Forging titanium - GIF and video

[Jon]

Forging titanium. I'm guessing in that booth on the left is a well-paid, comfortably-air-conditioned operator working the controls.




Previously:
Forging crankshafts GIF
Freehand forging a corkscrew GIF

[Frank S]

Now that's a hammer and a pair of tongs to die for
To me it looks like they are forcing the impurities out of the bloom by repeatedly squeezing the mass one way then the other this would also tighten the molecules.
Titanium has been around since 1791 but only produced in very small quantities until somewhere in the 1930s

[Ralphxyz]

and just what does one do with a cube (@18" x 18" x 18") of titanium?

The Jaws and Press are awesome.

Ralph

[Frank S]

Ralph once the ingot has been pressed to remove the required percentage of trapped gases and impurities it would be sent to be further processed. quite possibly it could be machined as is to become what ever could be machined out of a cube of that size or returned to a furnace to be reheated then sent through another forging process possibly even several stages ultimately it could even wind up being run through rolling mills to become sheet material bar ingots or even tubular. Cubing the bloom as was done in the video would be only one process of many involved in the making of anything.
The process dates back to the first use of most metal ores even before the invention of a furnace capable of melting ores
They would heat ores in an open pit once the metal bearing rocks be it bronze tin iron or whatever were as hot as could be they would hammer them and hammer them to remove impurities then return them to the fire as many times as was necessary until the ore became what was known as sponge by this time the rocks had lost enough impurities to start fusing together becoming a more homogeneous mass eventually these would be what was called a bloom and could be heated then forged into what ever shape was needed.
Somewhere long lost in one of my dead hard drives is several years worth of research that lead to the creation of a 1500 page manuscript on the study of theoretical engineering practices for a fictional book I was attempting to write, which contained 1000's of ancient and modern techniques in metals processing methods.

[Jon]

This company's homepage: Nitinol,Titanium Alloy,Titanium Bolts - a trusted supplier TNTI . A bit lost in translation, but it's not terrible compared to other similar Chinese manufacturer sites I've seen. Their Twitter is not so bad either: https://twitter.com/talenttitanium/ .