Will Stelter: Restoring The Baby Beaudry Power Hammer After 5 years (Part 1)

Now it is a scientific fact the coolest machines ever made are blacksmith's power hammers and the one that we're working on today is one of the coolest and rarest hammers out there. This is a Beaudry number two clutch model. Now if you're a longtime viewer of the channel you probably recognize this hammer. I initially bought this hammer five years ago and a year after that I finally picked it up from San Antonio Texas. Three years after that I finally got it disassembled and started to clean it up. But since then it's just been sitting idle inside my workshop ready for the day to finally come back to life. And ladies and gentlemen, 98% gentlemen, today is that day. We need a hammer like this in the lineup for the forged goods that we make at Stelter Manufacturing. We have the 300 pound Chambersburg, the 165 pound Eng Yang, but this 50 pound Beaudry hits so much faster and we'll be able to do some different things than what either of those hammers can do. Now if you haven't seen either of the first two videos that I did, I did one about picking it up down in Texas and I did another one about disassembling it. The second video of taking it apart and getting it cleaned up is very satisfying to watch. I'd highly recommend giving it a watch before we get into the meat and potatoes of the actual restoration. Now obviously this is just a stripped down hammer right now and so we have a lot of work that we need to do before it's going to be ready to put back together. Wow! We're going to be talking about three main component groups today. There's going to be the clutch assembly, there's going to be the linkage and ram assembly, and then there's the drive and mounting system. Now the clutch assembly seems like it needs a little bit of work of forging and fabrication. The linkage and ram assembly have a much more intensive job that needs done and then we're basically starting from scratch for the drive and mounting system on it. But we're going to start off with the clutch assembly. But before I can do that, I need to bring the gantry crane over here because some of these pieces are really heavy and while I can lift them up to about waist height, getting them all the way up here is going to be a pain without a little mechanical advantage. Now unfortunately I'm working on the hammer in the center of the shop and the gantry crane is all the way in the corner over there and it's going to take a little doing. There's just lots of stuff in the way and it's kind of a tight squeeze to get it over to the center of the shop situated above the hammer here. Oh can I squeeze it through there? That would be so nice. Okay, so now that we have the initial part of the clutch assembly put back together, I think you guys will have a pretty good idea of how this works. So the main components that we have here are the crank shaft and crank disc. That's what interfaces the clutch system to the linkage and the ram on the front of the hammer. Everything centers around that. Moving back from that we have the clutch engager which is a cast iron piece that fits around the outside of the bearing assembly inside the hammer frame that when you pull down this way because of the two angled grooves it pushes everything this way. That piece moves back and forth on the outside of the assembly. From there we have the main clutch assembly. That is this giant piece. This is what the brake of the hammer engages with down here on the bottom and then we have the actual clutch itself. Now this is a solid steel clutch. It's not tapered in any way. All it does is expand and it expands into the big inertial wheel that I'm going to put on next but I want to show you guys the internals before I put that on. And the way that this steel clutch engages is by this piece right here rotating. So as it rotates, see that? As it rotates it gets larger. That means you're going to have more friction on the inside of the wheel on the back. And the way that that is caused to rotate is as this plate in the front is pushed back it engages with this roller assembly. As that roller assembly rotates it's pinned into this clutch engager and as that twists it engages the steel wheel. Okay I'm going to get the steel clutch keyed into the main clutch disc wheel thing. I don't know all the names for it. I'll figure it out though. I understand how it works at least. Okay so now you can see that when this... I just pinched my fingy. So this main flywheel on the back is always turning as long as the motor is running. It's going to be connected with the flat belt down to the motor mount down on the backside here. It is held on with a plate that goes on the back. This and this. That bolts onto the back here. That's not actually pinching onto the plate itself. It's pulling against that main clutch casting. So that means that as you tighten it down it won't be able to move back and forth. It hits the main clutch casting on the working side and it hits the plate on the back side. But everything's flat and smooth and there's no actual tension on it so it is allowed to spin freely. This thing is just really gunked up right now and so it's not spinning super freely. But once it's oiled it'll spin super duper freely. And so when you step down on the triddle, which is doing that, pushes everything back and all of a sudden everything wants to spin together. Now this is a super ingenious clutch method. It makes a ton of sense. There's a lot of adjustability. You can adjust the set screws on the clutch tensioner. You can control the linkage here. So it controls you know how much when you step down the clutch how far it moves back and forth. Unfortunately that bronze clutch roller is in pretty bad shape and so when I get this thing apart we're going to have a look at how we can fix that and make it so that it'll work really well. Right now it is sitting at a horrifying angle and won't work as intended for very long if we run the hammer a whole lot. Before we get to any actual work let me show you how the... golly I'm so sweaty right now. Good thing I have a great way to replenish my electrolytes because today's video sponsor is Element. For years now I've been drinking Element to rehydrate whether it's on my hikes or a hunt jujitsu or a sauna session or a workout. Now last week in the shop I was forging eight to ten hours a day every day and it was crazy hot in here and having clean great tasting electrolytes was incredibly helpful for not getting dehydrated as I got through that week. 