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I feel the people who made documentaries in the old days had a genuine appreciation for the subject they were documenting where that is less often true today.
Having been a stamper for over 30 years, iron smoshers as we were known, you would be surprised how skilful the job really is, from the setting of the dies to forging at the correct temperature, very very hard work, but i loved every minute of it.
My grandfather worked for a drop forging company in the US from the time he got off the boat from Sweden in 1903 until the day he retired, he was in charge of the surgical tool department
Watching the crankshaft forging made me think of a story my dad told me that happened probably 50 years ago. He worked for a major diesel engine manufacturer from the mid 1950's to the early 1990's. He was tasked to find out why crankshafts were failing and so he visited the machine shop where they were machined to final dimensions. His first clue that something was amiss was that periodically the whole building shook while taking rough cuts on the forgings. The cranks were machined to spec, but the loud noise of the rough cuts was a red flag. He visited the forging plant and discovered that the dies were badly worn, causing the forgings to be oversize. All that vibration on the rough cut was introducing cracks into machined parts.
Extremely hard work and dangerous! Hats off to these hard working folks. Im sure most have passed on by now. Thank you for your services of hard labour.
Nice to have this topic digitally preserved from the 1950's. It's a very rare in-depth discussion of Drop Forging, which is not usually shown or narrated in such detail elsewhere on You Tube. Present day discussions on You Tube seem to favour CNC carvings from a single billet of aluminium alloy, but according to this video, the grain structure wouldn't be as strong. Be interesting to compare foundry-casting grain structures to drop-forged grain structures. Well done Periscope Films!
Cast and then machined will Never never never meet the grain structure benefits of forged. Hence wrought iron bar stock is usually four to seven times more expensive than an ingot of cast iron.
If you ever go to the hardware store and get a bolt, you may notice the neck of the bolt is skinnier than the portion with threads. This is because they roll the b and blank between two concentric dies and form the thread and the material is upsetted. Thus they have a higher grade and are stronger.
@@joshschneider9766 I... what? It's because they're completely different materials. And do you even mean wrought iron, or modern mild steel? The grain structure of forged items is... overstated. There's also some confusions given that grain can mean at least two entirely different things (both of which forging can impact in certain materials in different ways) when it comes to steel, and cast iron is effectively an entirely different ferrous alloy than any of the others. There's also ductile cast steel, nowadays. So you have grain as in the granular structure of the internal crystals, where size is primarily what matters (which can be increased [bad] by getting it too hot or for too long, or decreased [good] through forging to an extent but primarily by annealing and normalizing [types of heat treatment]); this is the type of grain that matters a lot, and it comes pre-treated from the steel mill. And then you have grain as in a wood grain, a grain (mostly theoretical) running down the piece conforming to how it's been worked; given that all barstock is forged in its creation (really it's poured directly into a rolling mill, where it's forged) it already has a grain. The only time I've even heard of this being a problem is in mostly apocryphal stories about a person laying out a part very stupidly and subjecting it to multiple stressors and then blaming the failure on the grain going the wrong way. This is the type of thing that is being referred to by the "grain structure" of forged items conforming to their shape properly. In reality drop forged steel items could be made very strongly and with very complex shapes quite easily compared to anything else for a long time, reinforcing them while being somewhat lighter. There's a whole series of intertwining myths that have to do with this, which probably arose naturally as people tried to explain what metallurgists today know the reasons for. Cast iron is weak due to its high carbon content (too high, making it brittle) and often quite large grain (crystalline structure) which allows for easy cracking. It's however not really comparable to other cast materials, or analagous to normal steel/ iron because it is materially different. It's all old terminology problems.
Wow, just wow. This video is a masterpiece jewel of metallurgy. I giggled in amazement, and the men working in these forges i consider their work as difficult and dangerous as soldiers in battle. But that hammer of God. 60 tons + steam pressure. I've actually been in a car factory with a smaller drop forge hammer and when that thing falls no matter how far you are from it, you humble and tone your thought down instantly in respect of how powerful matter can be.
That hit will startle you the first time. People forget how important these machines are. When Germany fell in WWII the Americans were amazed at the size of the huge forges the Germans used. They liked them so much that they took several of them as reparations. One weighed 16 million pounds and produced 50,000 tons of force. The Russians took the best forges Germany had. The Mesta forge is really cool and has a heck of a storied history.
Everytime I watch these old videos I realize just how many of our jobs are lost because our politicians let so many companies move over seas. Our politicians have made themselves rich as the rest of us are jobless or service jobs.
