The Fellows cold forming machines were originally built in the 1960’s. They were set up and run off in the old foundry building on the corner of Clinton and Bridge Street. This building is still there, but I don’t think its used for anything now. When we got involved with rebuilding this machine, there was talk about setting it up and running it off there, because the anchor points were still in the floor. But there was no electricity or water available. So we set it up in our building on Pearl Street.

The machine itself was composed of three main sections; the infeed unit, the main forging head, and the backpressure unit. These arrived at our plant on two large flatbed trucks. After they backed into our building, we proceeded to unload each unit. Our main bridge crane could easily handle both the infeed and backpressure sections, but was really straining to handle the main forging head. I don’t think that crane was ever up to par after that. It was discovered that the (customer) estimated weights of these pieces was nowhere near what they actually weighed. The forging head consisted of a cast steel housing that ended up weighing ten thousand pounds without any of the components inside. Of course, it was fully assembled when we unloaded it. We ended up having to hire a travelling crane from Miller Construction in Windsor to move it around inside our building. We quite often used their services to handle large machinery.

I believe this machine design could be traced back to WW2 Germany. There were a couple of European engineers on the Fellows payroll who brought this product on board. It was really quite a piece of design work. The main motor was rated at 125 HP, and when we finally got the machine reassembled and pushed the “start” button, we smoked the power transformer on the outside pole! We had never handled anything of this size before. My contact at Winchester said we shouldn’t have to worry about going to Purgatory, as working on this machine was the equivalent. I tended to agree, it was one big, bad tough machine to work on.

The main forging head consisted of a large “bull” gear, probably 4 feet in diameter, which turned four equally spaced planetary gears. These planetary gears each turned a spindle which moved the forging hammer blocks thru eccentrics. There was a separate system that was powered by its own motor, that moved four wedge assemblies to bring the forging hammer block energy to the main forging dies (where the actual metal hammering took place). All of these parts were massive; the spherical roller bearings on the spindles were probably 18 inches in diameter. We had to lay the forging head casting on its back to disassemble and reassemble it. We had it placed on large 8 x 8 wooden blocks so we could crawl underneath it. That took getting used to……..