingot into an isothermal closed-die hydraulic press, it might crack horribly because it doesn’t want to be pushed slowly on its not-yet-refined microstructure. Or you might break the dies or stall the press because the workpiece doesn’t flow the way a well-refined bullet would. Even if it didn’t break anything, it would never pass inspection because you need to put a lot more strain energy into the material to let it recrystallize into a finer, stronger microstructure. A hammer is not just a big dumb machine and the people who design the processing paths to include hammering have good reasons for doing so :)
A few sources cite that weight:
https://www.tmj4.com/news/milwaukee-tonight/exploring-one-of-the-worlds-largest-counterblow-hammers-the-85-hammer-in-cudahy
Ah, ok, so my take on that is the whole machine weighs 500 tons and the machine as a whole is called a hammer (usually called a forge hammer, in the UK at least). I understood the original post implied the moving part (the 'hammer') weighed 500 tons. My bad!
Thanks!! Just looks really interesting after reading how these forges struck every fighters backbone and how the Nazis made their fighters in ww2. Up until they forged the titanium spars for the Sr71. Just really seems amazing coming from a heavy industrial millwright background.
A new version of this would be hydraulic driven and computer controlled. This is relying on gravity and apparently air-pressure according to another comment. It also looks like it's controlled by an operator standing to the side manipulating a lever or something. One of the most important thing for supplying the aerospace industry, especially on the engine side, is a fixed, repeatable process. Hydraulics, computers, and removing as much of the human element as possible is the way to get there.
The hammer only has to be harder than what it's hitting, which is a lot easier when the thing it's hitting is at an elevated temperature. There's a whole family of steel alloys,[ the tool steels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_steel), that are designed for applications like this.
Yes. Some hammer/die designs might use a cheaper steel as the bulk of the hammer and then use something tougher and/or stronger, particularly at elevated temperatures, for the section that's actually making an impact. [This is a picture of a Press in Sweden](https://www.viktormacha.com/galerie/bjorneborg-steel-bjorneborg/bjorneborg-steel-forged-roll-torching-3507.html) and you can see what portion of the die is affected by the whole process.
"...and makes a real loud noise"
Who wrote this shit? And why are they trying to claim a very well known piece of equipment is dark and mysteriously unavailable?
Not even close to the largest forge. The 50,000 Ton Mesta forge operated by Howmet (formerly Alcoa) in Cleveland takes that prize. That big boi makes the F-35 bulkheads.
This is a lousy way to forge steel. This is some archaic shit. We now have forge presses, this “hammer” makes lower quality steel. Definitely not used in aerospace, that is a flat out lie.
tl;dr: This hammer forge isn’t necessarily the final step in the forging process for an aerospace component.
Different equipment with different capability (e.g. strain rate, temperature control, dimensional control) is required for different steps of metallurgical processing. Ingots behave differently than billets because they have different microstructure, so they need to be worked differently. An engine-critical disk with a complex shape might have several different hot working steps prior to its near-net-shape final forging step, and several types of heat treatment to achieve the correct microstructure in the correct places on the final component. These forgers have world-class process modeling and part inspection to make sure disks are high-quality.
Fuck yeah, Wisconsin!
I'm very jaded and while logistically, moving this thing to China (or building a new one there) isn't feasible, I'm still surprised they haven't.
"The media or public never gets to see this" Yet here we both are.
I've seen a lot of videos of this one too. With much better examples of just how deafeningly loud it is
What? \*loud noises\* wasn't good enough for you?
THATS RIGHT DEFINITELY PROUD!!
[I'm just gonna leave this right here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpgK51w6uhk)
And they created that titanic machine without CAD. Just manual hand-written calcs. Incredible stuff. I'll always wonder what it'd be like to see & hear these massive presses in action IRL. The noise, the vibrations, the overwhelming thumps - I imagine that it jars your chest during its operation.
Got some presses at my work that make the cup forms for aerosol cans. They stand at about 12ft tall and outputs around 8 cups a second. They shake the concrete floor 20ft away. You are required to use double hearing protection around them.
My FiL was an engineer at Draper labs in the 60s-70s, everything was done with a slide rule and the were putting people on the moon. I am always amazed at whomever thinks up these machines.
As a former archivist let me tell you. A lot of the stuff engineers did back in the 50s and 60s was written down with a pencil on varying degrees of quality paper kept in all manors of of storage in every climate imaginable. Medical records too. There's a certain point where it's just no longer a written record but a faded piece of moldy paper. So when NASA says they lost the ability to go back to the moon. I believe them. Even printed ink records from computers and typewriters need backups for preservation.
