Provided by Dave Hammer....

Dr. Bruce Jarrell has been a hobby blacksmith for over 30 years.  For the past 10 years, Bruce has been concentrating on forging art with botanical themes.  His goal has been to replicate natural elements such as flowers and leaves as delicate as they exist in nature.  His early efforts involved forging schedule 40 pipe, using specialty dies he created himself, on his 155# ram Big Blu power hammers.  His results were very good, but he wanted to do better. His efforts were restrained by his power hammers.  They did not have sufficient control for him to be able to forge thin tubing, which he considered the gold standard for achieving his goals.

During the fall of 2018,  Bruce saw one of my early power hammer designs.  It was a Cricket I took to MASA's fall blacksmith conference at Tuckahoe, MD.  It had a 15# ram and the control he was looking for.  Bruce enthusiastically asked if I would build him one.  I responded with "Sorry, I don't build to sell".  My only goal (with regards to hammers) in those days was to design a power hammer that anyone who could weld and had basic metalworking tools could build.  I had produced a dozen very detailed YouTube videos showing how to build them.  

Bruce had been an acquaintance of mine for several years before that fall.  He always brought examples of his work to conferences.  Not just botanical themes, but also an range of eclectic forgings from plates to miniatures of early American furniture.  I had a great respect for his skill in many ways.  I saw him again at MASA's Gichner's Memorial Conference the following January.  He was still excited about the Cricket and told me more about desire to have one made for him.  He invited me to visit his shop to see how he forged with his current equipment.... It was late spring before I made it to his shop.  He showed me more of his work and demonstrated some of the processes he used to produce it.  

I was impressed and agreed he could benefit from one of my hammers.  I still was of a mindset that I didn't build to sell though.  I likely saw him at more conferences that year (2019), including again at the MASA fall conference in the fall.  I started liking the thought that I could help him advance his capability to meet his forging goals.  I didn't tell him, but made plans to build him a specialty hammer to help him do some of the work he couldn't do with his Big Blu hammers. 

Over the ensuing years, I built three power hammers for Bruce.

Click on http://hammerfireforge.com/power-hammers.aspx to learn more.

Return to Tube Forging Page