How to Build a 50,000 Ton Forging Press

August 21, 2024 11:18 AM

In the 1950s, the U.S. Department of Defense undertook the Heavy Press Program, funding the construction of ten colossal forging and extrusion presses, powerful enough to create entire aircraft components as single pieces of metal, replacing hundreds of smaller parts. Not only did the large parts produced by the presses greatly reduce the cost and increase the performance of military aircraft, the presses also proved useful for making parts for things like helicopters, submarines, spacecraft, and commercial jets. Six of the ten presses are still operational today.

An article from the Construction Physics newsletter by Brian Potter.

posted by automatronic (25 comments total)

Couple of things I found interesting in this article:

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, while the Soviet Union secured the 33,000-ton press, the designs for the 55,000-ton press, and a number of German metallurgical experts.

I didn't realize that the allies appropriated this sort of thing after the war. That sent me down a weird wikipedia rabbit hole of other things I didn't know happened after the war.

And in fact, recent experience suggests the U.S. might no longer be willing or able to take advantage of this type of opportunity. Much of the experience in building machinery of this magnitude has been lost, or has migrated elsewhere. The original heavy presses were built by American companies like Loewy Hydropress and Mesta, but when the 50,000-ton Alcoa press was refurbished in the early 2000s, the parts came from German company SMS, the same company that built the 60,000-ton forging press. And while American car manufacturers are using large Giga-casting machines in their manufacturing operations, those machines themselves are overwhelmingly built by Chinese or Chinese-owned companies like IDRA.

I guess it makes sense that with so much manufacturing capacity being moved overseas, the capacity to create manufacturing capacity would also move, but I recall the promise of the 80s and 90s that offshoring jobs would leave behind the skilled jobs that Americans and Canadians actually wanted to do. I'm not exactly super surprised that didn't turn out to be the case.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:36 AM on August 21 [16 favorites]

...the U.S. might no longer be willing or able to take advantage of this type of opportunity.

You could say it's quite...de-pressing.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:48 AM on August 21 [30 favorites]

I guess it makes sense that with so much manufacturing capacity being moved overseas, the capacity to create manufacturing capacity would also move,

I think it's probably more a function of cost than anything. Existing parts/expertise in Germany or China is more affordable than re-inventing the wheel in domestically. But it's theoretically do-able.

In software I think the analogue would be GCC and LLVM. As I understand it, the people who could maintain GCC (a core component of turning some languages' source code into actual programs) eventually whittled down to nothing. LLVM was essentially another way to accomplish the same thing, but with a living, non-retired user-base of "greater than zero." One of those "life, ah, finds a way" things, I think.

Anyway, I may not have that right. I'm a JVM/CLR person, so living in a different part of the stack. But that's the (maybe apocryphal?) story as I remember it. In a similar way, if the need arose it might take a few years to get off the ground, but the gigapress need could surely be met domestically.

Given how lucrative the military industrial complex can be, and how fundamental this sort of thing is to their big boats and planes, there's probably a 3rd or 4th iteration of the project sitting in a meeting right now with 2 engineers, 4 project managers and 8 civil servants pontificating the details. Again.
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 11:54 AM on August 21 [7 favorites]

I got yer peace dividend right here: sixty-eight minutes of David Letterman crushing and smashing things [SLYT].
posted by wenestvedt at 11:54 AM on August 21 [5 favorites]

I would never have guessed that David Letterman beat the Hydraulic Press Channel to it by thirty years.
posted by automatronic at 2:18 PM on August 21 [2 favorites]

Insane. One summer during college I worked in a factory making wood stoves and often ran a 300-ton press that punched half-round slugs from a 3/8" sheet of black iron (after the sheets were bent, formed and match welded, the half-rounds formed the flue holes in the back of the stove). Insert sheet, press the button and down came 300 tons of pressure to punch perfectly formed slugs with a BAM sound like a gunshot. I simply can't fathom the size and power of a 50,000 ton press - those things are from some kind of mechanical fever dream.

Painful anecdote: During operation, the 3/8" half-round iron slugs stack up in a column below the press plate and must periodically be collapsed by poking a metal rod through the opening in the front of the press so they never stack up to the level of the plate. I once spaced on this urgent safety step and the stack of slugs was instead collapsed by the 300-ton force of the press - that column of slugs, under said 300 tons of force, collapsed outward firing a half dozen or so of those iron slugs straight into my groin at a velocity sufficient to knock me straight on my ass. I narrowly avoided losing my manhood that day and, suffice to say, never forgot to clear the slug stacks again.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 2:26 PM on August 21 [26 favorites]

On the Wikipedia article for the Heavy Press Program there's a fantastic pair of photos which really brings home the sort of things these machines can do: a bulkhead for the F-15, before and after pressing.

Just try to imagine the force it takes to do that to a solid block of titanium.
posted by automatronic at 2:32 PM on August 21 [10 favorites]

> that column of slugs, under said 300 tons of force, collapsed outward firing a half dozen or so of those iron slugs straight into my groin at a velocity sufficient to knock me straight on my ass.

That's one way to incentivize operator compliance with posted procedures!
posted by genpfault at 2:33 PM on August 21 [3 favorites]

I would never have guessed that David Letterman beat the Hydraulic Press Channel to it by thirty years.