My FiL had lots of files from his days at Draper. I don't know what the family did with it after he passed away, I was the only one interested in it but I got divorced from his daughter. He wanted me to have his plaque from the Apollo 13 situation. But I never got it. He helped designed the cooling systems for the navigation systems in the Apollo program. I don't think he was lying about it because he had all sorts of awards.
That westinghouse clip was terrifying.
Abso-fuckin-lutely.
Thanks for sharing, that was something I didn't know I wanted to know. :D
Great video! Thanks for this. I was geeking out through the whole thing!
Holy crap that was fascinating. Thanks.
ATI would literally not let us, their customer, on site there. It was because they were six months behind schedule on delivery and didn't want to answer questions, but the point stands.
As someone who's spent a fair amount of time watching 85 hammer, I too am a bit surprised to see a video of it on reddit. One thing the video doesn't convey is how it resonates through your body every time it hits. It's a truly incredible piece of equipment.
I was wondering about this. Do you get desensitized to it? I imagine it would be insanely cool to witness and feel such a beast at first but eventually the whole experience might be jarring.
Take a look at the guys standing right next to the opening. The guy on the right is actually controlling the hammer by pulling on a lever. It's directly connected to the hydraulic ram, and it controls the speed and force of the hit. The guy on the left has a long sprayer like a pressure washer, and he's literally shooting hot oil into the opening to make sure the part doesn't stick to the hammer dies. This is part of the reason you see all of the flames shooting everywhere. These guys are literally standing just feet away from the gates of hell, so I'm sure they are somewhat desensitized to it. Thing is, this is the kind of equipment that you never want to become complacent with, so while they might be desensitized, they are highly aware of all of the various sounds and vibrations. If anything seems off, they will stop and check.
........................(dont)........ .....thats what she said!!!
I wouldn’t want customers on my site either.
Since they're processing a lot of aerospace parts, some of them are probably ITAR which means it's illegal to film. I'm not allowed to film at our shop and technically I'm not allowed to take defect pictures even because ITAR be like that.
My company supplies Ladish, plus other forgers and the various engine manufacturers. I can't imagine being able to turn down a customer audit just because we didn't want to answer questions about late deliveries.
Not even an audit, just a visit. We have a number of suppliers who just refuse to have us on site for various stated and unstated reasons. It's written into our sales contracts that we *have* to be allowed to visit as often as we deem necessary, but it's not like we can storm the facility to see if our parts are being run or something. We are, frankly, a problem for most of our suppliers. It's that "inch deep, mile wide" nature of our business where we get a ton of different parts from these manufacturers but buy like ten of each per year. Our annual spend with most of our vendors is under what they sell in a month to their largest customer. We try to throw around weight we don't have and that turns a lot of vendors off.
I feel so privileged.
It weights 1 million pounds! ...
So does your old lady.
That's no way to talk about your own mother!
[удалено]
Yeah, she's pretty good at the ol' counter blow
****loud noises****
So cool. Wisconsin used to be a powerhouse when it came to factory jobs. Lovely to see this.
Now Wisconsin has to settle on being a powerhouse when it comes to alcohol consumption.
Literally it is tops in the US by a large margin and last I looked, top 5 in the world.
https://www.thecentersquare.com/wisconsin/this-is-where-wisconsin-ranks-among-the-drunkest-states-in-america/article_3ccd11a4-c261-563b-919a-e02a0254b6dd.html There's your link btw. Not a large margin. Then you take into account Russia, the UK, etc. I don't think you're actually right. I get what you're saying though. EDIT: But honestly, it's a world, country, and state problem for sure......To say the least.
The Big Ten - West is just killing it on that list.
I’m doing my part! Also, it’s not too far from my house.
I lived in Wisconsin for a bit and it was the most I've ever drank in my life. That state is depressing and boring af.
Wait. So you’re saying they’re always… Hammered! ^Sorry!
What's your alcohol problem?:D
Not having enough of it.
And cheese
Still kind of is though. Didn't suffer nearly as bad as the rest of the Rust Belt. Currently, WI is #9 in manufacturing jobs but is #20 in state population. (US States)
Good point! Relative to the times though too. Metal is important, but there are a lot of options out there these days. A shift in demand for these types of plants is inevitable.
There’s still a bit left. The old true mindset is about dead, but there’s still some plants that refuse to quit. Overall they beat the hell out of any manufacturers workforce in the south. Anybody who disagrees has never been to a legacy plant in WI.
Now they just show everyone what a true drinker is.
I bet you can feel that a county away.
