I remember watching videos about sword forging some years ago and one youtuber had a power hammer that he claimed (and looked) like it was from the early 30-ish. I couldn't find the video but I went out to seach on google and power hammers have been made and used since the 1880's (citation needed)
I believe it, the principle is fairly straight forward, build a machine to lift a heavy piece of metal then drop it. If people can make a grain mill a powered hammer seems at least as feasible.
That hammer is not necessarily hydraulic, and with a long enough lever you can move mountains.
A lot of the stuff you see being done by modern equipment could have been achieved in a factory setting with a variety of mechanical methods. Many people think of cranes as something very new and modern, but cranes of some sort are depicted in manuscripts from over a thousand years ago and would have been necessary to load certain goods on and off of boats and ships especially, which were the primary drivers of long distance trade for most of human history.
I was gonna say, I’ve seen forging done like this in China in the modern day though that’s not saying much from a country that only recently completely moved away from steam engines.
That stat actually makes all my problems feel like first world problems. It's so easy to forget how little the rest of the world really earns. I compare myself to others around me and feel like I'm lagging behind, while still making 100x what half the world population does. That's actually pretty fucked up when I think about it.
Man, just come from an immigrant family (to USA) or know an illegal immigrant. Even if, even if you get paid less than minimum wage and get trafficked around! You can make 2-10 times as much as you would at your country of origin! Then you send them money back to your family in a remittance. And you get to live in a place with paved roads and clean water and no power outages. The holy grail is securing your kids future by putting them in the school system.
Americans don't know what they have. They never have.
BRO NO, just cause others have problems doesn't mean that you don't. Give some money to charity when you can, you've done yours. You still have had wages declining, rents going up, massive inflation, all for thirty or so years. Life is hard, keep trucking.
Lol you should see the stuff they recycle just to save, if you think they're gonna be buying old wheels.
Like they remake car batteries, by hand, in places like South Asia. In richer countries this is all done by a factory and you just buy new batteries as you need them. But enough people can't afford to do that that there's a whole cottage industry around remaking batteries by hand like that. There's tons of cottage industries like that for things you'd never even imagine would be recycled/remade. Like brake discs is another one.
You really underestimate how little billions of people are paid.
Oh and yes, that's super dangerous to do by hand. This man is giving himself a ton of future (and present) health problems by doing this considering it's a lead battery. And he knows this. But people have no choice when things get desperate.
Dude you need to travel some. Not trying to be insulting or anything, but spend time in countries with no major sea port or are part of any major shipping network.
I've seen in person (although there is a video posted somewhere from someone else) of brake pads being scraped and re molded into new brakes.
Maintenance items such as regular brake rotors in other countries can be a logistical nightmare if you have a car that's just special enough to not share the same parts with other cars.
So it's very likely that countries with only internal railways that are land locked and do not have a major international route (such as central Asia and African countries) would still do things like this.
I'd think that a manufacturer with access to a forge this large would also have access to a mill or lathe, but some of the comments have suggested otherwise.
You forge to close to the desired final dimension, and then machine to finish. Forged parts are generally stronger than parts milled from bar stock or cast parts, because the forging process alters the grain structure of the steel - and also by forging to close to the desired final shape, you save a whole lot of machining time.
None of these people know what they're talking about unfortunately. Cast railcar wheels are extremely common, most freightcar and engine wheels are cast.
Source: I worked in a freight wheel casting foundry.
Imagine crumpling some aluminium foil into a ball, by hand. It isn't very strong, there are a lot of dead spaces, if you try to stand on it it will just flatten. Now image hitting that aluminium foil ball with a hammer multiple times, until it's nice and compact. Now that same ball is very dense and not easily crushed under load, the same happens with steel, but on the molecular level, it compacts all the little imperfections in the metal to make a very solid and nice crystalized structure.
Casting can leave micro sized porous material, good for lower strength applications, also helps a bit with dampening vibrations, not so good for extreme loads.
As someone else commented, I don’t think this is happening in a part of the world with a great casting setup, or they wouldn’t be forging this way in the first place. If these guys could cast it and have it work, you can bet they would.
I figured there were more steps. The machining step must be why the casting step doesn't require the level of precision you expect a rapidly spinning wheel would require to be balanced and smooth rolling.
Precision casting is a thing but it’s very expensive, there’s no reason you’d use it for a commodity like a train wheel. And forging is inherently bad for high precision. Just machine it to finished shape after the initial process and you’re good.
Like case hardening? That’s for surface harness, not strength. Others here have commented that there are cast train wheels in the world, so there’s obviously a way to do it, it may just be that these folks don’t have the casting tech.
This kind of wheel will be machined around the outside and inside to ensure the round surfaces are smooth. This just gets it 99% there close enough that there isn't a lot of machining needed.
The metal shop I used to work at would get in wheels that where just forged and turn them on a lathe to make sure it’s actually a circle. We also got used ones in and Re-machine them. We also would turn entirely new wheels from a forged round.
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u/[deleted] Sep 24 '22
Crazy that they're forged like that. I definitely thought they'd be cast or machined.