Hmm, I dunno, he was missing the critical Finnish accent.
posted by nat at 4:18 PM on August 21 [1 favorite]

I think it's probably more a function of cost than anything. Existing parts/expertise in Germany or China is more affordable than re-inventing the wheel in domestically. But it's theoretically do-able.

Many things are theoretically doable, the question is whether it's practically doable. Software is unique in that the marginal cost of extra copies is basically zero so it only takes one team to maintain and develop LLVM for the entire world to benefit from it and iteration is very quick - if you want to test a change, it takes maybe 1 hr to compile? That doesn't apply to physical manufacturing tools, not to mention while the US has a deep pool of software engineers, it has a much more shallow bench of mechanical engineers (many of whom are retiring) involved with the design and setup of manufacturing lines - not only is our cost of manufacturing higher, our cost of scaling up manufacturing is higher. In addition to needing a lot of institutional knowledge to build and operate a megapress, you also need the economic rationale - Tesla did it because they envisioned increased competitiveness and savings over millions of units, but it's difficult to make that case given the low quantities involved in most military procurement.
posted by ndr at 4:28 PM on August 21

automatronic, thanks for pointing out the photos.

To make it even more astounding, check the caption. That's not an aluminum slug, it's titanium!
posted by chromecow at 7:56 PM on August 21 [2 favorites]

I'm gonna have to take another look at the gigantic hydraulic press at my work site.
It's not on the list of presses in the article but it sure does look like them.
posted by tresbizzare at 8:19 PM on August 21

And the scale of those parts! After checking on some dimensions of the F-15, I reckon that bulkhead is something like 12ft x 6ft.
posted by automatronic at 8:35 PM on August 21 [1 favorite]

Very Cool Article! Seeing big equipment/Ifrastructue is always cool. Sad that this country hasn't historically had much of an industrial policy, outside of funding military based projects...

National defense is again one of the big drivers of Biden's CHIPS Act, which is putting $billions into making advanced semiconductors into the US again. The fabs are pretty big and the chips they make are pretty amazing in terms or number of circuits, but that they don't make my heart tingle in the same way a massive price of steel does.

TO NDRs point one great thing about the CHIPS investment is it is going to help retain and rebuild some of the semi-connector knowledge basis in this country.
posted by CostcoCultist at 10:50 PM on August 21 [1 favorite]

Incredible.

This schematic of the Aloca press rebuild got me wondering, "How hot does the billet get?"
Aluminum boils at 2500°C, and 50,000 tons is a lot of magnitude...
posted by rubatan at 11:42 PM on August 21 [1 favorite]

Six of the ten presses are still operational today.

...and sadly they're primarily used to make iPads out of fresh-squeezed artists.
posted by fairmettle at 1:57 AM on August 22 [1 favorite]

Thus the budget for military per year is billions upon billions. This is what we know of. Then there is the part we do know anything about.
posted by DJZouke at 5:55 AM on August 22

I really enjoyed this video from the excellent Machine Learning youtube channel about this topic. You can see the astonishing visual scale of some of these presses. I hadn't realized how many more of these presses were made later, this article filled in a number of gaps I had questions about.

I was also curious about this, but there was a Loewy referenced in the list of press builders and it turns out that there were two separate famous industrialists named Loewy at the time. Raymond Loewy who was a famous industrial designer, the other, Erwin Loewy, was known for industrial extrusion and building large presses. I'm so curious if they had beef.
posted by burntbook at 6:32 AM on August 22 [2 favorites]

Maybe more-efficient production of war machines is not in our best interest as citizens or as humans. Maybe the government's financing of heavy industry based on the nazi model is not so much an engineering achievement as it is a confirmation that fascism is less about armbands and more about the relationship between the state and the corporation.
posted by Richard Saunders at 8:55 AM on August 22 [2 favorites]

I have a little 35-ton press I use for hot work these days to save my elbows, and I've seen a 12,000 ton press in use, but these monsters really, ahem, impress me. I do wonder why there aren't more of them, as a quick check with some industry guys I know seems to show that these aren't obsolete white elephants waiting for the occasional job, but heavily used tools booked years in advance, and whose occasional maintenance or repair down-time costs millions of dollars in delays. Even considering the cost of building a new one, you'd think some investment company quant or industry maven would say "hey, with a 10-year break-even payoff, that's a good investment." I guess if it doesn't make money this quarter . . .
posted by Blackanvil at 9:28 AM on August 22 [3 favorites]

I have been looking for some video of one of these 50k ton presses in action. Did I just miss it? Does anyone know where I might find it?
posted by nat at 11:26 AM on August 22

Brilliant post. History and immense mechanical marvels go together like peas and carrots.
posted by Sphinx at 12:54 PM on August 22

Or in this case, mashed peas and carrots.
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:43 PM on August 22

Or extremely mushy peas with fish and (machine tool) chips.
posted by mubba at 8:36 AM on August 25

That's one way to incentivize operator compliance with posted procedures!

Or the company could have spent $100 installing a little ramp out of sheet metal that would divert the slugs from under the hole. Probably would have paid for itself with all the time saved poking slugs with a stick.
posted by Mitheral at 9:06 AM on August 30