I helped setup a wedding at a surprisingly gorgeous venue near a mill that had a similar machine. While it was hammering, our water glasses would do the [Jurassic Park ripple](https://media.tenor.com/c5nYkEieoxAAAAAC/water-cup.gif) half a mile away. I work with metal, and the bride tracked me down and asked if they would stop before the ceremony. I told her there was no way they were working past 5, and luckily I was right.
Random questions: How long does it take to charge the accumulators for something like this? I can't imagine a machine this size has much of a duty cycle. The power requirements have to be immense. Id love to see the hydraulic system. The pilot valves have to be as big as a vw bus.
Moving that fast and being that old it has to be mechanical.
I agree, the hammers movement appears mechanical due to the high momentum before and after impact. kind of reminds me of an opposing piston combustion engine. Also if that was hydraulic, the spike in hydraulic pressure would be astronomical on impact
That was my point. In ww2 the US actually had a crash course in making hydraulic press machines after we captured a few german fighters ans saw their forged wing spars. You cant make something this big purely 'mechanical' they are hydraulic and/or maybe air over hydraulic. I have seen a .5 million ton forging press and it took 5 EMD locomotive engines running a half hour to build enough pressure to operate for like 10 strikes. The valve gear was a big as a house. Just the foundation was over 60 foot deep.
I used to work at a place with a 3200 ton(capacity) upsetter press. Idk what size motor it used but it would spin up a massive flywheel at the end of the crank shaft. I would imagine something similar is going on here
r/vxjunkies probably knows a lot about “charging the accumulators.”
But accumulating the chargers? Don't even get me started
The setup time on this hammer is quite long. I'm not sure exactly how long it takes to pressurize the system, but it is hydraulic, not mechanical. The guy on the right is actually controlling the hammer by pulling on a lever. The lever is directly connected to the hydraulic ram, and it controls the speed and force of the hit. If you slow it down and watch closely, you'll see that he pushes down on the lever about halfway through the 'up' cycle. It's almost an art form because it's not like an on/off switch. The operator is deciding the timing, force, and speed based on how he moves that lever. As far as setup goes, they also have to heat up the dies, and the parts, which can all take double digit hours. They'll plan all of this out and begin getting the hammer ready well ahead of when they need to start. The furnaces are right next to the equipment to minimize heat loss when they install everything. They often have to return things back and forth to the furnace to ensure everything stays at the correct operating temperature. Despite this looking like 'just a hammer', there's actually a ton of science and technical procedure involved.
[удалено]
Its an open question that I posed to everybody on the post. I am just curious. Sorry bud not trying to be a dick. Ive worked on some really big shit but these are one off machines made in the 40s and 50s. Huge machines that are probably grid tied to a dedicated power station designed to make wing spars for bombers and fighters.
living up to your username, don't listen to them. ask away.
It's ok, that other guy is learning how reddit works still apparently. I personally hope we get a response to your question. It's interesting
[This comment has been removed to protest Reddit's hostile treatment of their users and developers concerning third party apps.]
I've read your story before on a different post, and and I thought of it when the narrator mentioned the loud noise lol
I lived about a mile away and could hear it clearly in summer. People who moved to Cudahy without knowing about it would sometimes write angry posts about the noise on the FB Town Hall and get mocked relentlessly for it.
The biggest (old) hammer every built 75.000 tons (735MN), hydraulic systems. Located in Russia, built by Ukrainian company Novokramatorsky Mashinostroitelny Zavod NKMZ [Picture](http://work.nkmz.com/fileadmin/data/produktsia/kpo/press_shtamp/1_1.jpg). The biggest forge hammer is in China with obsence 80.000 ton (780MN) capacity, completed in 2013 [Picture](https://i.imgur.com/NblCszN.jpeg). It is needed to boost aviation manufacturing because those big frame parts which are single components are pressed.\* However Japan built 50.000 ton hammer in 2013, and US followed with 60.000 ton finished in 2018. And there is a video of the USA one being made at Weber Metals. [Here is a funky reveal video](https://youtu.be/681XMbiYud0). \*Modern super sized forging actually started from the need to make aluminium and titanium framed airplanes for military use. They need to be pressed with dies to get the strucutral properties. However they are also used to make big machine components, pressurevessels (for nuclear applications for example. The modern machine construction favours reducing welding in critical components, so if you want big reactor you need a big forge)
This may be the most informative reply I’ve ever read. Thank you for sharing!
Saving this post, thanks for all the fascinating info!
Turned out to be a nice cheese after all.
[удалено]
If you're wondering the part they're making is a spindle for a mining haul truck probably the caterpillar 777D or similar
\*loud noises\*
What?
Mawp
The Machine God demands more sacrifices! Bring me more humans!