100% we are losing a lot of skill sets in the West and giving them to “developing countries” there are still some niche industries around thou, but it won’t be long before they are gone. They want us to be nothing more than consumers, not builders. Equity for the Earth.
@@charlieromeo7663 the point is the political weenies make the policy that creates a situation where it's more profitable to move over seas. While you're right about the decisions being made in board rooms, it's the political policies that prompt those decisions.
Beautiful color shots at about 3:42 of what appears to be a 1953 Studebaker Starliner coupe. The U.S. Navy jet fighter seen at the end is a Grumman F9F-6 Cougar (swept wing version of the straight wing Panther). Hey, note the guys working the forges, and for that matter the blacksmith, seemingly not wearing hearing protection. If that was the case, bet in a few years of this kind of work they found themselves saying, "could you repeat that please?" As they say, "Hear today, gone tomorrow."
Personally, I believe the 1953 Starliner was one of the best styled car ever built. The design was use, with minor changers, until 1964. Take away the chrome, change the headlights and taillights and it would still look stylish today.
Hence modern osha standards. Foundry and forge workers today all wear huge levels of personal protection which includes ear muffs and such.
4 роки тому+2
@@christopherconard2831 I've done commercial steel for most of my life and suffer also. Have you ever seen some of the natural remedies on YT? There's one that involves covering the ears and tapping on the skill base, for some reason it actually works, even if only for a few hrs. I do it a lot on the weekends when i'm concentrating on something like a crossword and the ringing starts to drive me mad. Who'd have thought silence could be so loud? LOL
I've been a mechanic for 50 years, and I found this especially fascinating, seeing how these parts are formed. I have seen some old films on metal stamping for fenders and car bodies. I also have to wonder how these rugged men could work in these conditions for years on end. I imagine there were a lot of injuries on the job. Dust, sparks, noise, debris everywhere, and that big hammer inches away from your limbs. Imagine your first day on the job........
Lifespans were shorter years ago and this video illustrates a reason why. Those old videos showing production line workers spray painting cars without respirators are also an eye opener.
@@charlesballiet7074 "Trickle-down" my ass! You give corporations huge tax cuts, they don't share that profit with the workers. Never have. Never will.
When old shiny forged his last there he was seen to drop. Did he die one onlooker asked after the furious strike? No, another said as shiny rose again.
Company i worked for in the 70-80's, EPAG developed a closed forging system. A fixed weight of material was forged with no flash almost to finished surface finish. All went way of the the DoDo in the early nineties few years after i left. Lack of investment in British industry. My boss made me redundant and said take our ideas to America and show them there how to do it and make a few bob. I never did. What if? Wasted knowledge and experience.
Forging like that is sorta done in conjunction with cbc machining processes sometimes. Saturate the grain structure where you want it with one or maybe two forming strikes then machine to finished. Best of both worlds application for stuff like rocket parts and so forth.
When I used to work in the space patch, one of the materials guys I knew told me of gigantic forges that were brought to the US from Germany after WWII that are used to make outsized aircraft forgings.
Yes, those machines were nicknamed "iron giants." In 1920s/30s, under Treaty of Versailles, Germany was prohibited from manufacturing certain military items, esp involving armor steel. So German engineers focused on using other materials like magnesium and high grades of then-novel aluminum. They developed forming techniques involving high-power stamping and presses. When WWII began, shot-down German aircraft were recovered and analyzed by US/English/Russian intel people, and they found all manner of "forged" articles, with novel metallurgy and high strength/performance. When war ended, there was as much of a race to recover German stamping & forging machines as for the rocket scientists. USSR Red Army captured some of the largest presses in Eastern Germany (and Silesia, which became part of Poland), which were sent back to Russia as trophies. And US/UK also recovered trophy presses in the Western regions of Germany, some of which remained in country, and some were returned to US/UK. This led to quite a bit of R&D in USA in 1940s/50s, leading to some of the largest systems such as Alcoa press in Cleveland, and several others around the country. Heavy press forging was considered a critical technology for industrial advancement and military production. It still is critical to any advanced economy (ask the Chinese), although most US policymakers are totally clueless about such things these days.
I made reproduction firearm parts for the old German pistols and aerospace parts in the early part of my life and made forging dies for many of the parts just so I could get the flow of the metal correct. Then I would machine the parts. I always had strong parts that rarely broke.
Can I ask you a question? How would you go about making a U bracket out of 304 stainless 1/8" sheet? Is that a hydraulic press pressing into a steel form? Thanks for any info in advance!
