KRUPP HAMMERS.

Lyell Times and Central Buller Gazette, Volume VI, Issue 273, 15 May 1886, Page 4

KRUPP HAMMERS.

There is a curious personality in hammers, and workmen like to give them names. There are 82 steam hammers in the Krupp works, of from 4001b weight to fifty tons. The largest is " Fritz," whose fifty tons fall on an anvil and anvil-block weighing together 1250 tons, these resting on a foundation 100 ft deep. The next in size is " Max." It would require a poet like him who sang the " Song of the Bell" rightly to describe the action of " Fritz," and I do not wonder that the Emperor, on his visit here, presented the worker of this hammer with a watch. I observed " Fritz " for some time at work upon the steel stem of an Austrian iron-clad, the Ferdinand Max. The metal was from one casting, without seam or weld, 45ft long and of twenty-five tons weight. Four men with long clamps managed this red-hot mass, swung over the anvil by a crane. They turned it readily this way and that, the foreman pause uttering a signal which " Fritz " understood, answering with a soft tap, or a gentle pressure, or with an earthquake. I was curious to see the anvil-block which supplemented the ability of the earth to sustain such shocks through a length of time, and was presently shown one which, after twenty-one years of thumping, had cracked straight through from top to bottom, possibly beneath some gentle stroke which was the last feather to break its huge back. Krupp does not make plates for ironclads, but only such parts as might be needed for ordinary ships.