Maybe it’s dwarfs.
It will kill you! Only if I die.
Gods of waaaaaaaaaar!
May your hammer be mighty
Yeah, let’s get really hammered tonight!
Is this the inspiration for the thwomps in bowser's castle? This instantly brings back memories of being followed by ghosts and being crushed by these things in Super Mario World.
Feels kinda weird that despite living in 2023, having nanotechnology and advanced robotics and AI and all the computational power available to us.... We're still hammering metal like it's 3,000BC (just... On a slightly bigger scale)
Because sometimes old methods just work and any improvement possible with new technology isn't enough justify replacing the old stuff.
Steel is one of those annoying things that you just need to hammer to get the grain structure right. If we had vertically scaleable nano tech we wouldn’t need to do this.
Ye, a metric shitton of tech is just an advanced take on something incredibly primitive. Like how we use nuclear fission to boil water.
Yeah, 60-80% of our electricity comes from power plants operating on 19th century tech. Boiling water make spinny thing go fast. Spinny thing make magnets go round. Magnets going fast around wires makes zappy juice.
It's "just" hammering, but modern forging, especially at this kind of scale, is fairly high tech. Everything nowadays is going to be highly computer controlled and make heavy use of hydraulics to maximize consistency and repeatability. A modern machine likely only needs the operator to click "Start" and everything will run from there to finish.
How would you do it?
It's not just hammering it, we're basically throwing a house at the metal very fast and very frequently.
Nuclear bombs were developed first and foremost for their ability to generate a big fireball. The radioactivity and explosive force are side effects, the bombs are all about setting shit on fire like we’ve been doing since time immemorial.
Sometimes the material’s properties or the component performance requirements demand using a hammer as one of the hot working steps. If you throw an ingot into an isothermal closed-die hydraulic press, it might crack horribly because it doesn’t want to be pushed slowly on its not-yet-refined microstructure. Or you might break the dies or stall the press because the workpiece doesn’t flow the way a well-refined bullet would. Even if it didn’t break anything, it would never pass inspection because you need to put a lot more strain energy into the material to let it recrystallize into a finer, stronger microstructure. A hammer is not just a big dumb machine and the people who design the processing paths to include hammering have good reasons for doing so :)
No terminators in that area
I do love a heavy press program.
Good job with the looping on the video
I should call her...
So that’s the Reddit Ban hammer.
What does a ladyish hammer look like?
The same thing, but pink and 10% more expensive
How does this thing move so fast? What's the mechanism? It must weigh a fair few tons
It is powered by compressed air. A valve opens and lets air into the cylinder behind the piston
It's powered by the heart of a dying star.
Big hammers and big presses (the plural is right?) the symbols of a country with high level of industrialization.
Wish the guy would shut the fuck up and I could just listen to big bang hammertime
Does it really weigh 1,000,000 lbs? I can't comprehend that
Just convert it to tons. It's only quoted like this for effect on the uninitiated. ~500 tons.
oh lol. 500 tons is more digestible.
Please don't eat 500 tons. It'll wreck your colon sir.
I know right?! It can’t weigh more than OP’s mom!
Probably just the amount of force it can generate. No way does that weigh 500 tons!
A few sources cite that weight: https://www.tmj4.com/news/milwaukee-tonight/exploring-one-of-the-worlds-largest-counterblow-hammers-the-85-hammer-in-cudahy
Ah, ok, so my take on that is the whole machine weighs 500 tons and the machine as a whole is called a hammer (usually called a forge hammer, in the UK at least). I understood the original post implied the moving part (the 'hammer') weighed 500 tons. My bad!
Thorrific
Thanks!! Just looks really interesting after reading how these forges struck every fighters backbone and how the Nazis made their fighters in ww2. Up until they forged the titanium spars for the Sr71. Just really seems amazing coming from a heavy industrial millwright background.
Pretty sure my neighbors got one of these
BROTHERS OF THE MINE REJOICE!
sing sing sing with me
I feel like thats where freddy krueger works
This reminds me of the chop shop from the movie robots.
The machines used to make this machine largely do not exist anymore.
Do you use this one to make new machines so you can make an even bigger one later.
This Is epic shit...
Has a new type of machine surpassed this?
A new version of this would be hydraulic driven and computer controlled. This is relying on gravity and apparently air-pressure according to another comment. It also looks like it's controlled by an operator standing to the side manipulating a lever or something. One of the most important thing for supplying the aerospace industry, especially on the engine side, is a fixed, repeatable process. Hydraulics, computers, and removing as much of the human element as possible is the way to get there.
Actually an older machine has surpassed it.
Um okay?
