Fred’s 100LBs Little Giant Power Hammer Rebuild, maybe.
I was looking for a Power Hammer for a while and ran across this 100 Lbs Little Giant. At the time I bought it, it had not been running, but had been sitting over in Seattle for a number of years. The gentlemen I brought the hammer from indicated that he ran it before he bought it, and it ran just fine. He indicated that he brought it from a blacksmith shop in Seattle where it had been in use for 70 years.
In any case, the hammer was not running and I decided to buy it, for way too much as it turns out, without the knowledge to give it a proper once over. I brought it over to my place, and it has been sitting for two years as my job put me on the road.
Well now I have started disassembly with the idea to rebuild the hammer. Two things have become immediately obvious: 1) It has way more problems then I realize and 2) I am in over my head a bit. So, I throw together this web page, not only to document my progress, but be able to share information as I solicit help on the rebuild process. Web page authoring is a new endeavor also.
First thing I did, which I should have done well before I bought the hammer, was to get the rebuilding DVD’s from Sid at littlegianthammer.com. The DVD is great in my opinion and I should have brought the DVD first. I probably would have passed on this hammer, or gotten it for significantly less.
Pictures right before disassembly:
Notice the ‘plating’ on the spine. I was assured that the frame was not cracked, but in retrospect, I do not know how the gentlemen I bought the hammer from could have known. Best case is he was parroting what he was told when he bought the hammer. The plating of the spine is very obvious from the back:
Various picture of the hammer:
Notice the casting defect in the ram. It looks like an insufficient pour left a void that eventually broke loose. My guess is that this will not hurt anything, and it can be brazed into one piece ( won’t be structural, just cosmetic to make me feel better ). More Pics:
Looking closely above on the bottom die you can see a ˝” steel spacer. I think the dies were two short and someone put a spacer under the die. The bad thing is that they welded the spacer, shim, tapered wedge, die and die block together. This is going to be some work to undo.
More Pics:
Although you can not tell from the pictures, the Left Adjustable toggle has been hitting the guide. Additionally, it looks like the all the pin holes in the toggle arms and the crosshead were brazed shut at one point and then re-drilled. The ram guide is really in bad shape and has evidence of multiple repairs. It looks like it wore through and cracked at one point. It was repaired by brazing. Later it looks like it was welded and a plate was formed to the guide and welded over the crack. Latter it looks like the guide was cut out to avoid the toggle link and a piece of 5/8” round bar was then bent to the shape of the cut-out and welded to the edge of the cut-out. The repair plate is currently also cracked. I will get a better picture of this after I get the crud cleaned off.
The other guide repair was to the frame. As shown in the following pictures pieces of brass were bolted to the guides cast into the frame to build them up:
I do not know for sure if this was standard, but looking at the construction is seems like a repair. Two brass strips were held on to the cast-in frame guides with countersunk bolts ( steel in this case ). There are 4 bolts per brass strip. The top two bolts and the bottom one were drilled through the frame and attached with nuts. The remaining one was drilled and tapped into the frame. ( The picture caption above should read 4 of 8 bolts shown ).
Better pictures of the back of the frame showing the through bolt holes that were through drilled to hold the brass strips in place:
A better picture of the front of the frame showing the brass strips:
My project for next weekend project is disassembly. The only other known problem at this point is that the guides on the ram are quite banana shaped. That is they have been worn from parallel to a circular shape, that is two bananas facing each other. This will also have to be dealt with
Thx’s, Fred.
Ram Guide Disassembly and Cracks
I cleaned up the Ram Guide and was concerned as I found some cracks. So I had a friend sandblast it.
Front, Back, Bottom:
Hammer Left, Hammer Right, Cracks:
I could not get the cracks to photograph very well, so here are a couple of markups showing their extent:
So the next project is to determine how to repair ( grind and re-weld ), replace ( most likely not a option as I would guess they are not available ), or to fabricate a new one.
First though, I still need to get the Lower Die Out of the Frame. I was working with stone grinding points trying to cut the weld out, but that was slow going. So I got a Carbide Burr ( Tree style, Double Cut -> Thank’s Grant ) and it was going much better until my compressor quite this weekend. I will be out of town the next two weeks, so I will have to deal with it when I get back.
More to come.
Thx’s, Fred.