Am I the only one who thinks power hammers are cheating?

Watched a guy at a demo in Flagstaff last month draw out a 1 inch bar to a taper in two heats with a 50 lb hammer while I'd have needed six at the anvil. I get the appeal for production work but if you can't move steel with your own arm, you're not a smith, you're a machine operator. Anyone here actually feel like their hand work got worse after they started leaning on one?

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kim81921d ago

Learned this the hard way with my treadle hammer about eight years back. Used it for a whole month on a batch of tongs and when I went back to hand hammering my control was shot to hell, kept hitting soft and my tapers came out lumpy. What fixed it was setting rules: power hammer only for the rough drawing out stage and all the shaping done by hand. Your arm stays honest that way and you still save your shoulder on the grunt work. The guy in Flagstaff is doing production, that is a different job than what most of us do in our shops. As for the "not a smith" thing, a hammer is a hammer, it is all just how you direct the force, but I do think anyone who never learned to move steel by hand is missing something real.

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