FILENAMES: press1.jpg press2.jpg press3.jpg DESCRIPTION: This is a picture of a shop built hydraulic press. Posted by John Stevenson . John provided the following description: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- There have been some recent threads on press's and broaching. I thought that some of you may be interested in seeing a press that I have built to do broaching on. There are three photo's in the dropbox at www.metalworking.com under the heading Press1.jpg to Press3.jpg. This text as Press.txt accompanies the photo's. This started life as a purpose built press to put lids on paint tins. Whoever designed it needs shooting as not only is it very slow to do a job of this sort it's way too powerful. There are pressure and speed control valves built in but all they do is slow it down even more. The fatal design flaw though was the fact that the paint tins were 10" high and the press could only accept 8" total hight. This from a press with a 15" stroke. Cost of this machine was around 2,000 UKP. The firm it was made for took one look at it and hid it to save any embarrassment. After about a year they asked me to get rid of it one weekend when no one was around. I took the original 20" high sides off and cut some new sides from 7 x 5 channel and welded and bolted these in. Two adjustable table supports were fitted and a table plate at a cost of around 50 UKP. Our Gert gave it a coat of orange machine paint where needed and it works great. According to the DuMont website the max pressure needed to put a 16mm broach through at full pass is 10,600 lbs but in practice I only see 500 lbs max on the gauge which equates to 3,535 lbs on a 3" ram.