Steam hammer

“ Nasmyth was not born until 1808, and no machine inventor had yet come upon the scene. The steam-hammer that bears his name, which means a ponderous and powerful machine in which the hammer is lifted by the direct action of steam in a piston, the lower end of whose rod is the hammer-head, has done more for the development of the iron industry than any other mechanical invention. It was not actually used until 1842, or '43. It finally, with many improvements in detail, grew into a monster, the hammer-head, or "tup," being a mass of many tons. ”

“ The usual prejudice attending the introduction of any new machine, however obvious its advantages are afterward admitted to be, at length cleared away, and the steam hammer is from henceforth an absolute necessity in every engineering workshop, and scarcely less so for some of the early stages of the process of manufacturing crude wrought iron. Whether blows of enormous energy or gentle taps are required, or strokes of every gradation and in any order, the steam hammer is ready to supply them. ”

“ Turning our steps to the engine and fitting-shops, we come suddenly into the presence of a steam-hammer in full work, standing in the centre of a large building crowded with machinery, and at this moment driving the star-like sparks of burning metal, meteor-like, about the place. ”

“ By hand-working, with steam on top of piston, the full force can be more readily maintained until the blow is fully delivered; it is thus more of a dead blow than was formerly the case with the other system."
There was no want of orders when the valuable qualities of the steam hammer came to be seen and experienced. The first Order came from Rushton and Eckersley of Bolton, who, by the way, had seen the first copy of my original design a few years before. The steam hammer I made for them was more powerful than my own. The hammer block was of five tons weight, and had a clear fall of five feet. ”

“ As children we watched the blacksmith at his anvil, attracted and yet half-terrified by the spark-showers flying from a white-hot horseshoe. And even the adult, long used to startling sights, might well be fascinated and dismayed by the terrific blows dealt on glowing ingots by the mechanical sledge.
A steam hammer at work in Woolwich Arsenal, forging a steel ingot for the inner tube of a big gun. It delivers a blow equivalent to the momentum of a falling mass weighing 4000 tons. ”

“ To the steam hammer we owe the first heavy armor plate for our battle ships and the propeller shafts of our earlier steamships. In fact it was the steam hammer which first rendered the large steamship possible. Mr. Nasmyth not only invented the steam hammer, but the steam pile driver as well.
FIG. 90.—STEAM HAMMER.
For quick action, nicely adjusted machinery, and showy finish the steam fire engine is a familiar and conspicuous application of steam power. ”

“ Probably one of the most powerful steam hammers ever constructed is that recently erected at the Royal Gun Factory at Woolwich, for the purpose of forging great guns for the British Navy. It has been made by Nasmyth & Co., and is in shape similar to their other steam hammers. Its height is upwards of 50 ft., and it is surrounded with furnaces and powerful cranes, carrying the huge iron tongs that are to grasp the glowing masses. The hammer descends not merely with its own weight of 30 tons ”

“ They sometimes exhibit their perfect control over the machine by cracking a nut on the anvil of a huge hammer; or a watch having been placed—face upwards—upon the anvil, and a moistened wafer laid on the glass, a practised operator will bring down the ponderous mass with such exactitude and delicacy that it will pick up the wafer, and the watch-glass will not even be cracked. The steam hammer has recently been improved in several ways, and its power has been more than doubled, by causing the steam, 27during the descent, to enter above the piston and add its pressure to the force of gravity. ”

“ But metal refuse, scraps of iron, old boiler plates, under his magic touch, are also turned into the most useful things. For instance, the steam hammer used in the government workshop is rigged on steel columns from the debris of an engine room of a wrecked vessel. The hammer is the crank of a disused shaft of a cotton machine, the anvil is from an old "monkey," that drove the piles for the Suakim landing stage in 1884; the two cylinders are from an effete ice machine, and the steam and exhaust pipes come from a useless locomotive of the old railway. ”

“ As soon as the furnace-door on one side of this hammer was opened, a large lump of scrap-iron at a white heat was lifted and then conducted by a crane on to the anvil beneath. At the same moment from an opposite furnace a long iron bar, heated only at one extremity, was by a gentle blow of the hammer no sooner welded to the mass than the head smith, using it as a handle, turned and re-turned the lump on the anvil so as to enable the steam-hammer to weld its contents into proper form. Of course there has been selected for this extremely heavy work the strongest man that could be obtained. ”

“ The steam-hammer, be it known, is the application of steam to a piston under complete regulation, so that the piston, armed with a hammer, regularly, steadily, perpendicularly descends as desired, either with the force of a hundred tons or with a gentle tap, just sufficient to drive home a tin tack and no more. At a word it stops midway in stroke, and at a word again it descends with a deadly thump. On our visit, an attempt was being made to execute in wrought, what had hitherto always been made in cast iron. Success would effect a great saving in weight. ”

“ Though the steam-hammer can crack the coating without injuring the kernel of the filbert it drops upon—the admirable precision of its gigantic power could never be demonstrated by exhausting its energy upon an empty nut-shell. ”

“ Thus, by the more or less rapid manner in which the attendant allowed the steam to enter or escape from the cylinder, any required number or any intensity of blows could be delivered. Their succession might be modified in an instant. The hammer might be arrested and suspended according to the requirements of the work. The workman might thus, as it were, think in blows. He might deal them out on to the ponderous glowing mass, and mould or knead it into the desired form as if it were a lump of clay ”

“ The steam hammer being the machine almost invariably used, is too well known to need illustration. It is made with single or double standards, and though differing somewhat in details is practically the same machine wherever manufactured. ”

