12 ms·

How to build a 50k ton forging press

451 points by chmaynard 2y ago

cbsmith 2y ago
...and now the modern equivalent is the Giga Press: https://cleantechnica.com/2024/03/09/teslas-giga-press-has-led-to-systemic-industry-change-now-evs-will-cost-less-to-build-than-ice-vehicles-by-2027/ https://cleantechnica.com/2024/03/09/teslas-giga-press-has-l...
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  Not only is the giga press mentioned in the article, it's very far from being an equivalent to the Alcoa 50,000.
  - cbsmith 2y ago
    Yes, it is mentioned in the article, and it specifically says: "We can see a modern, obvious parallel between the Air Force Heavy Press Program and Tesla, which has created a similar revolution in car manufacturing by using large aluminum castings to replace dozens or hundreds of smaller parts." So I didn't think what I said was out of line. Obviously, I was mistaken.
- aaron695 2y ago
  [dead]
tra3 2y ago
Super interesting: > The largest, the 50,000-ton forging presses, were behemoths: each was the size of a ten-story building, and could exert enough force to lift an entire battleship. The 35,000-ton forging presses weren’t much smaller. and then > Following Germany’s surrender, the U.S. and the Soviet Union divided up its large press capabilities as well as its rocket scientists. The U.S. dismantled four German presses and had them shipped back to the states I wonder what the logistics for moving something like that across the ocean was. I know Soviets dismantled a bunch of factories during the war and moved them far behind the front lines...wonder what that was like.
- dimator 2y ago
  There's an excellent video on these presses https://youtu.be/hpgK51w6uhk?feature=shared https://youtu.be/hpgK51w6uhk?feature=shared
- hinkley 2y ago
  Well when you have military supply vessels just hanging around in the area…
  - tra3 2y ago
    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..
    - hinkley 2y ago
      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 (granted, harder to do when shipping overseas) then you’re good. Imagine you had a device where four hardened steel bolts held the critical parts together. It would be stupid if the handles used the same bolt sizes in mild steel, right? Someone will fuck that up and use the wrong spare parts or do deep maintenance wrong. You’d use a different size bolt so they can’t get mixed up.
      - WheatMillington 2y ago
        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 hydraulics, both of which are highly complex systems. Simply moving large machine parts safely requires documented procedures, let alone order of assembly.
bee_rider 2y ago
They talk about machining, casting, and pressing. Mostly with casting and pressing in a good light, machining not so good. As somebody who knows absolutely nothing about this stuff, I wonder—casting, I thought, was generally a lower quality option (like cast iron doesn’t have fantastic high-performance material qualities, and I had some crappy cast pewter toys as a kid). Are there different, higher quality casting processes, and I’ve only seen the bargain bin results? Is there a general ranking of the quality of the result or is it all very complicated and material specific?
- debacle 2y ago
  Casting isn't necessarily "lower quality," it just has different properties. It's also much older (by thousands of years) than machining or pressing, but you can't get to the pressing or machining step without having an ingot, which comes from the casting process. The main drawbacks of casting are you get a hard, but brittle product with (generally) uneven quality. There are processes (like annealing, though I don't know how you anneal a massive component) that can solve these problems, but all iron/steel is "cast" at some point.
  - BlueTemplar 2y ago
    Until the mid-1800s, basically only the Chinese used cast iron, since it's so brittle. Ingots would come from smelting, not casting.
  - kragen 2y ago
    depends on what you mean by 'machining'. grinding is at least 7000 years old https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-last_celt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-last_celt and roughly contemporary with pottery. casting presumably began with pottery but was definitely in full swing by the bronze age, a mere few thousand years later
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- WJW 2y ago
  Machining is fine, but in the context of the article the problem is that it usually starts off from plates or otherwise block-shaped materials. That means that if you have a weirdly shaped part full of holes and/or with many protrusions in weird angles (as vehicle parts tend to have), then you either have to combine many smaller parts into a final part or have to machine away a huge amount of material from a solid block to come to the final shape. It would be much better to cast or forge the part into roughly the right shape straight away, so you'd need only minimal finishing work. That is what these presses enabled.
Metacelsus 2y ago
Now I want to see one of these on the Hydraulic Press Channel!
jcgrillo 2y ago
My little 20 ton shop press brake can bend 5/8" plate. Incredible to imagine what this behemoth can do...
- kibwen 2y ago
  Using advanced math I hereby extrapolate that this 50,000 ton press can bend 12,500/8" plate.
  - hwillis 2y ago
    The second moment of area is quadratic with thickness (t^2), so 250/8" plate. But in reality 2-3x more than that, because at that scale steel gets a bit... goopy.
    - kristjansson 2y ago
      I understand very little about machining, expect that _all_ materials are kinda squishy if one applies enough squish.
      - mikewarot 2y ago
        Even inconel is bubble gum in a Kurt vise if you're chasing tenths, or microns.
  - jcgrillo 2y ago
    well the next time I need some 130ft thick brackets I'll ask them whether I can use it after hours or on the weekend EDIT: or, according to hwillis' math, 2.5ft thick. I guess those could be useful for anchoring a zipline to the moon or something.
    - hinkley 2y ago
      I saw a guy weld 1.5 or 2 inch plate once to repair the bucket on a giant bulldozer. That was… interesting. I was trying to figure out why he left such a big gap until he started welding. He had to fit the head in to lay down layer after layer of welding bead to join the pieces at full depth. How would you weld even one foot of steel?
PaulHoule 2y ago
Nobody in North America has a press that can make a vessel for a nuclear reactor without making it in pieces and welding them together (probably adding a year to the schedule if you don’t use a new welding technique just developed in the UK not to mention people being anxious over the welds) There is a Canadian company that is gearing up to make small reactor vessels like the BWRX-300 but so far I haven’t seen a sign they aren’t Nuscale 2.0
- phiiiillll 2y ago
  Was curious about what welding technique you meant, looks like it is local electron beam welding https://www.thefabricator.com/thewelder/blog/assembly/sheffield-forgemasters-makes-global-leap-in-welding-technology https://www.thefabricator.com/thewelder/blog/assembly/sheffi...
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    That’s it.
  - MisterTea 2y ago
    I work in an EB shop doing everything from welding, engineering assistance, machine repairs, and complete machine rebuilds. It's quite an impressive process and Ive had parts in my hands that come from some of the biggest names you can think of in aerospace, semiconductor, military, medical and more.
