How about a gigantic steam-powered forging hammer?

[Roamad]

Got a chance this morning to tour the blacksmith shop at the Nevada Northern Railway, in Ely, Nev. The entire railroad is on the National Register of Historic Places and now operated as a nonprofit. Many of the buildings exist in a kind of suspended animation, as if all the workers just stepped out for a smoke break.

Anyway, check out this gigantic steam-powered forging hammer. Wanna forge a REALLY BIG knife? Here's your tool:

Those gears on the wall in the background are actually wooden forms used for casting the real metal gears & wheels.

Rack of blacksmith tools:

The room next door is home to these two giant steam boilers, each is about 6' in diameter:

Next door to that is the main room of the machine shop. In one corner is this huge grinding/sharpening wheel, about 4' in diameter and still ready to work:

And here's one of several gigantic metalworking machines nearby, this one a horizontal lathe of some sort:

Thanks for tagging along!

 

[A.McPherson]

Very cool! I always mean to stop by there, just never got around to it... now I live in tx so I guess I missed out!!

 

[jll346]

Really cool!!!

 

[mike-E]

That's a horizontal drill press. Used to run the hell out of one probably twice that size.

 

[Stacy E. Apelt - Bladesmith]

A neat thing to know is that those wooden gear and wheel models are for making sand casting molds. They are an exact amount oversize to allow for the hot metal shrinking and the rough surface being removed with files. They also have a minute taper to allow clean removal from the sand molds.

Somewhere in my shop I have a set of long measuring rules that are calibrated for these casting losses. 60" on the rule is actually longer than 60". They came from a man who turned the wooden modles for train wheels for the Russian Railroad. Once he made the wooden wheels, the foundary and machine shop would cast and turn them on giant lathes to the final size.

 

[Natlek]

I like old machines..............here is some picture from museum in Wien , Austria

This lathe chuck is bigger than me

Some kind of press................

Electricity generation

Hammer

Electric car..................

 

[Rick Marchand]

I ran a Lucas mill, similar to that one when I started in tool and die.

 

[mike-E]

I ran a Lucas mill, similar to that one when I started in tool and die.

How did the cutters attach? We had a couple Gilberts that took a number 6 morse taper. They had 16ft of x travel and 8 on the y. The quills would extend almost 4 ft. We only used them as side presses. There was no way to hold a milling cutter.

 

[Rick Marchand]

This is almost identical to the machine I ran. Don't make me try to remember the head... that was one of my starting machines back in '92. We used flycutters, taps, endmills and many other cutters.... but it was mostly a "lift hole" machine. I also ran an old Gilbert and a big ol' TOSS with 300"+ of horizontal travel and 156" vertical. I did a short stint on a Toshiba CNC before I went into the engineering/estimating department and forfeited my soul.

 

[HSC ///]

They are an exact amount oversize to allow for the hot metal shrinking and the rough surface being removed with files. They also have a minute taper to allow clean removal from the sand molds.

Somewhere in my shop I have a set of long measuring rules that are calibrated for these casting losses.

In in the foundry industry we called this the "shrink rate". I can't recall excatly what it was for stainless but something like .010 inch per inch.