A trip hammer, also known as a helve hammer, is a massive powered hammer used in:
- agriculture to facilitate the labor of pounding, decorticating and polishing of grain;
- mining, where ore from deep veins was crushed into small pieces (though a stamp mill was more usual for this); and
- finery forges, for drawing out blooms made from wrought iron into more workable bar iron
- in fabricating various articles of wrought iron, latten (an early form of brass), steel and other metals.
Trip hammers were usually raised by a cam and then released to fall under the force of gravity. Historically, trip hammers were often powered by a water wheel, and are known to have been used in China as long ago as 20 AD, in Rome by the 1st century AD and in medieval Europe by the 12th century. During the Industrial Revolution the trip hammer fell out of favor and was replaced with the power hammer. Often multiple hammers were powered via a set of line shafts, pulleys and belts from a centrally located power supply.
Read more about Trip Hammer: Types
Famous quotes containing the words trip and/or hammer:
“Jack and Joan they think no ill,
But loving live, and merry still;
Do their week-days’ work, and pray
Devoutly on the holy day;
Skip and trip it on the green,
And help to choose the Summer Queen;”
—Thomas Campion (1567–1620)
“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well oiled in the closet, but unused.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)