Homemade Power hammer Plans needed

Mark Williams

Mark Williams

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Well after banging out one knife blade and one hawk, of which larry did the hard pounding, It was almost dangerous for me to drive back home cause I could barely lift my arm from shoulder pain. :grumpy:

If anyone has a link to some good plans or pictures of some homemade power hammers , I would greatly appreciate it.
 
this is athread I need to watch :D

Good luck with that shoulder MW
 
Hi Mark,

Here's one site:

http://magichammer.freeservers.com/

Scroll down about halfway through the page. The ABANA plans are good as a set of guidelines only, you'll have to adapt to whatever you can find locally for steel. We're still in the never-ending process of building 5 air hammers...one of these days we'll get them finished up! :)

Building an air hammer is a pretty easy endeavor if you have the ability to work with the large pieces of steel, luckily, we're building these up at Len Landrum's fully equipped machine shop...although I do plan to build one on my own at my shop whenever we finish up these five as a sideline project.

Putting a wobbler in the shaft to the head weight helps eliminate the need for real precision in the head assembly. Go with two two way valves for the head control, instead of the single four way valve...it'll allow you to adjust it such that you can get the full blow of the hammer...in other words, the bottom (return side) of the air cylinder won't be dampening your blows. This will slow it down just a little bit, but allow for a harder hit...you can of course adjust the switches such that it pretty much acts as a single four way valve if you want, but this just gives you another option.

Building one of these or getting a Little Giant will probably go a long ways toward keeping you in the forging from now on...the body can only take so much, especially when it has a predisposed condition, I'm glad to see you looking into this route rather than just giving up! :)

:)

-Darren
 
Mark Williams said:
Well after banging out one knife blade and one hawk, of which larry did the hard pounding, It was almost dangerous for me to drive back home cause I could barely lift my arm from shoulder pain. :grumpy:

If anyone has a link to some good plans or pictures of some homemade power hammers , I would greatly appreciate it.
Click to expand...

Sorry you are still not up to speed, bro. :(
 
Thanks Guys. I really like the mechanical hammer for the simple reason that I dont have a compressor. This is top priority for me so you will get to see this thing evolve from the junk that I have on hand. Should be fun. I just need a couple of young bucks to do the lifting :) I'm thinking that for what I'm doing a 15-25 lb hammer would suffice. Variable speed would be sweet but what is the normal speed in beats per min of most P hammers?
 
Mark, the ones I've seen are variable and it looks like they are running at about 120 BPM at full load. That's just a guess.
 
Well I've got a two horse motor with a 20:1 gear reducer made by Browning. I guess I could have the gear on the flywheel half the size of the reducer gear to get 175 rpm. Might be a little fast but maybe play around with the gearing to get it closer to 120 bpm. This might just work :)
 
John Martin has made one that has about a one horse motor (runs on 110 V) and all of it cost him about $400.00. It operates on a belt with an idler pulley to get it rocking. It has a very large pulley on a jack shaft and a round plate on the end with some holes it it that is attached to the rod that drives the hammer up and down. I will get the url of where the picture is shortly.
John Martin with hammer
 
Hi Mark, good thread.
A little info on hammer speed, my 25# little Giant runs at around 375 blows per min. and my 100# Little Giant run at around 280 blows per min. The cutch action is like variable speed, very slow to wide open. The slip belt idler puller set up on these home made type hammers will work like the clutch on a little giant, slow to wide open. I realy like the looks of this Rusty Hammer, very simple and looks easy to build. If I were making one I would start off with a speed around 150 rpm and see how it works and keep rasing it by changing pullys until I like the speed. I've used a power hammer that ran at 120 BPM and it was way to slow for me. I also think you would be more hapy with a larger hammer, at least a 50#.

Hope this helps, I might build one of these myself.

All the best, Don Hanson
 
If you can afford it get a little giant or an air hammer, if your like me and too poor or cheap, the rusty works OK. That is if you turn your own pully for the drive pully, and isolate the motor. I've went through three motors befor I figured out that I needed a small shaft on pillar block bearings to seperate the motor from the slip belt. That said mine works fine but if I had it to do over again I'd build the rearend type hammer, the belt still leaves something to be desired for as control. It works good for me as I mainly use it to forge down large stock to a rough preform and finish up the bevels and point on the anvil by hand.
 
might wanna check out keenjunk.com they have a lot of used stuff, from grinders and anvils to power hammers. might be easier than building one.... more expensive though
 
Thanks Guys, raker that is exactly what I needed to see. Simple design that looks like it would work just fine. I mainly just want one to move large amounts of metal to save my shoulder for the finer work by hand. I'm going to get as much done this w/e as I can.
 
Does anyone know if the flywheel that moves the rod up and down to control the hammer should be counterweighted? It looks like it should be to keep the whole thing from rocking badly
 
On the one that John Martin has, the flywheel is a round plate of about 1/2" thickness and has holes around the edges. When one hole gets wore out from the wear, he can change holes. Also, the distance from the center will make a difference in the stroke of the hammer. His hammer is a version of the Rusty hammer. He was in one of the issues of ABANA with his hammer and how he made it using the plans of the "Rusty". There are several ways to adjust the hammer's operation that don't require a lot of time. The length of the stroke from the rod, the length of the spring, the strokes per minute, the height that the hammer hits on the down stroke (for the larger pieces that need more clearance), and I think there may be more.
We are having a Knife Group Association meeting at his place the 24th of July and I can take more pics of the different parts if some one is interested in them. I will put a link on the forums to them on my web site for those that may want to look at them later.
 
Thanks raker , that would be of benefit I'm sure. the design looks pretty straight forward. Gonna have to get or borrow a stick welder. My little wire feed wimp wont penetrate enough to hold up I would imagine.
 
hmmmm now you guys got me thinking of building one...... i'm not very educated on these things though, are they worth making? which one should i go for if i do make one?
 
Michael J. Spangler said:
hmmmm now you guys got me thinking of building one...... i'm not very educated on these things though, are they worth making? which one should i go for if i do make one?
Click to expand...
If I only had a brain????? :confused: :confused: :confused:OH!! Boy!!! Grass hoppa!!!! :eek: :eek: :eek:
 
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