There are loads of people who have physically, mentally, or otherwise demanding jobs…and then there’s this. What you are going to see is a massive drop hammer being used to forge glowing steel in a plant and while the video is coming up on 20 years old, we’re thinking that if we walked into the same place today, we’d see the same machine getting after it with the same fire belching effects, noise, Earth rattling concussion, and myriad of other potential hazards. We do not know what these guys are forging but we do know that the metal hunks are pretty big as two guys are used to transfer them from hammer to hammer.
This has got to be a job that guys wash out from pretty quickly. Between the intimidation of handling the zillion degree steel plates, the potential for being burned to a crisp, squashed by the tool you are using, and other stuff, the failure rate for employees has to be high. Then there are the lasting effects of a job like this. The constant concussion, the deafening noise that chips away at your hearing over time, all of that grinding physical labor. This is no country for weak men.
Lastly and most impressively, there’s the huge fireball that the hammer releases on its first strike of the fresh material. Being that the place is so loud and the guys have their protection on, they seemingly communicate by telepathy. The work never stops, they transfer in a new piece and both literally just lean back before 20 feet of hellacious fury leaps from the hammer.
These are some tough freaking guys. Think about them every time you pick up a forged crank, a forged rod, or anything of that nature. Wow.