My father was a drop forger in the 50s and 60s in the UK. By the time he was 40 his lungs were knackered and he had to find unskilled work somewhere else - no mention of compensation or redundancy etc. Needless to say I became a Labour voter as soon as I came of age.
And it's still done the same exact way. I design and build forging dies. They are sent to R and R forge in San Bernardino CA. where the parts are forged. I plan to make a series of videos on how it's done. I made the first one showing how I ruff out the punch from a solid block of tool steel ua-cam.com/video/meims7jfNeg/v-deo.html more to come. I just retired and want to record the whole process so it is not forever lost.
How much has the precision of forging improved since this was made? From time to time I've heard about flashless forgings and forged powder metal. Most connecting rods for the auto industry today are made from forged powder metal.
Had a job in Jersey years ago working shoveling the years of lubricant from beneath a behemoth drop hammer.....The hammer sat on a 20ft.×20ft. concrete base that was 8ft thick, the whole thing sat on giant springs mounted to a lower level floor.....that's where the 3 foot deep sludge accumulated.....hard work even without the thought of all that weight above my head sitting on some springs.....
I loved the narrator's comment along the lines of 'removing the attractive shell from the automibile shows the quality inside' (or thereabouts). I' m sure that was a double entendre. Woof.
Tapping the anvil is extremely common between actual material strikes. I've talked with some smith's who unless it's brought to their attention don't even realize when they do it. Most commonly it's used to maintain the rhythm and momentum of the actual "forging " strokes. And btw it's a light tapping not a strike on the anvil. It most definitely does not hurt the anvil.
@@putteslaintxtbks5166 An anvil that is correctly made is 'live." That is the smith's hammer will bounce off the anvil. It helps to reduce the effort to bring the hammer up for the next blow after the smith determines where it should fall. Every little bit helps if you are doing this all day long.
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Right!? Super interested in how that process worked back then. I work in a forge as a trimmer. Everything shown here is pretty similar to the way it’s done today.
@@Halinspark so there’s a guy hitting the die block with a stick before the hammer man begins hammering. What he’s doing is called swabbing. Basically lubricating the die with an oil/water solution. Helps prevent the forging from sticking to the block while being hammered. Perhaps he has too much oil in the swab bucket!
This kind of technology of our grandparents generation was developed out of necessity and for survival; the two great wars. I’d say this era showed how what they may have lacked in today’s advanced technological advances they made up for in brain and brawn, sheer will power to succeed and triumph over a very real existential enemy. Today we have no such threats, hence the maxim; good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, hard times create strong men, strong men create good times.
Just because your weak doesnt mean we all are, some of us can make things in any form we choose using any method we choose, so your weakness doesnt transcend to everyone. nice retweeting of an old maxim though, at least you can read.
I would imagine that these workers had serious hearing damage after one day and were close to completely deaf in a month unless they were wearing very good protection.
So many comments from people worried about hearing loss. Meanwhile small square protective device guy at 24:35 got engulfed in flames and bits of molten metal all shift long.
4:00 Companies used to go _so_ much harder in when they made documentaries. Just look at that. They went and stripped down a car just for a 5 second shot. I get that they probably worked with whatever car company that was (don't @ me my car experience doesn't start until the 60's and not _really_ until the 80's) probably worked with them and might have just lent them a few cars for the shoot. Or the car company maybe just had a car without the body on hand as a demonstration. I also know that older cars were built differently and it was much easier to take the body off of the chassis. But still. You never see that much effort put into documentaries, anymore, let alone documentaries _made by an industrial trade group that is only tangentially related to the company whose product is being used as a visual demonstration._ I think it might just be that film production was so much more expensive and rare that when something like this came around it was a much bigger deal and it got a lot more people excited to participate, and was probably a lot easier to justify the cost to accounting as "advertising." I know that on the few occasions I've been at a job and some sort of professional or semi-professional video shoot was happening, there was a palpable buzz in the air, I imagine it must have been that times a thousand back in the day where that might have been the first time you had ever personally seen a professional quality movie camera.
The die formed connrcting rods are mostly now made using sintered metal power and realitively cold formed. Of course high end connecting rods are still made from forgings.
Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, hard times create strong men. We are in the second phase of this life cycle
@@brosefmcman8264 It started with Reagan's "trickle down" bullshit. Trickling down means the corporations make tons and tons of money through tax cuts... and then piss on the workers. You should know that by now.
Why does the blacksmith bounce the hammer on the anvil a couple times, then strike the hot metal? I get the actual forging process, I'm just not understanding the extra hammer blows that aren't directed to the piece being manipulated... Is it a rhythym thing? Or just 'cause it sounds cool?