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I'm working around dangerous machinery all day. I want to be hydrated. It helps with brain clarity and this stuff doesn't have any junk in it or any other garbage that our food systems like to put in our food. Now this flavor is absolutely awesome. I like that they put the caffeine in there. I do still love all their other flavors and I really like their sparkling drinks that they do. They are super refreshing and they're very nice when it's a hot day. They're nice when it's a cold day too. They're just nice. Now it is a huge blessing to get to work with companies that I already have been supporting and buying things from for a very long time. I really highly recommend Element and if you want to try it you can go to drinkelement.com slash will stelter and you get a free sample pack of all of their most popular flavors with any purchase. That's good for both returning customers and new customers and it's risk-free because if you don't like it you can just give it away to a friend and Element will give you your money back which is a darn good deal. But honestly I think that most people should drink Element. It's frankly super tasty. So thank you so much to Element for sponsoring today's episode. With that let's keep on hammering. Actually I've got a lot of work to do before we can get to hammering. Okay so laid out before us we have all of the linkage pieces for the bowdry mechanism. Now it starts off and this piece right here is where it connects to the crank shaft specifically the crank plate that big round casting in the front of the hammer. On top of that sits this bushing. Theoretically sits that bushing. Wow that is gross. That is one of the ickiest feelings I've ever had and I've eaten fermented shark in Iceland. So this bushing sits around the shaft of that pin that connects it to the crank plate. On top of that sits the pitman of the hammer. Now the pitman of the hammer has this rack and pinion on it and sits inside of the spring box. Now the spring box is a very important piece. It's kind of what the whole linkage assembly centers around because inside of the spring box you have six main interfacing pieces. You have the pitman. You have two tension set screws. You have this little rack right here and that rack is held into the rat tail gear rack pinion whatever of the pitman with this tapered key that sits in the side right here. So that pushes down on that and that allows you to pop that key out and slide this back and forth depending on what size of you want to work. Then down below there's two arms. These are actually springs. So these are made out of a high carbon spring steel and these are another part of the really ingenious part of the bowdry design. You have a lot of control over the spring tension and the way that the hammer feels based off of how far in these set screws are set. These set screws are pushing outwards. It's pivoting around this center part of the spring box here and flexes those arms outwards. That is putting pressure on the rollers. Now these roller bearings sit inside the end of the spring arms and in turn this entire thing sits inside the ram of the hammer. Now the ram of the hammer is not just flat walls. It's an elliptical shape. So it's widest about right here and then it gets tighter on either side. So it's kind of an oval in here and that means that as the hammer comes up you know it's going fast and that ram has some inertia to it. So it comes up and these springs that want to sit in the middle are compressed. So they compress as they kind of push down forward as that ram comes up and then they're exerting a lot of pressure outwards and so it whips that ram back down and pushes down and gives it a lot more force than if it was fixed to the actual crank assembly. And then as that ram comes down it actually compresses the springs at the top of the ram. And so the ram comes down it compresses the springs again it hits and then it whips that ram back up and it just gives you an absolute ton of control and a very very hard hitting hammer especially for the size. It's a really really neat system. It's very well thought out. There's a lot of really cool things like the ram and the spring box are made are both made out of cast steel so they're easily repairable compared to cast iron. It makes servicing them and fixing anything that needs done just a lot simpler. Now this linkage assembly is going to require a lot of work. I basically need to make two new spring arms and two new rollers. On top of that I need to grind out and clean out the inside of the ram. What can happen is if these rollers get jammed up where they're no longer rolling properly or whatever it is is they can wear tracks inside the elliptical shape of the ram. You want them to have the ability to roll smoothly and freely without having to sit in a track that was worn in when the hammer was in a different position. You know any kind of back and forth can um can upset that and you don't want them to have to try and ride in those tracks. You want them to be very free floating. So this whole system is going to need a decent bit of work. The main challenge I think is going to be forging and machining and then heat treating the spring arms. That being said it is definitely doable. I have the equipment here to be able to do it but I've never attempted something like this. This is a big old funky spring shape and it's definitely super intimidating. So let's move on to the last system that we're going to talk about which is the drive and mounting system. Now like I said we're basically starting from scratch with the drive and mounting system and those are kind of two different