Lehigh Heavy Forge Corporation of Bethlehem, Pa., is the sole remaining super-heavy open-die forging company in the Western Hemisphere. More than a century old, the company’s historic facilities were the birthplace of the modern U.S. defense industry.

Operating for more than a century, this company grew from a small supplier of forged products to western railroads into an important supplier of precision forgings with global reach.

As forging hammers have become faster and more powerful, so too has the need to isolate their vibrations. This article examines ways of isolating or minimizing vibration transfer to the shop floor, employees and adjacent equipment.

Press tonnage is one of few variables that can be collected in the 1/50th of a second it takes to make a forging. This is an important tool in the measurement and monitoring of stresses during forging cycles, and it will help you see how stresses affect the performance and life of your mechanical press.

What started as DemShe Products in 1988 has emerged from a 2007 bankruptcy as Demshe Forge, a Canadian supplier of parts primarily to the oil and gas industry. With its “small” and “heavy” forges co-located on their Ontario site, the company is positioned to supply both small and large parts to its customers.

Measuring the strain on load-bearing members of hydraulic forging presses is one way to diagnose potential equipment trouble before it becomes a major downtime incident. Using linear variable differential transformers and related hardware, a distribution-of-forces system can alert equipment operators to potential problems.

In the first four articles in this series, the operation and use of four types of forging equipment – hammers, mechanical presses, hydraulic presses and screw presses – were reviewed. In this fifth and final article, a general comparison of these four types of forging equipment is made. Each type of equipment can perform well or poorly depending on conditions and circumstances. It is hoped that the comparisons made in this article will help readers select the right type of equipment for the specific job.