Thanks!
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Old documentaries are 100 % better than modern ones
By a HUGE margin.
By a Moon distance.
I feel the people who made documentaries in the old days had a genuine appreciation for the subject they were documenting where that is less often true today.
Spoken like a truly ignorant person…
100 %
Students across the world should be so lucky to se these …. Real film. Real work. Real people. …….
No comment is perfect but this is close 👌
God bless the hard-working generations before us. The modern world is something we take for granted.
So much more interesting than today's rubbish! I imagine part of this work was financed by hearing aid manufacturers.
Having been a stamper for over 30 years, iron smoshers as we were known, you would be surprised how skilful the job really is, from the setting of the dies to forging at the correct temperature, very very hard work, but i loved every minute of it.
how long does a set of dies last?
My grandfather worked for a drop forging company in the US from the time he got off the boat from Sweden in 1903 until the day he retired, he was in charge of the surgical tool department
Immigrants always taking jobs!!!
@@bryannonya9769 THEY TEWK ER JERBS!
@@danorthsidemang3834
The jobs did not exist. Swedes created these industries from nothing. No welfare, no government benefits of any kind.
@@danorthsidemang3834 LOL so true!
@@bryannonya9769 Trolls taking oxygen real humans could use.
Watching the crankshaft forging made me think of a story my dad told me that happened probably 50 years ago. He worked for a major diesel engine manufacturer from the mid 1950's to the early 1990's. He was tasked to find out why crankshafts were failing and so he visited the machine shop where they were machined to final dimensions. His first clue that something was amiss was that periodically the whole building shook while taking rough cuts on the forgings. The cranks were machined to spec, but the loud noise of the rough cuts was a red flag. He visited the forging plant and discovered that the dies were badly worn, causing the forgings to be oversize. All that vibration on the rough cut was introducing cracks into machined parts.
Yeah, these dies must cost a fortune to replace..
Extremely hard work and dangerous! Hats off to these hard working folks. Im sure most have passed on by now. Thank you for your services of hard labour.
U.S Forge 105 Clark St Detroit Michigan. "Through These Doors Work The Best Damn Forge Workers In The. World!!! 1978.
Running a 2500 pound hammer at Crescent Tool for two years convinced me I needed to go to college.
@Whistling in The Wind : An adjustable wrench was often referred to as a *Crescent Spanner* in Australia during the 1950's.
And then went back to that-same company as a mechanical engineer, maybe? ☺
Amazing how education hard work can be.😯😉
hahaha big hammers get real rough real quick don't they hehe
And dav wasn't crescent a brand name like allen? Always thought it was anyway
Nice to have this topic digitally preserved from the 1950's. It's a very rare in-depth discussion of Drop Forging, which is not usually shown or narrated in such detail elsewhere on You Tube.
Present day discussions on You Tube seem to favour CNC carvings from a single billet of aluminium alloy, but according to this video, the grain structure wouldn't be as strong. Be interesting to compare foundry-casting grain structures to drop-forged grain structures. Well done Periscope Films!
cast is no where near as strong as forged.
Cast and then machined will Never never never meet the grain structure benefits of forged. Hence wrought iron bar stock is usually four to seven times more expensive than an ingot of cast iron.
If you ever go to the hardware store and get a bolt, you may notice the neck of the bolt is skinnier than the portion with threads. This is because they roll the b and blank between two concentric dies and form the thread and the material is upsetted. Thus they have a higher grade and are stronger.
@@joshschneider9766 I... what? It's because they're completely different materials. And do you even mean wrought iron, or modern mild steel?
The grain structure of forged items is... overstated. There's also some confusions given that grain can mean at least two entirely different things (both of which forging can impact in certain materials in different ways) when it comes to steel, and cast iron is effectively an entirely different ferrous alloy than any of the others. There's also ductile cast steel, nowadays. So you have grain as in the granular structure of the internal crystals, where size is primarily what matters (which can be increased [bad] by getting it too hot or for too long, or decreased [good] through forging to an extent but primarily by annealing and normalizing [types of heat treatment]); this is the type of grain that matters a lot, and it comes pre-treated from the steel mill.
And then you have grain as in a wood grain, a grain (mostly theoretical) running down the piece conforming to how it's been worked; given that all barstock is forged in its creation (really it's poured directly into a rolling mill, where it's forged) it already has a grain. The only time I've even heard of this being a problem is in mostly apocryphal stories about a person laying out a part very stupidly and subjecting it to multiple stressors and then blaming the failure on the grain going the wrong way. This is the type of thing that is being referred to by the "grain structure" of forged items conforming to their shape properly. In reality drop forged steel items could be made very strongly and with very complex shapes quite easily compared to anything else for a long time, reinforcing them while being somewhat lighter. There's a whole series of intertwining myths that have to do with this, which probably arose naturally as people tried to explain what metallurgists today know the reasons for.
