Ingersoll upsetters and Breaker points | Power Hammers and Presses | Forum

I figured I had hijacked Randy's thread enough

Larry L;15899 wrote: Did you make sure the valve box is full of oil? If you take the cap off the valve there should be some cotton looking wadding in there and it should be about half full of some ISO 100 compressor oil.... If the glands are dry there is no hope of keeping air in the thing.... Some heavy grease on the guild and ram pins will help as well, should have zerks.... the cylinder is the whole tank under the thing.... the piston is huge.... positive pressure on the piston in the tank is what gives it so much control....

Mine has a reservoir for the oil that will take about a cup of oil. The oil almost pours right through it. I have given it lots of oil. I used rock drill oil as that is what I have for the hammer and I figured the jackhammer for upsetting was similar to a rock drill. I think the IR33 is quite a bit smaller than the 40. It is only about 1200lb total.

Larry L;15898 wrote: I gotta jump in here and say its all about the volume of work..... I started using an IR 40 to nip off the ends using the 45 deg tooling that Grant worked out ( I would assume the same thing Randy used) I did that for a few months and I could outwork the air supply... I had a 10HP two stage compressor with about 400gal worth of capacity... burnt up the 10HP motor because it would run almost continually to keep up with the IR, I then added a second 7.5HP 80 gal unit into the system to keep the 10HP from working so hard.... It also cost a ton of money to run both compresses all day... (power bill jumped a few hundred bucks) My solution was to dump the IR and set up a 40 ton punch press to do the nipping.... I wouldnt go back to the IR for anything.... Its faster, has much more "umph" and runs on a 3HP motor..... Now with the induction forge and the way I was set up I can do a bit every 45 seconds continuously.... If your doing a bit ever couple minuets then the IR would keep up with much less air but still its so much more economical (and quite) to run the punch press... And its not so destructive to the machine... The IR was never intended to use the air vise to slam down like is required to shear off the tips... It was designed to "grab" the steel and hold it.... So over time you will damage the big guild pin and Pointsharp even broke the head off one (Pretty amazing considering the rod is like 5" and the head weighs over 1000 pounds) The IR is a pretty cool tool though, it has so much control and it is very easy to build tooling for.... It works really well for joggling parts, punching small holes, doing small embossing and bending..... I would highly recommend having one but I think there are better options for shearing the bits... The benifit is with a IR40 you have about a 15ton press (even though its only about a 3" stroke) that can be both very fast and very genital and controllable... It can both squeeze and hit like a hammer.....

It is a tool that I think will come in handy for certain jobs but I am either going to have to get a lathe to make tooling for the upsetter grippers or make a die to forge tooling for it.

I think you are probably right about using it for nipping points. I can use the bender short term if the breaker work picks up and then if it really takes off I can easily pick up a punch press, as there are lot's of them around fairly cheap.