    - hinkley 2y ago
      Are they for prototypes? Or how do you service production runs for parts? If for arguments sake it were a part for an AWACS or an aircraft carrier you might only need to make eight or a dozen. But even military aircraft tend to run into the hundreds.
      - MisterTea 2y ago
        We do production runs with the rare service run. Most parts are one time use as you might imagine. Service work is the rare mold repair. We are part of a few companies just in time manufacturing so they pay for expedite processing on orders as small a one piece to a few dozen. And we can get production run orders in the tens of thousands.
hwillis 2y ago
> 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 of times its original length. That process alone makes it 2-4x stronger in that direction. You stretch steel and it gets stronger in that direction. Do you see how complicated that optimization process becomes? The process steps are not just trying to take it to the final shape. Your piston rod needs to be strong lengthwise, so you actually want to start with a short fat ingot and stretch it out instead of one that is near-final size. Think of making an I-beam. You could hammer out the middle, making it thinner. That would give you a bit of strength there but very little on the edges. If you instead pull the edges out, you create a long continuous stretch that will be very strong against bending. Where, how, and in what order you stretch makes all the difference. You may want to leave extra material and cut it off later, so that your grains are all oriented together instead of tapering to a point. For any moderately complex part, this process is as complicated as modern engineering problems. With poor steel you genuinely need to understand how to foster and bring out those continuous lines or your corkscrew will unwind like playdough. Blacksmiths had a legitimately intellectual job back in the day!
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > 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.
  - NegativeLatency 2y ago
    Unskilled feels unfair, it requires a fair bit of skill, and you're also learning how to forge while doing it.
    - droopyEyelids 2y ago
Yenrabbit 2y ago
For a program started in the 50s, it's impressive that "Six of the ten presses are still operational today."!
- barryp 2y ago
  I got curious as what happened to the other 4. Wikipedia lists them as extrusion presses being scrapped in the 90's and 2021 in Maryland and Torrence CA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program I wonder if they wore out?, something better came along?, or just no demand?
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    They've been maintained, wear parts such as bearings and seals can be replaced. You can keep well-made machinery running almost indefinitely if you take care of it.
bhouston 2y ago
More details in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ50nZU3oG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ50nZU3oG8
chasil 2y ago
I understand that this press, and the Cleveland site, is now owned by Howmet Aerospace, which is a "daughter company" of Alcoa (along with Arconic) after its 2020 separation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howmet_Aerospace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howmet_Aerospace The big Cleveland press has its own wiki. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoa_50,000_ton_forging_press https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoa_50,000_ton_forging_press
- a2tech 2y ago
  Howmet is an interesting company. My dad worked for them his entire life (it was called MISCO, then Howmet bought them, then Alcoa). He worked specifically in titanium injection molding--they would heat titanium until it was liquid and then force it under pressure into intricate molds they made onsite. Most of the time they made turbine blades for jet engines, but if it was slow they would make golf club heads for PING and companies like that. In all the years he worked there, the golf club heads were the only tangible product of his work that I saw because everything else was tightly controlled in the facility.
  - chasil 2y ago
    The blades were actually perfect crystals, with either all the grain boundaries aligned, or no grain boundaries. This lets them run at higher temperatures without melting, increasing efficiency. Pratt & Whitney appears to have developed most of the technology. https://www.americanscientist.org/article/each-blade-a-single-crystal https://www.americanscientist.org/article/each-blade-a-singl...
    - dekhn 2y ago
      Oh, so that's what they were doing in the facility in my hometown. It was always pretty secretive and now I can see why.
baking 2y ago
There is no "H" in "Worcester."
- mhb 2y ago
  And it's odd to see one there, since, from the pronunciation, you'd expect it to be spelled "Wooster".
  - mauvehaus 2y ago
    The Wooster in Ohio is spelled "Wooster".
  - thehappypm 2y ago
    Wustah
  - nostrademons 2y ago
    In Massachusetts it's pronounced "Wistah".
shepherdjerred 2y ago
What strikes me is how great of an investment this turned out to be. Does the US invest in manufacturing like this anymore? Tangentially, if there were a war today would the US be able to produce as much as it did in WW2?
- bradford 2y ago
  > Does the US invest in manufacturing like this anymore? It might be easy to argue over the exact degree of similiarity, but I'd argue that the US has repeatedly made manufacturing investments since the 1950s. Buried in bills signed into law, you'll find such investments. Recent examples include the Recovery Act of 2009 or the American CHIPS act of 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestment_Act_of_2009 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvest... https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/what-chips-act https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/what-chips-act
- waythenewsgoes 2y ago
  In terms of raw output, the answer is likely no. However, this might not matter as much now as it did in the past due to nuclear weapons being the primary deterrent in war these days, and the fact that our standing fleet of aircraft, aircraft carriers, nuke subs, tanks, etc... is essentially second to none. Additionally what we do have is highly capable and extremely specialized, in my opinion, leading to not really needing as many (quality over quantity). Take for example, an F35, which doesn't really have an equal in the skies, we have over 630 of them, with the goal of having around 2500. China only has 300 J-20s which are basically a copy of the older F22. Russia only has 22 non-test Su-57s. Would we have a realistic need to build 1000 of them within a year? Due to many factors, but primarily free trade and globalization, it's unlikely that we ever see that non-automated manufacturing capacity return, though if needed we could probably mobilize the economy via the defense act to force more manufacturing capacity, though it's hard to imagine we would currently need to.
- bluGill 2y ago
