straightening a leaf spring, this sounds like b.s. to me guys

Short answer..........With a forge you can heat the leaf spring to forgeing temp and make it into just aboput any shape your skill permits.

Mike
 
Yea, I don't think much of that guys methods.

I really like the part where he says to stick a bolt in the hole in the spring and pound it over like a rivet... to cover up the hole.

He says it should take days to hammer it flat.

He should build a forge and pound it flat in a couple minutes.

That was way amateur and way loosey goosey advice IMHO :)

-Nick-

http://www.wheelerknives.com
 
I once re-arched a set of leaf springs from a 1965 International 3/4 ton pick/up with a sledge hammer. If you can recurve them, you can straighten them. This was cold working the steel. That is how they do it commercially, only they use power hammers.

Get a piece of 6" wide I-beam or channel iron and lay the spring across it-perpendicular to its length. You have to have an assistant to hold the spring in place. Start working it over with a 12# sledge while the asst slowly moves the spring across the gap.

The sledge work is much better than holding on to the leaf. It took us about a week to do 14 leaves. (I was not working at the time and was in my twenties, I had more energy than brains back then.)
 
A sledge hammer will deliver much more force per unit area than anything the car will ever see because the weight is spread accross the whole thing.
 
nick, i found the article very entertaining too, i thought i would share it. the sad thing is, theres a couple of guys actually doing this! they straighten a leaf spring, and then grind hardened metal with angle grinders! i would be so much easier to get straight, annealed 5160, and then grind or forge to shape and send to a HT place where they can achieve the same quality HT as the automobile plant.
also wouldnt straightening it cause severe stress to the blade? and dont forget that leaf springs have a good memory, (cause thats what there made to do).
 
oh, and nick he said that the forge method produces crappy quality, compared to cold working the metal. this was in the armor section of the site. they say that their armor is crap when it is hot forged, and that the cold forging works better. he even goes as far to say that hot forging caused stress cracks in their armour. heres the article, http://www.livesteelarmor.com/how/cas.html
read their process, they probably used mild steel, which wouldnt harden correctly. either that, or they used a steel with too much carbon and they didnt draw it right.
something like 1050 with a spring temper on it i think would hold up better than work hardened mild steel. ive seen pro armourers make breastplates out of medium carbon steel, then temper to a spring. and it held up great in the tests. what ya think?
 
I can't speak for this guy....but there are smiths in Nepal making khukuris out of truck leaf springs every day - no big deal to straighten them.
 
Earlier this year a buddy and myself heated a leaf spring on one of those propane heaters that he used for the turkey fryer last Christmas , we had a sledge , took us about 30 minutes of hating and beating to make a flat piece.
 
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