Cast iron is weak due to its high carbon content (too high, making it brittle) and often quite large grain (crystalline structure) which allows for easy cracking. It's however not really comparable to other cast materials, or analagous to normal steel/ iron because it is materially different. It's all old terminology problems.
So we’ll said! And I’m so happy you pointed out how UA-cam videos now favor CNC work of billet aluminum. Nothing like forged steel
Amazing indeed guess that's before they knew about industrial deafness . These old docos are like travelling in time me thinks.
These films reminds me of my school days.
When you came in from recess and the film projector was set up! Bonus if the reel was a huge one! Today's kids will never understand 😂
Wow, just wow. This video is a masterpiece jewel of metallurgy. I giggled in amazement, and the men working in these forges i consider their work as difficult and dangerous as soldiers in battle. But that hammer of God. 60 tons + steam pressure. I've actually been in a car factory with a smaller drop forge hammer and when that thing falls no matter how far you are from it, you humble and tone your thought down instantly in respect of how powerful matter can be.
That hit will startle you the first time. People forget how important these machines are. When Germany fell in WWII the Americans were amazed at the size of the huge forges the Germans used. They liked them so much that they took several of them as reparations. One weighed 16 million pounds and produced 50,000 tons of force. The Russians took the best forges Germany had. The Mesta forge is really cool and has a heck of a storied history.
V 0
@@johnconnelly4053 movies
Worked for Alcoa Aluminum for 16 years. Forging 10,000 ton hydraulic presse was little hot during the summer time.
Everytime I watch these old videos I realize just how many of our jobs are lost because our politicians let so many companies move over seas. Our politicians have made themselves rich as the rest of us are jobless or service jobs.
100% we are losing a lot of skill sets in the West and giving them to “developing countries” there are still some niche industries around thou, but it won’t be long before they are gone.
They want us to be nothing more than consumers, not builders.
Equity for the Earth.
I’d wager that decisions to manufacture overseas are made in boardrooms guided by CFOs and shareholders more than politician weenies.
@@charlieromeo7663 the point is the political weenies make the policy that creates a situation where it's more profitable to move over seas. While you're right about the decisions being made in board rooms, it's the political policies that prompt those decisions.
the executives put a gun in their mouth and asked if they wanted to get paid or get buried
We are a long way past peak civilization already !
Watching these videos you can definitely see why labor unions in American industry were a thing. We need to bring them back in a big way.
Beautiful color shots at about 3:42 of what appears to be a 1953 Studebaker Starliner coupe. The U.S. Navy jet fighter seen at the end is a Grumman F9F-6 Cougar (swept wing version of the straight wing Panther). Hey, note the guys working the forges, and for that matter the blacksmith, seemingly not wearing hearing protection. If that was the case, bet in a few years of this kind of work they found themselves saying, "could you repeat that please?" As they say, "Hear today, gone tomorrow."
As someone with severe tinnitus I cringe when I see stuff like that.
I'll bet a lot of them were happy about it because much of what people say isn't worth listening to anyway...
Personally, I believe the 1953 Starliner was one of the best styled car ever built. The design was use, with minor changers, until 1964. Take away the chrome, change the headlights and taillights and it would still look stylish today.
Hence modern osha standards. Foundry and forge workers today all wear huge levels of personal protection which includes ear muffs and such.
@@christopherconard2831 I've done commercial steel for most of my life and suffer also. Have you ever seen some of the natural remedies on YT? There's one that involves covering the ears and tapping on the skill base, for some reason it actually works, even if only for a few hrs. I do it a lot on the weekends when i'm concentrating on something like a crossword and the ringing starts to drive me mad. Who'd have thought silence could be so loud? LOL
Tough people used to do this kind of work. Very tough people.
We still do this today in Texas for butt weld flanges
I've been showing these to my son so he knows what real work looks like.
I've been a mechanic for 50 years, and I found this especially fascinating, seeing how these parts are formed. I have seen some old films on metal stamping for fenders and car bodies. I also have to wonder how these rugged men could work in these conditions for years on end. I imagine there were a lot of injuries on the job. Dust, sparks, noise, debris everywhere, and that big hammer inches away from your limbs. Imagine your first day on the job........
