Reckhammer

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Reckhammer (its own design. A tail hammer ) in the Bremeck hammer

A Reckhammer was a hammer mill powered by water power from the late Middle Ages until the First World War . This name was used as a regional name in Westphalia and especially in the Bergisches Land , while in the rest of Germany and Austria the name Zainhammer was common. A special form of the horizontal hammers were the so-called refining hammers , which were used to refine steel. Horizontal and Zain hammers emerged in the second half of the 16th century as independent hammer mills that were not tied to the iron-producing iron hammers .

In a horizontal hammer, pig iron made from the sponge iron (historically known as Luppen ) was freed of slag residues by mechanical processing ( forging ) and the carbon content was reduced. The machining resulted in almost pure iron , which was shaped into bars ( semi-finished products ) and some of them were transported to refining hammers for further machining in order to produce elastic steel . The activity was called stretching , the blacksmiths were called Iserrecker .

The refining under the stretching hammering was necessary due to the former manufacturing method, since no carbon steels , but only welded steel (fire welding) was available in small furnaces ( low shaft furnace ) - than from the history bloomery called - or later in the puddle was won . The finished product of the horizontal hammer is called wrought iron . It has a typical structure that can be made visible by etching .

A particularly high distribution of horizontal hammers was found in the Bergisches Land ( Cronenberg , Remscheid and Solingen ), the Enneperaum , the northwestern Sauerland as well as the Ore Mountains and the Thuringian Forest . Bar hammers still preserved can be found in the Freudenthaler Sensenhammer Industrial Museum , the Bremecker Hammer and the Founder's Hammer .

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. Ludwig Beck: The history of iron in technical and cultural-historical significance. 2nd volume. Friedrich Vieweg and Son , Braunschweig 1893–1895, p. 478.