things but I lumped them in because they're the two parts of the hammer that aren't really connected to it that I'm not remaking or working on original pieces. They're just totally different. Now originally these hammers came with either an 850 or a 900 rpm five horsepower motor which is incredibly hard to find. Fortunately five years ago I was driving around and I just I found one bought it for like 50 bucks and I think it's gonna work. I've never tried running it before but we'll see how it goes. This is a five horsepower GE 855 rpm motor. It is horrifyingly heavy. Nowadays a five horsepower motor is like this big around and usually they run at higher rpms but a lower rpm motor is going to have more torque than a higher rpm motor and we're going to have the ability to run a larger pulley on it which gives better belt engagement. It's just overall a big win and then this guy is going to get mounted on the mounting plate that's attached to the back of the frame of the hammer. That's this guy right here. Now this thing has been bolted on and there's also like lead babbeting or lead material around the outside of it and I know that this is going to be nice and square to the flywheel of the hammer and so that's awesome. The bolt pattern doesn't quite line up but it's close. It'll be easy to make an adapter plate to slap on there to make everything fit. It's going to look super good. This thing has such a small footprint. It's about 21 inches by 38 or something like that. It's just a tiny footprint for a hammer this capable. Very very very cool. And then for the actual mounting system of it as you can imagine we probably don't want to be forging down here and so the plan is to fabricate a concrete box. A base that it'll sit on and that'll mean that for one thing I'll be able to move it around because I don't think that I'm going to have to bolt that block down to the actual foundation in the shop. I think that it'll be uh you know a semi-mobile hammer and if that's not the case I will fabricate the box so that I can bolt it down to the concrete if it needs it but if I put you know a thousand pounds of concrete underneath it I don't think that this thing's really going to move it around all that much but we're just going to find out when we get there. With that let's get this clutch system taken apart and we can figure out exactly what we need to do to start wire wheeling and cleaning things up. I did degrease some of those parts last night to make them a little bit less greasy but they're still horrifyingly dirty. I mean my hands turn black immediately as soon as I touch any of this stuff and I'd like to make it so that I can work on this hammer and film without having to wash my hands every eight minutes uh so let's get to it. Before me are all of the pieces that I know for sure I need to remake. Now I know I need to remake this spring. I'm not going to trust that braze job on there and if I'm making one I might as well make another one. Plus it'll be nice to have a spare in case anything catastrophic happens. Then on top of that I know that I need to remake the spring rollers. These are a very easy lathe project. These are a very complicated forging project. I know that I need to remake the tapered key that holds the uh rack into the spring box uh and connects it with the pitman. This thing is just beat up and looks terrible and then the one that I'm kind of least looking forward to is figuring out how to remake this rolling clutch tensioner. I can't really tell if this thing's been worked on in the past or not. This one I'm not looking forward to playing with and then I'm pretty sure that I should probably remake the bottom die. It's been all chipped out. It does not look like it's in great shape. I like the shape of the die itself but it's just not great and then I need to remake the die keys for both the top and the bottom. I have no idea where the top die key is. It's just gone probably somewhere in my other shop but who knows. White people. Everything else on the hammer seems like it's ready to rock and roll pretty much. They all need to be wire wheeled and cleaned up and coated and all that stuff but uh they should theoretically go back together without any major machine work and the part that I want to tackle first is that clutch mechanism and so in order to be able to get that going good I need to address this thing. Before I do that though I think I'm going to go ahead and wire wheel everything. Get it all completely cleaned up so that I can really see what's going on. If there's any cracks hiding wire wheeling it will show on any of these pieces and there's still just a lot of gunk and goop and stuff like that hanging out on these guys along with just like loose rust and things. So I'm going to load it up on a pallet and take it all outside so I can get everything wire wheeled without trying to take things in and out of the grinding room. A lot these pieces are really heavy and being able to get it up to working height will be really nice. Well as it turns out we need to add one more piece to the definitely needs worked on pile and that is this clutch engagement plate. So this is the piece that you know sits over the top of the bearing when you pull down on the treadle it rotates pushes backwards engages our super messed up funky forked roller arm thing and this roller arm being so out of square and probably not rolling really well has worn this really bad groove in here. Now I figured out I think this piece is made out of two different pieces there's a the cast iron chunk which is the the main body of it and then it looks to me like they shrunk a steel ring onto the outside so an interference fit of steel on the outside and that groove right in there a very prominent feature on this particular piece of the machine is not supposed to be there it's groovy but not in a good way. So we're gonna have to figure out a way to get rid of that groove there's a couple different options we could fill it with braze we could pop off that ring turn down a new ring out of steel and interference fit that one on there we can't fill it with mig bead