Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 May 1886 — Krupp Hammers. [ARTICLE]

Krupp Hammers.

There is a curious personality in hammers, and workmen like to give them names. -There are 82 steam-ham-mers in the, Krupp works, of f from 400 pounds weight to 50 tons. The largest is “Fritz," whose 50 tons fall on an anvil and an anvil-block weighing together 1,250 tons, these resting on a foundation 100 feet deep. The next in size is named “Max." It would require a poet like him who sang the “Song of the Bell" rightly to describe the action of “Fritz,” and I do not wonder that the Emperor, on his v sit here, presented the worker of this hammer with a watch. I observed “Fritz” for some time at work upon the steel stem of an Austrian iron-clad, the Ferdinand Max. The metal was from one casting, without seam or weld, 45 feet long and of 25 tons weight. Four men with long clamps managed this red-hot mass, swung over The anvil by a crane. They turned it readily this way and that, the foreman at each pause uttering a signal which “Fritz” understood, answering with a soft tap, or a gentle pressure or with an earthquake. 1 was curious to see the anvil-block which supplemented the ability of the earth to sustain such shocks through a length of time, and was presently shown one which, after twenty-one years of thumping, had cracked straight through from top to bottom—possibly beneath some gentle stroke which was the last feather to break its huge back. Krupp does not make plates for iron-clads, but only such parts as might be needed for ordinary ships. Having lit our cigars on the Austrian iron-clad, we proceed to observe the operations of “Max” and other hammers. One of these I saw giving 300 tremendous strokes a minute. “Max” was engaged in welding “hard” iron (though this is more ductile than the other). To nice distinctions between iron and iron “Max” is indifferent; his big bow-legs arch above a tower of pieces built on his anvil, and with crushing blows of his mighty fist he makes a hundred plates one. However, though they seem one and act together, .in the end it will prove that they are not one; no conceivable force can weld into one different organizations of atoms. To be thoroughly united they must be filtered and refined in the crucible. The central part of railway wheels is made by welding, but the tires are made without welding. The nave of the wheel is wrought iron, which is placed beneath a hammer of suitable shape, and at the third blow the wheel is shaped. The tire is cut from a long round mass of steel—6 or 8 from one casting—when it is called a “cheeseit is flattened, punched in the center with an eight-inch die, strung on a horse-anvil, and there beaten until it becomes a tire, and ready for the fluting process which adapts it to the rail.— Moncure D. Conwvy, vn Harper’s Magazine.