  > Does the US invest in manufacturing like this anymore? No, but that is different from not investing. Today the US invests more in automation and engineering and less in manual labor. > if there were a war today would the US be able to produce as much as it did in WW2? It took several years to ramp up to WW2 level production. We would see the same, a couple years of trouble on the fronts while building industry at home, then when the industry is built up massive production. Historians (amateur so I'm not sure if they are right) tell me Hitler was ready for WW2 first and Italy begged him to not start the war as their industry wasn't ready. However France and Briton saw the war coming and were building their industry and so waiting might have made things worse.
wyck 2y ago
Some machine porn I found about the the biggest(?) press in the world in L.A. by Weber metals, I think it's 60k tons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOe8KYZXGeg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOe8KYZXGeg
gffrd 2y ago
> 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 Heavy Press program for the first time, here on HN[1] a month ago, and am glad more about it is being posted. It makes me think: what other processes could redefine an industry or way of thinking/designing if taken a step further? We had forging and extrusion presses … but huge, high pressure ones changed the game entirely.
- twic 2y ago
  Electrolytic refining of iron, all the way from ore. Gets rid of blast furnaces, allows far more precise control over metallurgy.
- westurner 2y ago
  > 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=30138954 ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37560244 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40768549 "Electric recycling of Portland cement at scale" (2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07338-8 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 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-aluminum-plasma-reduction-hydrogen-green-steel 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39735205
nickdothutton 2y ago
These massive presses are/were of strategic importance. Something politicians, most of whom seem to be lawyers these days, completely fail to grasp. I am not in general a fan of government subsidy, but I was very disappointed when the government of the UK declined to fund a large press in Sheffield, which would have been used to build the next generation of nuclear reactors. June 2010 timeframe. Luckily natural gas is cheap and has no geopolitical supply chain problems eh?
- Dennip 2y ago
  Sheffield Forgemasters? They are actually now directly govt owned as of 2020, with future investment for a new heavy forge.
- pjc50 2y ago
  We're not going to build the nuclear reactors either. The problem will finally be solved by re-permitting onshore wind and a lot of batteries imported from China. (The "local supply chain is vulnerable to political uncertainty over long term project funding" problem is much worse in regard to trains, and has resulted in losing most of our train building capacity. See HS2 fiasco.)
  - elzbardico 2y ago
    This is basically a pipe dream. But as long as the subsides are going to Big Green scammers, we will have numerically ignorant journalists peddling this bullshit.
    - seec 2y ago
      I don’t understand how anyone can push that “solution” with a straight face. Surely they have worked out the numbers and figured out it’s not realistic at all, right,…,right ?
ckemere 2y ago
Was reading this NYT op ed - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/19/opinion/chris-murphy-democrats.html?smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/19/opinion/chris-murphy-demo... - and reflecting that the people talking don’t get that the secret sauce for meaningful labor is not just that it pays, but also the sense that it is “special” somehow, in the sense that manufacturing parts with 50000 ton press is manual labor but also remarkable because of the uniqueness of the machine being used. Most discussions about trying to build industrial capacity in the US seem to focus on either our high labor costs or on the disinterest in capital to invest in low margin places. I would love to understand what time frame of guaranteed business the government provided these companies to convince them to participate, and also what other industrial processes the government invested in which failed to take off. Specifically, why didn’t this sort of thing work for the solar industry a few years back?
Animats 2y ago
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/weber-metals-starts-up-worlds-largest-pull-down-die-forging-press/ https://www.lightmetalage.com/news/industry-news/forging/web... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNFIMy8BuHc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNFIMy8BuHc
- doormatt 2y ago
  The article says there's an 80,000 ton press in China.
  - kragen 2y ago
    many people in the usa say 'the world' when they mean 'usa'
    - retzkek 2y ago
      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.
      - kragen 2y ago
        i admit i don't know what 'pull-down' and 'in pit-mounted design' mean, and i'm not sure my understanding of 'die forging' is correct, but that seems likely on the other hand, the press release might be written by the same sort of people who say things like 'the world series', which is a baseball tournament between teams from the usa (and canada) https://www.gasparini.com/en/the-worlds-largest-hydraulic-presses/ https://www.gasparini.com/en/the-worlds-largest-hydraulic-pr... says > The United States leadership only lasted two years: in 1957 the Ukrainian company Novokramatorsky Mashinostroitelny Zavod (NKMZ), specialized in steelworks equipment, built two 75,000-ton presses. The first one, destined for a plant in Samara, is now owned by Alcoa’s Russian branch. The second was installed in Verkhniaïa Salda and is used by VSMPO-AVISMA, the world’s leading producer of titanium and other specialty alloys. > Outside the two superpowers, France was the third country to equip itself with a hydraulic press of this size: also built by the Ukrainian NKMZ, this 65,000 ton presse hydraulique* was installed in Issoire between 1974 and 1976. Owned by Interforge, the machine is 36 metres high and manufactures components for Airbus, Boeing, the space and transport industries.* ... > After 60 years, the USA has added a new 60,000-ton hydraulic forging press. Built by SMS Group and managed by Weber Metals in California, it started operations in October 2018. > The heavyweight champion, of course, is Chinese: a machine with the incredible power [sic] of 80,000 tons is in operation since 2013 for the giant Erzhong Group in the province of Sichuan. As tall as a 10-storey building, its use is very confidential: it seems to be used to build parts for military aircraft, like its titanic sisters. To give an idea of the power of this machine, with its 780,000 kN it could easily lift an entire cruise ship. As often happens, larger does not mean better: it is not the most technologically advanced press in the world. It was built by adapting old USSR projects from the 1980s, and is currently underused due to competition from the other giants we mentioned. either this derives from this longer post from 02022, or they both derive from a common source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/worlds-largest-hydraulic-press-machines-mohammad-ali-nekahi https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/worlds-largest-hydraulic-pres... the owner was at risk of bankruptcy in 02015: https://web.archive.org/web/20160809080032/http://www.france-metallurgie.com/index.php/2015/09/21/erzhong-under-the-threat-of-bankruptcy-us/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160809080032/http://www.france...