or weld bead because part of that groove goes into the cast iron and it's not going to like that so much or we could machine down the outside and then add another plate on top and that is definitely the direction that I'm leaning I think that machining this down is probably the easiest and safest way to do it and then I can add a plate on there that will be a lot easier to swap out and either change the material or if it does start grooving or something like that just gives a little bit more mobility to be able to play around with that and I think that that is definitely going to be the best way to go I can drill and tap into the piece itself and then I can countersink screws into the into the plate that I put on there and I just think that's going to be the safest way to do it I could even use like a hardenable like a knife steel or something like that so that there's a really low chance of it you know ever wearing down like that again the biggest problem with that method is that my lathe is not big enough to fit this piece on here either the monarch that's behind me or the American pacemaker that's up at my home shop the pacemaker is a lot closer to being able to do it but it's still about a half inch shy that ear that the treadle linkage connects to is going to hit the carriage of the lathe if I try it in the lathe and so I think the only way that we can do it is in the milling machine which is going to be a big old pain to get set up so I'm going to table this for now and start working on our bronze roller arm now the first thing to do here is to get that pin pushed out so we can have a better idea of exactly what we need to do now I'm not super into the idea of just wailing on this with a hammer I think that'll be a great way to break it or bend it and so what I want to try and do is figure out a kind of press setup to kind of press that bearing out now there's definitely some kind of hammer marks around the outside here I don't know if they were having problems with that pin walking out at some point I might I might clean this up the grinder real quick just take a little bit off the outside kind of looks like that pin it might be bronze as well it's really hard to tell so we're going to get this thing cleaned up real quick and then we'll figure out a method to get that pin out of there all right it looks a lot better now I have a much better idea of what's happening it looks like on this side they had brazed a little bit in here so I added a little bit more bronze with a an oxy acetylene torch and on this side there had been a couple of little hammer dimples but now they are no longer there so let's figure out our pressing setup all right I think this is gonna work I've got a socket on the back I've got a socket on this side totally misusing the sockets but it gives room for that pin to be pushed through and this is just a nice you know hardened little nub to be able to do it oh yeah look at that money oh easy day ha ha sick oh my gosh that's terrible oh no okay so here's what we got the bearing itself actually looks pretty decent uh I'll check it but it doesn't look uh doesn't look super bad the pin on the other hand uh has seen better days and then we already knew that the inside of this was zoinked beyond belief I got it degreased and upon further inspection I now no longer think that keeping these bronze ears is going to be the best way to go and the reason for that is that it's been fussed with a lot there's actually brazing on this side too that porosity there's a slight color change around it so I think that that's been messed with the inside here has definitely been rebuilt up with braze which is no good and then uh this wheel is super wallowed out it is at do it so you guys can see it's at 820 thousandths on this side and it's at three quarters of an inch so 750 on this side so this this wheel was definitely wearing really bad on this pin and it did uh I mean this wheel is definitely hardened and I think this pin is probably hardened too and it's all just zoinked I think the best course of action for me is going to be chopping off these ears right here drilling down adding a pinhole and then rebuilding this fork assembly out of a block of steel that will allow me to keep things really precise and square I'll have to turn a new wheel anyway and make a new pin but I think that all of that will be far more doable um than uh than trying to fuss with this I think just chopping it I think that these holes are square or parallel with the bottom of this um I don't think that it needs to be like super super super square uh as long as it rolls and obviously this wheel has a little crown to it um so that you know it has some variability um yeah I uh I just I think that's going to be the easiest way to go okay I got my layout done for the block that I'm going to replace those ears with now because I did a little bit of a indexing path in the top of the arm I'm going to need to cut down 110 thousandths of an inch to make that similar pattern in the bottom so that it'll slip in there and stay put now the only thing that I need is a three quarter inch hole on the face here and then I need to cut my slot for the wheel to sit inside of on this side I also need to take a little bit of material off of the back of it and I need to take about three quarters of an inch off the top well we diddly dun dun done it poked two three quarter inch holes in this one for the bearing one to be the termination point uh for my bandsaw cuts down that was just I think the fastest way to remove that material although cutting through two inch thick steel with a 14 tpi blade bad move but I don't have a lower tpi blade so we made do uh I got everything indexed in here so this thing kind of clicks in holds its own weight I do think that I should probably put a pin in here somehow I was kind of trying to think about how to do that look at that money um I think just something that can withstand more sheer force sideways I mean I'm going to I am going to braise this thing on but it'd be nice to have something a little bit more mechanical holding it all together and I