“ Fig. 2.—THE CREUSOT ONE HUNDRED TON STEAM HAMMER.
The piston which moves in this cylinder, under a pressure of 5 atmospheres, is capable of lifting a weight of 100 tons. The hammer, which is fixed to this piston by a rod, has therefore an ascensional force of 88,000 pounds. It can be raised 16 feet above the anvil, and this gives it a power three and a third times greater than that of the Prussian hammer. Large guns can therefore be made in France just as well as in Germany. ”

“ The mill for rolling only is 1,500 by 350 feet, filled with trains. The giant, however, is the 80-ton steam hammer, with its huge appliances. Masses of steel 35 tons in weight are handled as readily as we move a rail ingot. One ingot of steel weighing 120 tons was shown to us. This monster hammer is required only for armor plate and guns—war material. The happier demands of peaceful industry are met with ordinary machinery. Long may it be, therefore, before America can boast an engine of even half the size. ”

“ All that was then required to produce a most effective hammer, was simply to admit steam of sufficient pressure into the cylinder, so as to act on the under side of the piston, and thus to raise the hammer-block attached to the end of the piston-rod. By a very simple arrangement of a slide-valve under the control of an attendant, the steam was allowed to escape, and thus permit the massive block of iron rapidly to descend by its own gravity upon the work then upon the anvil. ”

“ Vickers in forging down the ingots in shafts, guns, or other large work. This hammer can give a squeeze of 3,000 tons. The steel seems to yield under it like tough putty, and, unlike the steam hammer, there is no jarring on the material, and it is manipulated with the same ease as a small hammer by hydraulics. ”

“ A few moments' rapid thought satisfied him that it was by rigidly adhering to the old traditional form of hand-hammer—of which the tilt, though driven by steam, was but a modification—that the difficulty had arisen. When even the largest hammer was tilted up to its full height, its range was so small, that when a piece of work of considerable size was placed on the anvil, the hammer became "gagged," and, on such an occasion, where the forging required the most powerful blow, it received next to no blow at all,—the clear space for fall being almost entirely occupied by the work on the anvil. ”

“ The steam-hammer pile-driver had also been used for driving the piles of the great bridge at Kieff. I next received an order for one of my largest steam hammers for the Imperial Arsenal, and it was followed by many more. It is a singular fact, as showing the readiness of the Russian and other foreign Governments to adopt at an early date any mechanical improvement of ascertained utility, that I supplied steam hammers to the Russian Government twelve months before our Admiralty availed themselves of its energetic action. The French were the first to adopt the invention ”

“ In the second, preliminary drawing down is done under the steam hammer, and bending and welding at the anvil, or under the steam hammer, until the forgings are brought approximately to their final shape and dimensions. Then they are reheated and inserted in the dies, when a few blows under the steam or drop hammer suffice to impart a neat and accurate finish.
The limitations of die forging are chiefly those due to large dimensions. The system is most successful for the smallest forgings and dies which can be handled by one man without the assistance of cranes ”

“ Large hammers are now universally worked by hand, according to Nasmyth's original plan, the introduction of balanced valves giving the hammer-man perfect control, even over the most ponderous machines (Pract. Mech. Journ. July 1848 p. 77, November 1855 p. 174) . The patent of 1843 contained a claim for the application of the invention as a pile-driver, and the first steam pile-driver was used in the Hamoaze in July 1845. In that year Nasmyth took out a further patent for a special form of steam-hammer for working and dressing stone. ”

“ Coincident with the improvements in apparatus and methods for producing wrought iron, the general advancement of all the arts, and especially those relating to the manufacture of machinery, created a demand for forgings of a size impossible of execution by the ancient trip and helve hammers; and as a means of supplying this need for uncommonly heavy forgings, the manufacture of the "Nasmyth direct-acting steam hammer" was commenced in the year 1843, by Messrs. ”

“ At the first few blows a terrific shower of sparks shoots around, which travel for a great distance, burning everything they meet. To protect themselves against this the shinglers wear heavy iron jackboots, reaching above the knees, with an iron veil over their eyes and faces. As the steam-hammer block upon which the pounding is done is only a few inches above the floor level and the sparks and splinters fly out with the precision of shot from a gun barrel, the danger is confined to a space within two feet of the floor. ”

“ I have often thought him since, like the steam-hammer that can crush a man or pat an egg-shell, in his combination of strength with gentleness. ”

“ The piece is carried by a steam crane of 140 tons power, and the men grouped at the maneuvering levers are directing this incandescent mass under the power hammer which is to shape it. This hammer, whose huge dimensions allow it to take in the object treated, is one of the largest in existence. Its striking mass is capable of reaching 100 tons, and the height of the fall is 16 ft. To the left of the hammer is seen a workman getting ready to set it in motion. It takes but one man to maneuver this apparatus, and this is one of the characteristic features of its construction. ”

“ Yet all the time, a time ages long, the utmost help they had found for the bare and unaided hand was the serrated edge of a splintered flint, or the chance-found fragment beside a stream that nature, in a thousand or a million years of polishing, had shaped into the rude semblance of a hammer or a pestle. ”

“ Immediately adjacent to these rail-mills are the steam-hammers, whose blows shake the solid earth. The largest descends with the force of seventy tons, yet so delicate is the machinery that visitors are shown how the same ponderous mass of metal and the same irresistible might can be so gently administered as to crush the shell of a nut without injuring the kernel. These hammers are employed in beating huge masses of iron into cranks for engines, and other heavy work which is beyond the unaided strength of man. ”