deleted 2y ago
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brcmthrowaway 2y ago
Is this how the SR71 was made?
advisedwang 2y ago
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.
- mannyv 2y ago
  In reality what we call 'capitalism' is unstable and requires continual intervention to survive.
  - hackit2 2y ago
    That is a very simplistic perspective of 'capitalism', it is a bit more nuance than that. It typically requires intervention to prevent it from destroying the economy because of insider trading, liquidity, and monopolist practices. The only criticism you say about it mirror aspect of our-selves that we don't like to admit. It isn't perfect but people are not perfect how-ever based on how fast we're pull people out poverty, you have to admit its pretty good!
- refurb 2y ago
  Do you feel that the free market wouldn't have adopted it at some future point in time?
  - advisedwang 2y ago
    I don't believe the free market would ever have produced the heavy presses. The coordination problem between making designs that use the heavy press and the investment to make the presses is essentially the prisoner's dilemma - each actor reaps a large reward if they both commit but loses massively if only they commit. The outcome is that they don't commit, especially if you add in real-world factors like alternate uses of the investment that competition tends to force the businesses involved into. The only hope would be something vertically integrated that can commit both, but there's no particular reason to believe that such an enterprise could enter into the market. The free market probably could and would have optimized the situation at hand. Machining would have become cheaper, solutions to the fastener issues mentioned would be found and so on. This might even end up being better than the heavy presses - that's a technical question not an economic one - although the article makes it sound like the forging solution really is inherently superior.
azalemeth 2y ago
If you're reading this article, you may wish to know that arguably a "counterpart" to heavy press forging is explosive forming [1] in which a chemical high explosive is used to force a template material against a template. The overpressure generated by the explosive can be equivalent or maybe even greater than heavy press forgings (a 50,000 US short ton force press exerts ≈500 MN force; peak overpressure close to detonating TNT or PETN explosives can be MPa or higher [2] so depending on the geometry of the part they may be comparable) and it has the added "fun" fact that complex cylindrical or spherical shapes can be made very easily and accurately. The only people I know who have worked with this have used it to make superconducting magnets, explosively forming either titanium or high grades of nonmagnetic stainless (A4, which has µr ≈ 1) without causing marsenite formation due to machining. This includes a major international MRI scanner manufacturer, for one relatively niche product. It's like the "extreme" version of metal spinning [3] – forcing a rotating chunk of metal against a rotationally symmetric mandrel. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive_forming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive_forming [2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Variation-of-peak-over-pressure-with-scaled-distance-for-1-kg-TNT-explosive_fig1_323161518 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Variation-of-peak-over-p... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_spinning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_spinning
- infogulch 2y ago
  There are some popular videos making spheres using explosive hydroforming, which is quite fun, and much lower tech than explosively forming magnets to avoid the formation of marsenite (sp?).
- kragen 2y ago
  *martensite
- Animats 2y ago
  Explosive forming has been used to make aluminum boat hulls.[1] It's a useful way to form very large sheet metal parts. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbS6rS0seuk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbS6rS0seuk
- baud147258 2y ago
urbandw311er 2y ago
Anybody know: Do these large presses still exist usefully today or have they been obsoleted by larger ones / by newer manufacturing techniques?
- ggm 2y ago
  TFA says some of these are still in operation.
nntwozz 2y ago
The workers in those pics have no hearing protection, no eye protection; no helmets. Yeah, must be the 50s. My 75 years old carpenter is half deaf, his grandfather fell from a roof and died. He himself fell off a roof in 1981 but was lucky and survived. Just some thoughts seeing those men working in those conditions.
asib 2y ago
Recently watched this great video on the USAF Heavy Press Program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ50nZU3oG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ50nZU3oG8
Simon_ORourke 2y ago
I'm not sure it's rose-tinted glasses or some sense of nostalgia for the "good old days", but it does feel that our manufacturing processes have taken a step backwards since then.
sidcool 2y ago
Love them or hate them. Tesla's manufacturing prowess is unmatched.
- humansareok1 2y ago
  Given their seeming lack of proper quality control I find this statement highly suspect.
twic 2y ago
> Partly this broad range of uses for the heavy presses came from expanding the range of materials used in them. Originally the presses were designed to make parts from aluminum and magnesium, but by the 1960s they were not only pressing aluminum and magnesium but steel, titanium, nickel, copper, columbium, beryllium, and a variety of other metals. Columbium is apparently an old name for niobium, and one perhaps still in use by American metallurgists. There's no way anyone was making huge niobium forgings, though. Or nickel? Surely this is a reference to the use of those elements in superalloys.
Nifty3929 2y ago
Amazing achievement. But I can't help but notice how much we celebrate these efficiency gains in the past, while being scared of them in the present. At heart, this is the story of using less labor to product a unit of output, and possibly also improving the quality of those units of output. This led to much better outcomes for society. Was anybody then scared of what would happen to the riveters? Maybe, but those voices would have been drowned out. These days, production is demonized, particularly at scale. Is there any successful producer being celebrated for being so? Are there any new, innovative, labor-reducing technologies being celebrated? Does it take a war to snap us out of our fear of being better?
rendall 2y ago
I first learned about these presses several years ago from the YouTube channel Machine Thinking which is excellent and unfortunately infrequent. The linked video has some excellent footage of these beasts in action. "America's Iron Giants" https://youtu.be/hpgK51w6uhk?si=5BjwmlSMAAKzVYzS https://youtu.be/hpgK51w6uhk?si=5BjwmlSMAAKzVYzS
rendall 2y ago
> Experience developing the SR-71 led Kelly Johnson to believe that the U.S. needed even larger, 250,000-ton presses, and in the 1980s the Army studied whether presses of up to 200,000 tons might be useful. But no such presses were ever built, either in the U.S. or elsewhere. I imagine extremely large construction and digging. Kilometer-tall buildings and deep large tunnels.

