Simple forging questions, answered
In any creative effort, you leave a lot on the cutting-room floor. In the case of the Atlantic piece, some pretty basic questions went unanswered — had to go unanswered — so that important details could be included. I've addressed some of them in a companion piece at BoingBoing (for instance, just how big is it? See the photos there). But there are others, such as:
What color is the forge?
It's now a vibrant turquoise, on the green end of the scale. The original machine was painted in a stylish banana-and-pistachio scheme, reminiscent of Gary Cooper's 1930 Duesenberg Model J. (The car is now at the Heritage Museum and Gardens in Massachusetts. If you're in the area, consider a visit. It's great.) Update: Looks like the turquoise was a factory paint job. Since I visited in December, the press has been repainted in its traditional green and yellow.
Is it crazy loud?
No. Like every employee and visitor, I was required to wear hearing protection while I was in the Cleveland Works facility. The 50,000-ton press was not yet operational, but I took my earplugs out when we were standing next to the 35,000-ton forging press as it worked, and it was surprisingly quiet. Like the Fifty, it's hydraulic, and the main noise was the whoosh of oil-and-water hydraulic fluid into and out of various cylinders. For reference, I live in New York, and Broadway in Midtown or SoHo is a lot louder and a lot harsher. If you've been to a rock concert, you've experienced much, much worse.
What does press-forging look like?
It's surprisingly serene. Perhaps five or six people are directly involved. One carries an ingot from the preheating furnace to the forge with a fancy forklift. Another sprays the heated dies with an oil-and-graphite lubricant. The oil ignites and flames roil, but it's pretty tame. One or two operators check the placement of the ingot and the general health of the forge, and if all is OK authorize a forging stroke. One runs the machine itself using a simple control panel. And one forklifts the forged part out of the machine to a cooling rack. The whole process takes 2 or 3 minutes.
Forging itself takes 30 to 120 seconds. The forge has two speeds, a faster but not very fast one that moves the upper die into place, and a slower one that squeezes the upper die against the lower. You can easily observe the first movement; the second one is so slow that you wouldn't notice it unless you knew to watch the gap between the dies. When the dies are working, they only move a few inches in total, but between them hundreds or thousands of pounds of solid metal is flowing under millions of pounds of pressure.
How did they transport the forge's huge parts?
When the original machine was built by the Mesta Machine Company in the 1950s, the 14 major cast-steel components were carried by train from West Homestead, just outside of Pittsburgh, to Cleveland by rail. Special cars had to be built for the heaviest pieces. For the rebuild, German firm Siempelkamp cast the 14 components in ductile iron at its Krefeld facility, trucked them on specially built trailers a few kilometers to the city's canal, then shipped them down the Rhine, across the Atlantic, and up the St. Lawrence and Erie waterways to the Great Lakes. They were unloaded less than half a mile from Alcoa's Cleveland Works and trucked inside, where a gantry crane loaded them into place.
Why ductile iron and not steel?
Ductile iron is raw iron impregnated with microscopic spheres of graphite. The spheres act like ball bearings, allowing the iron to smoothly flex and rebound without cracking. Pound for pound, steel is stronger, but it's also more brittle and more prone to cracking. Cracks in the original steel components are what prompted the rebuild. (Ductile iron's flexibility is relative: you wouldn't notice it, but a few thousandths of an inch's deflection makes a big difference in the forge's ability to withstand its own wrenching forces.)
Is the 50,000-ton forging press unique?
Yes and no. It's one of two 50,000-ton forging presses in the U.S., both built by the Heavy Press Program in the 1950s, and though each has a different design, they can use the same dies. There are a few machines in Europe, Russia, and Japan that equal or exceed their power, but they are generally not considered as precise or adaptable. Several other machines from the Heavy Press Program, cousins to the Fifty, are also still working.
Why does the forging press matter?
It is true and probably irreversible that heavy industry is no longer the spine of the American economy. But an enormous amount of heavy manufacturing still takes place here, particularly high-tech, high-precision manufacturing. Check out the manhole covers in your neighborhood: they're cheap cast iron, and they're probably made in India. On the other hand, if you could check out your electrical plant's turbines or jet plane's skeleton, you'd see that they were made of highly refined, complex alloys, and that many of them would say "Made in America". Precision metallurgy is a serious business and one on which many lives, and many livelihoods, rest. The U.S. still holds a lead in production volume — but not clearly in ambition or ability. Increasingly, high-tech industrial parts say "Made in China," "Made in Korea," or "Made in Russia." And that is the result of concerted national efforts. Much of the world is actively striving, backed by public money, to catch up to the U.S., Germany, and Japan, the longstanding masters of advanced large-scale metallurgy. I think it is worth asking whether the United States should make a national effort to stay ahead.