think I'll do that before I shape this I'm going to make it you know look the way that it did before with the rounded out top I think that that's a clearance thing I think it needs to have that reduced down so that it clears inside of the clutch wheel clutch wheel I need to figure out names for all these pieces so when I talk about them I say the same name every time the the spinny part on the inside all right well this thing is looking frankly I think pretty good we're going to do more grinding and cleanup on it after I TIG braise it together um now I've never TIG braised before but I just watched a YouTube video about it so should go great on the first try I it's late and I don't really want to try any practice runs I am going to get a good preheat on both of these pieces I'll let her rip see how it goes I haven't drilled the pinhole that goes into the bronze piece yet I just drilled my pinhole into my arm up here and so after everything's stuck together then I'll drill down just with a hand drill and then ram a ram a rod in there so that it'll have good shear strength back and forth okay I don't have any 5 16th pin stock so we're going to use a little bit of 3 8ths instead which means we need to make this hole 1 16th of an inch larger maybe it'll just be faster to uh turn down this 3 8th stock to 5 16ths well that is the worst 3 jaw chuck in human history uh I was able to get a pin 5 16th pin with a 3 8ths head on it because of that little pre-drilling that I did we can go ahead and drop this feller down doesn't look like it's falling apart yet I don't think there's anything on this side of heaven that's going to get that apart now that is stuck does it still ring that's the question oh boy does it I think that's a totally adequate fix look at that hot dog all right well um all of this took a really long time so I'm gonna go to bed I'll see you guys in the morning it's like nine o'clock right now nope it's ten o'clock sick oh boy good morning everybody uh this thing looks fantastic it looks even better in the morning light but there are a couple things that we need to do before this clutch engagement arm is going to be ready to be put back into service we need to remake the wheel the roller and the pin or shaft or whatever you want to call it now I've got some 5200 to be able to turn this down from it's bearing steel it's perfect for the job we've got plenty of steel to make the shaft from we do have an issue however and that is the limitations of the lathe itself now the jacobs chuck that fits in the tailstock in the back of the lathe can only take up to a half inch drill bit well it can take up to a three-eighths inch shank but I have a half inch drill bit with a three-eighths inch shank so I can bore a half inch hole but then things get seriously bad the boring bar that we have and this thing is tiny needs at least a five-eighths inch hole to be able to make a full skimming pass I think that I might be able to make it work by taking little side cut passes with it but we're just gonna have to see how it goes I'm gonna get this 5200 chucked up in the bore jaw chuck and wish me luck that took so much longer than it should have and part of it was that this piece of 5200 is super crusty and so my dial indicator was you know bouncing up and down I think we're probably still a little bit out but quite frankly I'm turning down the whole profile anyway so what it is now is what it will be we find well the roller turned out just splendidly looks really good got some nice crowning on there unfortunately it has a ton of play fortunately that's on purpose I'm going to add a couple of bronze washers to go in between the ears of this fork and the roller itself to give it a little bit of side to side you know protection hopefully reduce friction give it a little bit of a wear surface I'm going to cut that out of some bronze plate yeah I didn't see that going that went about as poorly as we could hope for fortunately I have hole saws I'm going to try that next I think what I'll have to do is do my outside one first and then my inside one this should work better the reason that I have to do the outside that's you guys remember when I was fixing the Bergmaster and the hole saw that I was using had the hub started spinning so I just TIG welded it well now I need that hub to be able to cut my outside diameter all right we're going to cut our inside diameter first we're going to center punch we're going to cut our inside diameter first and we're going to hand profile the outsides let's see how they fit okay well it's definitely like a fairly tight fit right now but bam that brings us to our next point and the next point is this that I was really hoping that this uh three quarter inch 4140 shafting material that I had was going to work out well but unfortunately it is just about three or four thousands undersized whereas all of the holes are about three thousands oversized and six thousands of play doesn't sound like a whole lot but I'd really prefer if it had even less slop than that so while this thing is spinning freely now I got a little oil in there and that definitely helps this thing is ready to rock and roll once I turn down the new pin for it and unfortunately I don't have any 4140 that's not like three inch round or this size or smaller so I'm gonna need to go to the steel supplier and find something new to work with but we're gonna have to call it there for today's episode but I hope you guys stick around because this is going to be a really fun project we've got some very interesting things that we need to do to get this hammer up and running in the meantime make sure to go check out element today's sponsor I truly do just absolutely love their stuff make sure to check out the stelter mfg website where you can get yourself an apron a knife whatever you need basically all you need is aprons and knives so checks all the boxes that's the best way to support the channel and allows us to continue making fun videos and help grow our small manufacturing business thank you so much to our patrons for patronizing us and I will see you guys on the next one bye