451 points by chmaynard 2y ago

...and now the modern equivalent is the Giga Press: https://cleantechnica.com/2024/03/09/teslas-giga-press-has-led-to-systemic-industry-change-now-evs-will-cost-less-to-build-than-ice-vehicles-by-2027/ https://cleantechnica.com/2024/03/09/teslas-giga-press-has-l...

mitthrowaway2 2y ago
Not only is the giga press mentioned in the article, it's very far from being an equivalent to the Alcoa 50,000.
- cbsmith 2y ago
  Yes, it is mentioned in the article, and it specifically says: "We can see a modern, obvious parallel between the Air Force Heavy Press Program and Tesla, which has created a similar revolution in car manufacturing by using large aluminum castings to replace dozens or hundreds of smaller parts." So I didn't think what I said was out of line. Obviously, I was mistaken.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]

tra3 2y ago

Super interesting: > The largest, the 50,000-ton forging presses, were behemoths: each was the size of a ten-story building, and could exert enough force to lift an entire battleship. The 35,000-ton forging presses weren’t much smaller. and then > Following Germany’s surrender, the U.S. and the Soviet Union divided up its large press capabilities as well as its rocket scientists. The U.S. dismantled four German presses and had them shipped back to the states I wonder what the logistics for moving something like that across the ocean was. I know Soviets dismantled a bunch of factories during the war and moved them far behind the front lines...wonder what that was like.

dimator 2y ago
There's an excellent video on these presses https://youtu.be/hpgK51w6uhk?feature=shared https://youtu.be/hpgK51w6uhk?feature=shared
hinkley 2y ago
Well when you have military supply vessels just hanging around in the area…
- tra3 2y ago
  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..
  - hinkley 2y ago
    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 (granted, harder to do when shipping overseas) then you’re good. Imagine you had a device where four hardened steel bolts held the critical parts together. It would be stupid if the handles used the same bolt sizes in mild steel, right? Someone will fuck that up and use the wrong spare parts or do deep maintenance wrong. You’d use a different size bolt so they can’t get mixed up.
    - WheatMillington 2y ago
      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 hydraulics, both of which are highly complex systems. Simply moving large machine parts safely requires documented procedures, let alone order of assembly.

bee_rider 2y ago

They talk about machining, casting, and pressing. Mostly with casting and pressing in a good light, machining not so good. As somebody who knows absolutely nothing about this stuff, I wonder—casting, I thought, was generally a lower quality option (like cast iron doesn’t have fantastic high-performance material qualities, and I had some crappy cast pewter toys as a kid). Are there different, higher quality casting processes, and I’ve only seen the bargain bin results? Is there a general ranking of the quality of the result or is it all very complicated and material specific?

debacle 2y ago
Casting isn't necessarily "lower quality," it just has different properties. It's also much older (by thousands of years) than machining or pressing, but you can't get to the pressing or machining step without having an ingot, which comes from the casting process. The main drawbacks of casting are you get a hard, but brittle product with (generally) uneven quality. There are processes (like annealing, though I don't know how you anneal a massive component) that can solve these problems, but all iron/steel is "cast" at some point.
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  Until the mid-1800s, basically only the Chinese used cast iron, since it's so brittle. Ingots would come from smelting, not casting.
- kragen 2y ago
  depends on what you mean by 'machining'. grinding is at least 7000 years old https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-last_celt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-last_celt and roughly contemporary with pottery. casting presumably began with pottery but was definitely in full swing by the bronze age, a mere few thousand years later
deleted 2y ago
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WJW 2y ago
Machining is fine, but in the context of the article the problem is that it usually starts off from plates or otherwise block-shaped materials. That means that if you have a weirdly shaped part full of holes and/or with many protrusions in weird angles (as vehicle parts tend to have), then you either have to combine many smaller parts into a final part or have to machine away a huge amount of material from a solid block to come to the final shape. It would be much better to cast or forge the part into roughly the right shape straight away, so you'd need only minimal finishing work. That is what these presses enabled.

Metacelsus 2y ago

Now I want to see one of these on the Hydraulic Press Channel!

jcgrillo 2y ago

My little 20 ton shop press brake can bend 5/8" plate. Incredible to imagine what this behemoth can do...

kibwen 2y ago
Using advanced math I hereby extrapolate that this 50,000 ton press can bend 12,500/8" plate.
- hwillis 2y ago
  The second moment of area is quadratic with thickness (t^2), so 250/8" plate. But in reality 2-3x more than that, because at that scale steel gets a bit... goopy.
  - kristjansson 2y ago
    I understand very little about machining, expect that _all_ materials are kinda squishy if one applies enough squish.
    - mikewarot 2y ago
      Even inconel is bubble gum in a Kurt vise if you're chasing tenths, or microns.
- jcgrillo 2y ago
  well the next time I need some 130ft thick brackets I'll ask them whether I can use it after hours or on the weekend EDIT: or, according to hwillis' math, 2.5ft thick. I guess those could be useful for anchoring a zipline to the moon or something.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    I saw a guy weld 1.5 or 2 inch plate once to repair the bucket on a giant bulldozer. That was… interesting. I was trying to figure out why he left such a big gap until he started welding. He had to fit the head in to lay down layer after layer of welding bead to join the pieces at full depth. How would you weld even one foot of steel?