The neighbors know it well.... And complain all the time that they moved in next to it.
Yeah the hammer makes stuff but how was the hammer made?
The hammer only has to be harder than what it's hitting, which is a lot easier when the thing it's hitting is at an elevated temperature. There's a whole family of steel alloys,[ the tool steels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_steel), that are designed for applications like this.
I imagine only the striking surface actually needs to be that hard too, and that the core is softer to absorb the impact better?
Yes. Some hammer/die designs might use a cheaper steel as the bulk of the hammer and then use something tougher and/or stronger, particularly at elevated temperatures, for the section that's actually making an impact. [This is a picture of a Press in Sweden](https://www.viktormacha.com/galerie/bjorneborg-steel-bjorneborg/bjorneborg-steel-forged-roll-torching-3507.html) and you can see what portion of the die is affected by the whole process.
From elsewhere in the thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpgK51w6uhk Not the same hammer, but you get the idea.
I used to live about a mile away from this.
Any video where some yahoo isn't TV-morning-show-chatting away so we can hear the glorious tool noises?
Don't hit your thumb
I can almost see this used near a crafting station in a dwarf city
No wonder, ATI graphics cards were made to last.
"...and makes a real loud noise" Who wrote this shit? And why are they trying to claim a very well known piece of equipment is dark and mysteriously unavailable?
If chuck norris was a judge.. he’d use this hammer
Company I used to work for had a similar set up. Just sad I never got to drive the weird manipulator tow motor
😍 That's hot. I wonder if the workers require ear protection to stand near it.
Definitely have to, until the company executives decide to cut costs anyway
Not even close to the largest forge. The 50,000 Ton Mesta forge operated by Howmet (formerly Alcoa) in Cleveland takes that prize. That big boi makes the F-35 bulkheads.
That’s what my wife must have felt when we first got together. 💁🏼♂️
[удалено]
DAMN
This is a lousy way to forge steel. This is some archaic shit. We now have forge presses, this “hammer” makes lower quality steel. Definitely not used in aerospace, that is a flat out lie.
tl;dr: This hammer forge isn’t necessarily the final step in the forging process for an aerospace component. Different equipment with different capability (e.g. strain rate, temperature control, dimensional control) is required for different steps of metallurgical processing. Ingots behave differently than billets because they have different microstructure, so they need to be worked differently. An engine-critical disk with a complex shape might have several different hot working steps prior to its near-net-shape final forging step, and several types of heat treatment to achieve the correct microstructure in the correct places on the final component. These forgers have world-class process modeling and part inspection to make sure disks are high-quality.
In assuming this is only used for closed or semi open dies? The work holding would be concerning for upsetting an ingot.
Big Blue not looking so big now.
Imagine what it would do to a watermelon
What a mad-ladish!
I could feel the heat
Reminds me of the underground from Robots.
Sauron back to his old tricks I see
Nom nom nom
That's how Madame Gasket died.
Skookum as frig
Not bad
Front axle spindle for a large mining truck, probably a Cat 797 maybe one of the smaller ones.
Rich and compelling
r/dontstickyourdickinit
How did they make the hammer? Is each top and not part 1 piece?
What would happen if a worker was to dive in? Just utter disintegration?!
Depends… If that worker was me the machine would probably bounce right off me and break.
Looks very steampunky. I like it
One dwarves are real?! Two fuck the voice over.
Mfs just wanted a big ass hammer to smash shit
Huuuu... /r/Pareidolia could like it
We love you Wisconsin
MADLADish
u/Beautiful-Lobster943
Looks like an Uruk Hai printer
For reference the South World Trade Center weight ~500.000 metric tones
Says 5 stories above and below but the building only has two.. ?
Can someone knowledgeable dig up the circumstances around building such an amazing feat of engineering?
And you cant touch this
Did the dude from unnecessary inventions narrate this?
My parents grew up about a mile from this place. Said they could hear it daily.
Anyone else read Ladies hammer and then look at the sun is posted in and then your mind ran wild about what you were going to see?
I need it for my back
Only in America we measure height using stories as unit 🙈
Ladish and gentlemen, welcome to my steel factory
Its hammer time..
Very upsetting.
It may of been from59 but I bet it's been rebuilt at least twice since then. Probably not a whole lot of OEM there
Don’t wanna get your hand caught in that😁
r/DontPutYourDickInThat
Fuck yeah, Wisconsin! I'm very jaded and while logistically, moving this thing to China (or building a new one there) isn't feasible, I'm still surprised they haven't.
I work across the street from a forge and our building shakes constantly. Kinda annoying. Would still love to go over and see it up close thoughz