Old are always not gold they are diamonds 💯💯💯💯💯
If this would have been introduced to me as youngster, life would be incredible now, no doubt.
Lifespans were shorter years ago and this video illustrates a reason why. Those old videos showing production line workers spray painting cars without respirators are also an eye opener.
Thanks, Periscope! Those steam hammers were something else! Thanks again!
Real work. Real men.
working in real associations and earning real wages, but not anymore. the Shareholders demand more, more, more!
@@charlesballiet7074 "Trickle-down" my ass! You give corporations huge tax cuts, they don't share that profit with the workers. Never have. Never will.
“… flow under the blows of the hammer” Good rap lyric there.
"Forging In Closed Dies". That's so sad. It had so much to live for.
I see what you did there.
When old shiny forged his last there he was seen to drop. Did he die one onlooker asked after the furious strike? No, another said as shiny rose again.
When I was an apprentice, at college, in the late lesson sometimes we enjoyed a film like this. I really enjoyed and learned a lot from them
I love PeriscopeFilm
Company i worked for in the 70-80's, EPAG developed a closed forging system. A fixed weight of material was forged with no flash almost to finished surface finish. All went way of the the DoDo in the early nineties few years after i left. Lack of investment in British industry.
My boss made me redundant and said take our ideas to America and show them there how to do it and make a few bob. I never did. What if?
Wasted knowledge and experience.
13.59 we could have made a tool to make that forging in one operation close to finish tolerance. Zero to plus five thousand of a inch.
A lot of forgings would have up to 1/8 inch extra material around their circumference.
Forging like that is sorta done in conjunction with cbc machining processes sometimes. Saturate the grain structure where you want it with one or maybe two forming strikes then machine to finished. Best of both worlds application for stuff like rocket parts and so forth.
Sad that a lot of heavy industrial work like this has disappeared in America.
When I used to work in the space patch, one of the materials guys I knew told me of gigantic forges that were brought to the US from Germany after WWII that are used to make outsized aircraft forgings.
Yes, those machines were nicknamed "iron giants." In 1920s/30s, under Treaty of Versailles, Germany was prohibited from manufacturing certain military items, esp involving armor steel. So German engineers focused on using other materials like magnesium and high grades of then-novel aluminum. They developed forming techniques involving high-power stamping and presses. When WWII began, shot-down German aircraft were recovered and analyzed by US/English/Russian intel people, and they found all manner of "forged" articles, with novel metallurgy and high strength/performance. When war ended, there was as much of a race to recover German stamping & forging machines as for the rocket scientists. USSR Red Army captured some of the largest presses in Eastern Germany (and Silesia, which became part of Poland), which were sent back to Russia as trophies. And US/UK also recovered trophy presses in the Western regions of Germany, some of which remained in country, and some were returned to US/UK. This led to quite a bit of R&D in USA in 1940s/50s, leading to some of the largest systems such as Alcoa press in Cleveland, and several others around the country. Heavy press forging was considered a critical technology for industrial advancement and military production. It still is critical to any advanced economy (ask the Chinese), although most US policymakers are totally clueless about such things these days.
Wow, ran a dropforge back in 94 to 97 when I was an apprentice. Hard work but the power was addictive.
Liar!
Very informative and well filmed with excellent narrative.
Damn those men bad hard working lives
Best movie I've ever seen.
Ageless classic styling of Studebaker Hawk!
thats what made this world. Hard working people.
Thank you, I really enjoyed this.
We say thanks to them who create this things
Very humbling to see men work in the mouth of Hell with the tools of the Devil, while I tap on a keyboard 🙄
22:25 absolutely majestic
I made reproduction firearm parts for the old German pistols and aerospace parts in the early part of my life and made forging dies for many of the parts just so I could get the flow of the metal correct. Then I would machine the parts. I always had strong parts that rarely broke.
Can I ask you a question? How would you go about making a U bracket out of 304 stainless 1/8" sheet? Is that a hydraulic press pressing into a steel form? Thanks for any info in advance!
7:26 "Until the HAMMER MAN releases them for the next blow" --sound like words that came from the hammer man himself, Mr. "M.C. Hammer"
Great find, thanks 👍👍
My father was a drop forger in the 50s and 60s in the UK. By the time he was 40 his lungs were knackered and he had to find unskilled work somewhere else - no mention of compensation or redundancy etc. Needless to say I became a Labour voter as soon as I came of age.