PaulHoule 2y ago

Nobody in North America has a press that can make a vessel for a nuclear reactor without making it in pieces and welding them together (probably adding a year to the schedule if you don’t use a new welding technique just developed in the UK not to mention people being anxious over the welds) There is a Canadian company that is gearing up to make small reactor vessels like the BWRX-300 but so far I haven’t seen a sign they aren’t Nuscale 2.0

phiiiillll 2y ago
Was curious about what welding technique you meant, looks like it is local electron beam welding https://www.thefabricator.com/thewelder/blog/assembly/sheffield-forgemasters-makes-global-leap-in-welding-technology https://www.thefabricator.com/thewelder/blog/assembly/sheffi...
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  That’s it.
- MisterTea 2y ago
  I work in an EB shop doing everything from welding, engineering assistance, machine repairs, and complete machine rebuilds. It's quite an impressive process and Ive had parts in my hands that come from some of the biggest names you can think of in aerospace, semiconductor, military, medical and more.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    Are they for prototypes? Or how do you service production runs for parts? If for arguments sake it were a part for an AWACS or an aircraft carrier you might only need to make eight or a dozen. But even military aircraft tend to run into the hundreds.
    - MisterTea 2y ago
      We do production runs with the rare service run. Most parts are one time use as you might imagine. Service work is the rare mold repair. We are part of a few companies just in time manufacturing so they pay for expedite processing on orders as small a one piece to a few dozen. And we can get production run orders in the tens of thousands.

hwillis 2y ago

> 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 of times its original length. That process alone makes it 2-4x stronger in that direction. You stretch steel and it gets stronger in that direction. Do you see how complicated that optimization process becomes? The process steps are not just trying to take it to the final shape. Your piston rod needs to be strong lengthwise, so you actually want to start with a short fat ingot and stretch it out instead of one that is near-final size. Think of making an I-beam. You could hammer out the middle, making it thinner. That would give you a bit of strength there but very little on the edges. If you instead pull the edges out, you create a long continuous stretch that will be very strong against bending. Where, how, and in what order you stretch makes all the difference. You may want to leave extra material and cut it off later, so that your grains are all oriented together instead of tapering to a point. For any moderately complex part, this process is as complicated as modern engineering problems. With poor steel you genuinely need to understand how to foster and bring out those continuous lines or your corkscrew will unwind like playdough. Blacksmiths had a legitimately intellectual job back in the day!

thaumasiotes 2y ago
> 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.
- NegativeLatency 2y ago
  Unskilled feels unfair, it requires a fair bit of skill, and you're also learning how to forge while doing it.
  - droopyEyelids 2y ago

Yenrabbit 2y ago

For a program started in the 50s, it's impressive that "Six of the ten presses are still operational today."!

barryp 2y ago
I got curious as what happened to the other 4. Wikipedia lists them as extrusion presses being scrapped in the 90's and 2021 in Maryland and Torrence CA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Press_Program I wonder if they wore out?, something better came along?, or just no demand?
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  They've been maintained, wear parts such as bearings and seals can be replaced. You can keep well-made machinery running almost indefinitely if you take care of it.

bhouston 2y ago

More details in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ50nZU3oG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ50nZU3oG8

chasil 2y ago

I understand that this press, and the Cleveland site, is now owned by Howmet Aerospace, which is a "daughter company" of Alcoa (along with Arconic) after its 2020 separation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howmet_Aerospace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howmet_Aerospace The big Cleveland press has its own wiki. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoa_50,000_ton_forging_press https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoa_50,000_ton_forging_press

a2tech 2y ago
Howmet is an interesting company. My dad worked for them his entire life (it was called MISCO, then Howmet bought them, then Alcoa). He worked specifically in titanium injection molding--they would heat titanium until it was liquid and then force it under pressure into intricate molds they made onsite. Most of the time they made turbine blades for jet engines, but if it was slow they would make golf club heads for PING and companies like that. In all the years he worked there, the golf club heads were the only tangible product of his work that I saw because everything else was tightly controlled in the facility.
- chasil 2y ago
  The blades were actually perfect crystals, with either all the grain boundaries aligned, or no grain boundaries. This lets them run at higher temperatures without melting, increasing efficiency. Pratt & Whitney appears to have developed most of the technology. https://www.americanscientist.org/article/each-blade-a-single-crystal https://www.americanscientist.org/article/each-blade-a-singl...
  - dekhn 2y ago
    Oh, so that's what they were doing in the facility in my hometown. It was always pretty secretive and now I can see why.

baking 2y ago

There is no "H" in "Worcester."

mhb 2y ago
And it's odd to see one there, since, from the pronunciation, you'd expect it to be spelled "Wooster".
- mauvehaus 2y ago
  The Wooster in Ohio is spelled "Wooster".
- thehappypm 2y ago
  Wustah
- nostrademons 2y ago
  In Massachusetts it's pronounced "Wistah".

shepherdjerred 2y ago

What strikes me is how great of an investment this turned out to be. Does the US invest in manufacturing like this anymore? Tangentially, if there were a war today would the US be able to produce as much as it did in WW2?

bradford 2y ago
> Does the US invest in manufacturing like this anymore? It might be easy to argue over the exact degree of similiarity, but I'd argue that the US has repeatedly made manufacturing investments since the 1950s. Buried in bills signed into law, you'll find such investments. Recent examples include the Recovery Act of 2009 or the American CHIPS act of 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestment_Act_of_2009 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvest... https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/what-chips-act https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/what-chips-act
waythenewsgoes 2y ago
In terms of raw output, the answer is likely no. However, this might not matter as much now as it did in the past due to nuclear weapons being the primary deterrent in war these days, and the fact that our standing fleet of aircraft, aircraft carriers, nuke subs, tanks, etc... is essentially second to none. Additionally what we do have is highly capable and extremely specialized, in my opinion, leading to not really needing as many (quality over quantity). Take for example, an F35, which doesn't really have an equal in the skies, we have over 630 of them, with the goal of having around 2500. China only has 300 J-20s which are basically a copy of the older F22. Russia only has 22 non-test Su-57s. Would we have a realistic need to build 1000 of them within a year? Due to many factors, but primarily free trade and globalization, it's unlikely that we ever see that non-automated manufacturing capacity return, though if needed we could probably mobilize the economy via the defense act to force more manufacturing capacity, though it's hard to imagine we would currently need to.
bluGill 2y ago
> Does the US invest in manufacturing like this anymore? No, but that is different from not investing. Today the US invests more in automation and engineering and less in manual labor. > if there were a war today would the US be able to produce as much as it did in WW2? It took several years to ramp up to WW2 level production. We would see the same, a couple years of trouble on the fronts while building industry at home, then when the industry is built up massive production. Historians (amateur so I'm not sure if they are right) tell me Hitler was ready for WW2 first and Italy begged him to not start the war as their industry wasn't ready. However France and Briton saw the war coming and were building their industry and so waiting might have made things worse.

