WillC
Senior Member
- Joined
- Jul 9, 2011
- Messages
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"Tyre Hammer" Not a phrase which brings to mind a well tuned professional machine, but having looked at a few home built Power hammer designs, its to my mind the best of them. For those who don't know the tyre hammer is pretty much based on a little giant type, spring/ pivots/counterweight action. Using a tyre for traction of the motor and to support the counterweight. If you search "tyre hammer" you will find many examples showing the mechanism. Plans for making a hammer have been made by Clay Spencer. If I was hammerless, this would be the way I would go as it makes a nice size hammer for blade smithing and light damascus production. Far more versatile than a press in my opinion, (although a press is always handy too) And taking up an amazingly small footprint, less than 1m floor space. Needs to be bolted down though or it would wobble all over the shop.
Anyway I was very interested when my friend and fellow blacksmith told me he had built one so I went to have a play. He has done a few things differently as everything had to be reworked for what was available to him, many parts were specially machined. He also felt the Spencer design was a bit fixed as far as the gap between the dies so he added the ability for the head to move up and down to adjust for different tooling. The results impressed me and he has ended up with a very well set up versatile machine.
Here is a vid of me having a play on it, seeing how "heavy" and "delicate" it could be.
Ignore the silly banner, its just from the conversion software, I was too mean to upgrade the demo.
[video=youtube;w_IMPd-bapk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_IMPd-bapk&context=C3d8dacaADOEgsToPDskKzRyVpOcHowt6PCPBCSPP8[/video]
I could see one of these in my workshop eventually set up for specific tasks alongside my 40 kilo Anyang.
Anyway I was very interested when my friend and fellow blacksmith told me he had built one so I went to have a play. He has done a few things differently as everything had to be reworked for what was available to him, many parts were specially machined. He also felt the Spencer design was a bit fixed as far as the gap between the dies so he added the ability for the head to move up and down to adjust for different tooling. The results impressed me and he has ended up with a very well set up versatile machine.
Here is a vid of me having a play on it, seeing how "heavy" and "delicate" it could be.
Ignore the silly banner, its just from the conversion software, I was too mean to upgrade the demo.
[video=youtube;w_IMPd-bapk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_IMPd-bapk&context=C3d8dacaADOEgsToPDskKzRyVpOcHowt6PCPBCSPP8[/video]
I could see one of these in my workshop eventually set up for specific tasks alongside my 40 kilo Anyang.