Nothing particularly fancy or earth shattering. I just turned a hunk of 2.25″ diameter round bar a friend gave me a few years ago, sliced it in half on my horizontal bandsaw, and welded it to some base plates to use in my hydraulic press.
The purpose for this tool is to squish steel out to the sides to make a piece of steel wider, as opposed to drawing dies which are used to make something longer. Its basically exactly the same thing as drawing dies, but the dies are rotated 90 degrees from how they are oriented in drawing dies.
Needed these for a long time. finally spent a sweaty afternoon making them. ill be lots happier in the future…
The horizontal bandsaw was a game changer. It would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, to cut this piece like this without it.
tack welded the bottom die in place, and then carefully closed the press while holding the top die in place with my hand (yikes) till it was pinched in place so I could then tack weld the top die. very important that they be perfectly lined up with each other, or they could expand the steel inconsistently to one side more than the other which could lead to the workpiece bending or spreading unevenly
Once both dies are tacked in place I removed them from the press and fully welded then to the base plate
The last step was rounding over the hard corners at the ends. They could cause cold shuts and other issues with the forging