wyck 2y ago

Some machine porn I found about the the biggest(?) press in the world in L.A. by Weber metals, I think it's 60k tons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOe8KYZXGeg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOe8KYZXGeg

gffrd 2y ago

> 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 Heavy Press program for the first time, here on HN[1] a month ago, and am glad more about it is being posted. It makes me think: what other processes could redefine an industry or way of thinking/designing if taken a step further? We had forging and extrusion presses … but huge, high pressure ones changed the game entirely.

twic 2y ago
Electrolytic refining of iron, all the way from ore. Gets rid of blast furnaces, allows far more precise control over metallurgy.
westurner 2y ago
> 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=30138954 ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37560244 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40768549 "Electric recycling of Portland cement at scale" (2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07338-8 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 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-aluminum-plasma-reduction-hydrogen-green-steel 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39735205

nickdothutton 2y ago

These massive presses are/were of strategic importance. Something politicians, most of whom seem to be lawyers these days, completely fail to grasp. I am not in general a fan of government subsidy, but I was very disappointed when the government of the UK declined to fund a large press in Sheffield, which would have been used to build the next generation of nuclear reactors. June 2010 timeframe. Luckily natural gas is cheap and has no geopolitical supply chain problems eh?

Dennip 2y ago
Sheffield Forgemasters? They are actually now directly govt owned as of 2020, with future investment for a new heavy forge.
pjc50 2y ago
We're not going to build the nuclear reactors either. The problem will finally be solved by re-permitting onshore wind and a lot of batteries imported from China. (The "local supply chain is vulnerable to political uncertainty over long term project funding" problem is much worse in regard to trains, and has resulted in losing most of our train building capacity. See HS2 fiasco.)
- elzbardico 2y ago
  This is basically a pipe dream. But as long as the subsides are going to Big Green scammers, we will have numerically ignorant journalists peddling this bullshit.
  - seec 2y ago
    I don’t understand how anyone can push that “solution” with a straight face. Surely they have worked out the numbers and figured out it’s not realistic at all, right,…,right ?

ckemere 2y ago

Was reading this NYT op ed - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/19/opinion/chris-murphy-democrats.html?smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/19/opinion/chris-murphy-demo... - and reflecting that the people talking don’t get that the secret sauce for meaningful labor is not just that it pays, but also the sense that it is “special” somehow, in the sense that manufacturing parts with 50000 ton press is manual labor but also remarkable because of the uniqueness of the machine being used. Most discussions about trying to build industrial capacity in the US seem to focus on either our high labor costs or on the disinterest in capital to invest in low margin places. I would love to understand what time frame of guaranteed business the government provided these companies to convince them to participate, and also what other industrial processes the government invested in which failed to take off. Specifically, why didn’t this sort of thing work for the solar industry a few years back?

Animats 2y ago

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/weber-metals-starts-up-worlds-largest-pull-down-die-forging-press/ https://www.lightmetalage.com/news/industry-news/forging/web... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNFIMy8BuHc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNFIMy8BuHc

doormatt 2y ago
The article says there's an 80,000 ton press in China.
- kragen 2y ago
  many people in the usa say 'the world' when they mean 'usa'
  - retzkek 2y ago
    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.
    - kragen 2y ago
      i admit i don't know what 'pull-down' and 'in pit-mounted design' mean, and i'm not sure my understanding of 'die forging' is correct, but that seems likely on the other hand, the press release might be written by the same sort of people who say things like 'the world series', which is a baseball tournament between teams from the usa (and canada) https://www.gasparini.com/en/the-worlds-largest-hydraulic-presses/ https://www.gasparini.com/en/the-worlds-largest-hydraulic-pr... says > The United States leadership only lasted two years: in 1957 the Ukrainian company Novokramatorsky Mashinostroitelny Zavod (NKMZ), specialized in steelworks equipment, built two 75,000-ton presses. The first one, destined for a plant in Samara, is now owned by Alcoa’s Russian branch. The second was installed in Verkhniaïa Salda and is used by VSMPO-AVISMA, the world’s leading producer of titanium and other specialty alloys. > Outside the two superpowers, France was the third country to equip itself with a hydraulic press of this size: also built by the Ukrainian NKMZ, this 65,000 ton presse hydraulique* was installed in Issoire between 1974 and 1976. Owned by Interforge, the machine is 36 metres high and manufactures components for Airbus, Boeing, the space and transport industries.* ... > After 60 years, the USA has added a new 60,000-ton hydraulic forging press. Built by SMS Group and managed by Weber Metals in California, it started operations in October 2018. > The heavyweight champion, of course, is Chinese: a machine with the incredible power [sic] of 80,000 tons is in operation since 2013 for the giant Erzhong Group in the province of Sichuan. As tall as a 10-storey building, its use is very confidential: it seems to be used to build parts for military aircraft, like its titanic sisters. To give an idea of the power of this machine, with its 780,000 kN it could easily lift an entire cruise ship. As often happens, larger does not mean better: it is not the most technologically advanced press in the world. It was built by adapting old USSR projects from the 1980s, and is currently underused due to competition from the other giants we mentioned. either this derives from this longer post from 02022, or they both derive from a common source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/worlds-largest-hydraulic-press-machines-mohammad-ali-nekahi https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/worlds-largest-hydraulic-pres... the owner was at risk of bankruptcy in 02015: https://web.archive.org/web/20160809080032/http://www.france-metallurgie.com/index.php/2015/09/21/erzhong-under-the-threat-of-bankruptcy-us/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160809080032/http://www.france...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

brcmthrowaway 2y ago

Is this how the SR71 was made?