And it's still done the same exact way. I design and build forging dies. They are sent to R and R forge in San Bernardino CA. where the parts are forged. I plan to make a series of videos on how it's done. I made the first one showing how I ruff out the punch from a solid block of tool steel ua-cam.com/video/meims7jfNeg/v-deo.html more to come. I just retired and want to record the whole process so it is not forever lost.
How much has the precision of forging improved since this was made? From time to time I've heard about flashless forgings and forged powder metal. Most connecting rods for the auto industry today are made from forged powder metal.
@Andy Harman forging hasn't improved...the precision is in the dies.
What has improved is the materials being used for various items.
"I just retired and want to record the whole process so it is not forever lost."
Awesome. Thank you so much for doing this.
This video is now forged into my brain.
And For The Contributions They Make, Not Only To Our Standards Of Living But To Our Very Safety As A Nation.
The End ~ Thanks for the Great video.
I " forged" new respect for metal after watching this
Good lord. LOL!
Back in the day when things were meant to LAST and be refurbished for further life, instead of sent to the lanfill and simply replaced.
Like the connecting rod in your vehicle , or like the dies themselves?
Long lasting and repairing stuff is bad for stock prices... selling you new stuff is good for stock prices! ;)
They still make stuff like that
There's no money in quality. Or worker safety or retention. That's the core tenet of corporate capitalism and greed.
@@TheDing1701 take it to communist cina, bub, see what they say.😅🤣😂
What a great video! thanks for sharing!
We used to be a proper country 🇺🇸
I enjoyed that - very much in fact!
Had a job in Jersey years ago working shoveling the years of lubricant from beneath a behemoth drop hammer.....The hammer sat on a 20ft.×20ft. concrete base that was 8ft thick, the whole thing sat on giant springs mounted to a lower level floor.....that's where the 3 foot deep sludge accumulated.....hard work even without the thought of all that weight above my head sitting on some springs.....
In case no one ever said it. Thank you. That's a hardcore job as greasy as it is needed.
Abandoned North Jersey YT has probably been there too.
@ maybe. Fair few drop forging plants in Jersey have been repurposed over the decades.
Eeek.
@@joshschneider9766 can you what kind of repurposing has been done to these plants?
Would love to know more about how dies are made. Fascinating stuff.
Great video, as usual. Thanks!
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Ten points to the music - it is the melody of the "Anvil Chorus" from "Il Trovatore".
That is one sexy cutaway of a whole car.
I loved the narrator's comment along the lines of 'removing the attractive shell from the automibile shows the quality inside' (or thereabouts). I' m sure that was a double entendre. Woof.
A good blacksmith doesn’t strike his anvil unnecessarily.
Tapping the anvil is extremely common between actual material strikes. I've talked with some smith's who unless it's brought to their attention don't even realize when they do it.
Most commonly it's used to maintain the rhythm and momentum of the actual "forging " strokes. And btw it's a light tapping not a strike on the anvil. It most definitely does not hurt the anvil.
I can imagine those men had very little hearing left after a career of working a forge.
Yes, hearing loss, and just think of their lungs. That atmosphere is awful.
I was thinking this, too. I didn't notice one of them wearing any kind of hearing protection. I'd have a headache for a week.
Your videos are gold. Thank you so much.
"Quite loud in here" "WHAT?!!" "I SAID IT'S LOUD IN HERE!!" "YES!! VERY HOT!! GET ME A COLD BEER TOO!!" LOL. Hard work for sure.
WHAT ABOUT THE AARDVARK!?
This stuff is amazing
Great video. I wish there would have been more detail on how the dies are made.
Most fascinating.
Ever wonder how a crankshaft got its weird wiggle shape?
Well, now you know.
I forged a check
I forged a knife
Forged a friendship
And forged my life
Steel's cherry red
Won't be mislead
So till I'm dead
I'll forge ahead.
@ Made it up based on different uses of "forge."
Your a funny guy !!
So that's why the hammer moves up and down when not used!
And the blacksmith pounding on the anvil between blows to the metal being 👷worked?
@@putteslaintxtbks5166 habit and style
@@putteslaintxtbks5166 An anvil that is correctly made is 'live." That is the smith's hammer will bounce off the anvil. It helps to reduce the effort to bring the hammer up for the next blow after the smith determines where it should fall. Every little bit helps if you are doing this all day long.
In this case, yes. Not in every case. Some mechanical hammers do the same thing.
Man that was amazing
I worked in a forge shop for six years it was mercer forge in mercer Pennsylvania I was a layout man and lnspector
Do you have any hearing left?
Totaly amazing thxxx
Great video thanks!!!
I wish old educational films were easier to avoid. It's like a steel trap whenever I find one.
