Power Hammer Dies

[Crosche]

I am thinking about fabricating a pair of dies for my 25# Little Giant hammer. Currently I am thinking about making the dies from either 1045 or 4140....heat treated of course. The dies need to be hardend to between 42~46 HRC. Anyone have any insights on either of those materials?

 

[PeterT]

Coincidental you mention this because I was looking for some kind of online tool that one could pick 2 alloys & show a comparative HT hardness/toughness overlay plot on common axis. If anyone has seen anything like this, I'd like to know. I could replicate in Excel but kind of pita. Anyways, hopefully this demonstrates the interplay between hardness, toughness & corresponding tempering temp. Your application may favor a certain combination or one over the other. And then of course there is machineability of the part itself if that's an issue.

4140


O1 tool steel

 

[johnnielsen]

I made cold forging dies out of annealed 4140. Heat treat was done twice to a dark to medium cherry with no tempering. My dies were 2.5 inches thick so lots of material to absorb the after affects of the hit(100 tons).

 

[Crosche]

2" x 2" 4140CR is what I am planning to make my dies from. My friend has a heat treating oven, so I should be able to get close to 48 HRC. Little Giant has a 2 part die system now that I am adapting to my machine.

 

[Dabbler]

That would work just fine - you can heat treat in the normal way and then temper to 48HRC by choosing the correct temperature. 4140 is pretty simple to heat treat, and is hard to mess up.

 

[YYCHM]

Check this out..... https://www.littlegianthammer.com/about.php

@Crosche we need some pics and a video of this trip hammer in action.....