advisedwang 2y ago

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.

mannyv 2y ago
In reality what we call 'capitalism' is unstable and requires continual intervention to survive.
- hackit2 2y ago
  That is a very simplistic perspective of 'capitalism', it is a bit more nuance than that. It typically requires intervention to prevent it from destroying the economy because of insider trading, liquidity, and monopolist practices. The only criticism you say about it mirror aspect of our-selves that we don't like to admit. It isn't perfect but people are not perfect how-ever based on how fast we're pull people out poverty, you have to admit its pretty good!
refurb 2y ago
Do you feel that the free market wouldn't have adopted it at some future point in time?
- advisedwang 2y ago
  I don't believe the free market would ever have produced the heavy presses. The coordination problem between making designs that use the heavy press and the investment to make the presses is essentially the prisoner's dilemma - each actor reaps a large reward if they both commit but loses massively if only they commit. The outcome is that they don't commit, especially if you add in real-world factors like alternate uses of the investment that competition tends to force the businesses involved into. The only hope would be something vertically integrated that can commit both, but there's no particular reason to believe that such an enterprise could enter into the market. The free market probably could and would have optimized the situation at hand. Machining would have become cheaper, solutions to the fastener issues mentioned would be found and so on. This might even end up being better than the heavy presses - that's a technical question not an economic one - although the article makes it sound like the forging solution really is inherently superior.

azalemeth 2y ago

If you're reading this article, you may wish to know that arguably a "counterpart" to heavy press forging is explosive forming [1] in which a chemical high explosive is used to force a template material against a template. The overpressure generated by the explosive can be equivalent or maybe even greater than heavy press forgings (a 50,000 US short ton force press exerts ≈500 MN force; peak overpressure close to detonating TNT or PETN explosives can be MPa or higher [2] so depending on the geometry of the part they may be comparable) and it has the added "fun" fact that complex cylindrical or spherical shapes can be made very easily and accurately. The only people I know who have worked with this have used it to make superconducting magnets, explosively forming either titanium or high grades of nonmagnetic stainless (A4, which has µr ≈ 1) without causing marsenite formation due to machining. This includes a major international MRI scanner manufacturer, for one relatively niche product. It's like the "extreme" version of metal spinning [3] – forcing a rotating chunk of metal against a rotationally symmetric mandrel. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive_forming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive_forming [2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Variation-of-peak-over-pressure-with-scaled-distance-for-1-kg-TNT-explosive_fig1_323161518 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Variation-of-peak-over-p... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_spinning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_spinning

infogulch 2y ago
There are some popular videos making spheres using explosive hydroforming, which is quite fun, and much lower tech than explosively forming magnets to avoid the formation of marsenite (sp?).
kragen 2y ago
*martensite
Animats 2y ago
Explosive forming has been used to make aluminum boat hulls.[1] It's a useful way to form very large sheet metal parts. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbS6rS0seuk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbS6rS0seuk
baud147258 2y ago

urbandw311er 2y ago

Anybody know: Do these large presses still exist usefully today or have they been obsoleted by larger ones / by newer manufacturing techniques?

ggm 2y ago
TFA says some of these are still in operation.

nntwozz 2y ago

The workers in those pics have no hearing protection, no eye protection; no helmets. Yeah, must be the 50s. My 75 years old carpenter is half deaf, his grandfather fell from a roof and died. He himself fell off a roof in 1981 but was lucky and survived. Just some thoughts seeing those men working in those conditions.

asib 2y ago

Recently watched this great video on the USAF Heavy Press Program: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ50nZU3oG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ50nZU3oG8

Simon_ORourke 2y ago

I'm not sure it's rose-tinted glasses or some sense of nostalgia for the "good old days", but it does feel that our manufacturing processes have taken a step backwards since then.

sidcool 2y ago

Love them or hate them. Tesla's manufacturing prowess is unmatched.

humansareok1 2y ago
Given their seeming lack of proper quality control I find this statement highly suspect.

twic 2y ago

> Partly this broad range of uses for the heavy presses came from expanding the range of materials used in them. Originally the presses were designed to make parts from aluminum and magnesium, but by the 1960s they were not only pressing aluminum and magnesium but steel, titanium, nickel, copper, columbium, beryllium, and a variety of other metals. Columbium is apparently an old name for niobium, and one perhaps still in use by American metallurgists. There's no way anyone was making huge niobium forgings, though. Or nickel? Surely this is a reference to the use of those elements in superalloys.

Nifty3929 2y ago

Amazing achievement. But I can't help but notice how much we celebrate these efficiency gains in the past, while being scared of them in the present. At heart, this is the story of using less labor to product a unit of output, and possibly also improving the quality of those units of output. This led to much better outcomes for society. Was anybody then scared of what would happen to the riveters? Maybe, but those voices would have been drowned out. These days, production is demonized, particularly at scale. Is there any successful producer being celebrated for being so? Are there any new, innovative, labor-reducing technologies being celebrated? Does it take a war to snap us out of our fear of being better?

rendall 2y ago

I first learned about these presses several years ago from the YouTube channel Machine Thinking which is excellent and unfortunately infrequent. The linked video has some excellent footage of these beasts in action. "America's Iron Giants" https://youtu.be/hpgK51w6uhk?si=5BjwmlSMAAKzVYzS https://youtu.be/hpgK51w6uhk?si=5BjwmlSMAAKzVYzS

rendall 2y ago

> Experience developing the SR-71 led Kelly Johnson to believe that the U.S. needed even larger, 250,000-ton presses, and in the 1980s the Army studied whether presses of up to 200,000 tons might be useful. But no such presses were ever built, either in the U.S. or elsewhere. I imagine extremely large construction and digging. Kilometer-tall buildings and deep large tunnels.