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Great movie about the forging process. It is a shame that they didn't spend more time on die making.
Right!? Super interested in how that process worked back then. I work in a forge as a trimmer. Everything shown here is pretty similar to the way it’s done today.
@@xsmokebeersx1 Why are the forgings bursting into flames when hammered? What's actually burning?
@@Halinspark so there’s a guy hitting the die block with a stick before the hammer man begins hammering. What he’s doing is called swabbing. Basically lubricating the die with an oil/water solution. Helps prevent the forging from sticking to the block while being hammered. Perhaps he has too much oil in the swab bucket!
@@xsmokebeersx1 I didn't see it used much here, but they also use sawdust.
Love these old promo films. 👍
This kind of technology of our grandparents generation was developed out of necessity and for survival; the two great wars. I’d say this era showed how what they may have lacked in today’s advanced technological advances they made up for in brain and brawn, sheer will power to succeed and triumph over a very real existential enemy. Today we have no such threats, hence the maxim; good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, hard times create strong men, strong men create good times.
Just because your weak doesnt mean we all are, some of us can make things in any form we choose using any method we choose, so your weakness doesnt transcend to everyone. nice retweeting of an old maxim though, at least you can read.
3:51 Studebaker Loewy coupe. Yum!
24:35 respect for that guy
This looks like fun.......................
Real men with real jobs and real skills. Too bad we exported a lot of this work. We're still paying the price.
Also high quality
I would imagine that these workers had serious hearing damage after one day and were close to completely deaf in a month unless they were wearing very good protection.
I didn't even know Forging In Closed was sick.
25:12 'hmmm, this engine seems to be cut open."
"well there's your problem"
So many comments from people worried about hearing loss.
Meanwhile small square protective device guy at 24:35 got engulfed in flames and bits of molten metal all shift long.
Drop Forging: Brought to you by the ACME Hearing Aid Co.
I'm mechanic the best job I ever had was working in machine shop
This film has been on UA-cam for years Now it belongs to Periscope?
This is a film we rescued from oblivion --- it came out of a dumpster in Seattle.
@@PeriscopeFilm Seattle? Ahhh...everything makes sense.
Nice
4:00 Companies used to go _so_ much harder in when they made documentaries. Just look at that. They went and stripped down a car just for a 5 second shot.
I get that they probably worked with whatever car company that was (don't @ me my car experience doesn't start until the 60's and not _really_ until the 80's) probably worked with them and might have just lent them a few cars for the shoot. Or the car company maybe just had a car without the body on hand as a demonstration. I also know that older cars were built differently and it was much easier to take the body off of the chassis. But still. You never see that much effort put into documentaries, anymore, let alone documentaries _made by an industrial trade group that is only tangentially related to the company whose product is being used as a visual demonstration._
I think it might just be that film production was so much more expensive and rare that when something like this came around it was a much bigger deal and it got a lot more people excited to participate, and was probably a lot easier to justify the cost to accounting as "advertising." I know that on the few occasions I've been at a job and some sort of professional or semi-professional video shoot was happening, there was a palpable buzz in the air, I imagine it must have been that times a thousand back in the day where that might have been the first time you had ever personally seen a professional quality movie camera.
The die formed connrcting rods are mostly now made using sintered metal power and realitively cold formed. Of course high end connecting rods are still made from forgings.
Race to the bottom
Or simply cast and hardened. Lower quality and much less strong.
@@smithraymond09029 sintered metal has its own advantages and is hardly a race to the bottom.
Strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times, hard times create strong men. We are in the second phase of this life cycle
Back in the days where a job well done was more important than how much you get paid.
Back in the days when you could comfortably support a family on such a job well done.
Thanks Obama 😩
@@brosefmcman8264 It started with Reagan's "trickle down" bullshit. Trickling down means the corporations make tons and tons of money through tax cuts... and then piss on the workers. You should know that by now.
They pay pretty well these days too. Not as much as we're worth but everyone says that.
That was awesome
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Ya didn’t see the Safety Rep very often back in them days….only when someone died
I wonder 💭 how many of these machines I trucked down to Mexico 🇲🇽 crossing ports from all the auctions I ran flatbed out of ??
Ah a Studebaker V8..probally the best V8 of the era by a large margin...
Why does the blacksmith bounce the hammer on the anvil a couple times, then strike the hot metal? I get the actual forging process, I'm just not understanding the extra hammer blows that aren't directed to the piece being manipulated... Is it a rhythym thing? Or just 'cause it sounds cool?
Dude at 24:35 is a bad ass