Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to build a 50k ton forging press

construction-physics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 196 posts

Re: How to build a 50k ton forging press

#81

Post by kragen »

WheatMillington wrote: post #78
hinkley wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a UX school that says that if the user needs the manual you fucked up. I mostly subscribe to that school. Mostly. It drives my family nuts that I will assemble a piece of furniture without reading the instructions. But the thing is with a little mechanical sympathy, and a well designed product, there’s only one sensible way for the parts to go together, and if you organize them right while you disassemble it…

Your viewpoint is rather naive in the mechanical world. OK it's enough to assemble a coffee table, now try an engine with 2,000 parts. Without a manual how can you set bearing clearances? How do you know how much thrust clearance there should be? How do you know which way up a piston ring goes, or how much torque to apply to a head bolt? Machines are extremely complex, and that's before you even touch electronics and…

there's a lot of shade-tree mechanics who have successfully rebuilt engines with thousands of parts. essentially figuring out how to rebuild an engine is similar to figuring out how to build one from scratch, which is within human capacity, particularly with background knowledge. but the guy rebuilding the engine has a lot of hints

granted, he'll probably fuck up his first two or three pretty good without haynes or chilton

Re: How to build a 50k ton forging press

#82

Post by bell-cot »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #42
thaumasiotes wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blacksmiths had a legitimately intellectual job back in the day! ACOUP noted that blacksmiths might be assisted by unskilled laborers, strikers, who had the actual job of lifting the hammer and hitting the object with it.

Unskilled feels unfair, it requires a fair bit of skill, and you're also learning how to forge while doing it.

The reality is that, depending on circumstances, a highly skilled craftsman of yesteryear could have any number of obviously less-skilled assistants. Some would be "career track", some semi-skilled seasonal help, some minimally-skilled (whether due to youth, infrequent day labor, poor talent, or social status), and some in supporting type of skilled work - animal handling, cooking, bookkeeping, etc.

Re: How to build a 50k ton forging press

#83

Post by kragen »

doormatt wrote: post #61
Animats wrote: post #58

Progress continues. The biggest press in the world today was built in 2018, is rated for 60,000 tons, and is in Los Angeles County, California.[1][2] [1] https://www.lightmetalage.com/news/industry-news/forging/web... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNFIMy8BuHc

The article says there's an 80,000 ton press in China.

many people in the usa say 'the world' when they mean 'usa'

Re: How to build a 50k ton forging press

#84

Post by [deleted] »

kragen wrote: post #81
WheatMillington wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your viewpoint is rather naive in the mechanical world. OK it's enough to assemble a coffee table, now try an engine with 2,000 parts. Without a manual how can you set bearing clearances? How do you know how much thrust clearance there should be? How do you know which way up a piston ring goes, or how much torque to apply to a head bolt? Machines are extremely complex, and that's before you even touch electronics and…

there's a lot of shade-tree mechanics who have successfully rebuilt engines with thousands of parts. essentially figuring out how to rebuild an engine is similar to figuring out how to build one from scratch, which is within human capacity, particularly with background knowledge. but the guy rebuilding the engine has a lot of hints granted, he'll probably fuck up his first two or three pretty good without haynes or c…

[deleted]

Re: How to build a 50k ton forging press

#85

Post by sushid »

hinkley wrote: post #49
tra3 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For context, I work on my car a bit, and the shop manual for it is hundreds of pages (thousands?). Now scale it up to a factory, maybe without manuals. Disassemble, crate it, assemble it 5000 miles away. Based on my software experience, I can sort of go in blind and figure out how a system functions. I suppose that translates to real world too..

There’s a UX school that says that if the user needs the manual you fucked up. I mostly subscribe to that school. Mostly. It drives my family nuts that I will assemble a piece of furniture without reading the instructions. But the thing is with a little mechanical sympathy, and a well designed product, there’s only one sensible way for the parts to go together, and if you organize them right while you disassemble it…

Sure, but now you have another bolt and nut configuration that requires a different drill, maybe a new supplier, etc. RTFM!

Re: How to build a 50k ton forging press

#86

Post by mannyv »

advisedwang wrote: post #77

This should be a lesson for free-market advocates, especially those who see the US economic boom as a result of laissez-faire economics. In reality there are opportunities the free market doesn't take, and wise government intervention can yield enormous benefit to the public.

In reality what we call 'capitalism' is unstable and requires continual intervention to survive.

Re: How to build a 50k ton forging press

#87

Post by samstave »

hwillis wrote: post #20

> Forgings have the added advantage of variable grain direction which generally can be tailored to the stress patterns of a specific design. This is a super underappreciated fact! It's often repeated that forging is just stronger, but just squishing steel does NOT make it stronger. Forging a part is so much more than just smashing it into a shape. Steel cable is made of pretty ordinary steel which is stretched 100s o…

I have had this question in my mind for decades:

>"Can you forge metals in a highly controlled and directed magnetic field where you can orient the grain/alignment of atoms/fields in whatever direction you want. Further, if true, what happens when you make damascus from varying plated that have particular alignments/grains - and what are the features of this material?

Re: How to build a 50k ton forging press

#88

Post by westurner »

gffrd wrote: post #50

> By the early 2000s, parts from the heavy presses were in every U.S. military aircraft in service, and every airplane built by Airbus and Boeing. >The savings on a heavy bomber was estimated to be even greater, around 5-10% of its total cost; savings on the B-52 alone were estimated to be greater than the entire cost of the Heavy Press Program. These are wild stats. Great article! I was fascinated to learn about the…

> It makes me think: what other processes could redefine an industry or way of thinking/designing if taken a step further

Pressure-injection molded hemp plastic certainly meets spec for automotive and aerospace applications.

"Plant-based epoxy enables recyclable carbon fiber" (2022) [that's stronger than steel and lighter than fiberglass] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30138954 ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37560244

Silica aerogels are dermally abrasive. Applications for non-silica aerogels - for example hemp aerogels - include thermal insulation, packaging, maybe upholstery fill.

There's a new method to remove oxygen from Titanium: "Cheap yet ultrapure titanium metal might enable widespread use in industry" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40768549

"Electric recycling of Portland cement at scale" (2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07338-8 ... "Combined cement and steel recycling could cut CO2 emissions" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40452946

"Researchers create green steel from toxic [aluminum production waste] red mud in 10 minutes" (2024) https://newatlas.com/materials/toxic-baulxite-residue-alumin...

There are many new imaging methods for quality inspection of steel and other metals and alloys, and biocomposites.

"Seeding steel frames brings destroyed coral reefs back to life" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39735205

Re: How to build a 50k ton forging press

#89

Post by retzkek »

kragen wrote: post #83
doormatt wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says there's an 80,000 ton press in China.

many people in the usa say 'the world' when they mean 'usa'

That's pretty ungenerous. The press release says "The press is the world’s strongest hydraulic pull-down die forging press in pit-mounted design" so it's easy for a layman to read "world's strongest ... press" and take that at face value.

Re: How to build a 50k ton forging press

#90

Post by Terr_ »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #42
thaumasiotes wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Blacksmiths had a legitimately intellectual job back in the day! ACOUP noted that blacksmiths might be assisted by unskilled laborers, strikers, who had the actual job of lifting the hammer and hitting the object with it.

Unskilled feels unfair, it requires a fair bit of skill, and you're also learning how to forge while doing it.

I tried to maintain a certain kind of optimistic humility, that almost anything which employs a person full-time is a problem-area that has fractal layers of complexity one don't have to know from the outside.

The only question is whether someone will pay you for doing the fancy skill/science tricks or not.

Post reply on HN