The Iron Giant

[davidbfpo]

Working through the links on The Atlantic articles and then others I found this, another reminder of WW2 German industry acting as a catalyst for the victor's industrial strategy:

This massive forging tool actually had its genesis during the days of World War II. Allied intelligence teams inspecting German aircraft downed behind our lines discovered that they contained extremely large and complex major structural elements. Our appraisal of the situation, confirmed immediately after the end of the war, was that the Germans had produced these aircraft components with the aid of huge forging and extrusion presses possessing capabilities far in excess of those in our own industrial complex.

Link:http://www.clevelandareahistory.com/...s-matters.html

Note three machines found by the US military, two taken back to the USA and the largest back to the USSR - in itself an interesting story.

Ah yes, the Chinese have some and were building a very large one in 2011:http://www.chinatechgadget.com/china...ess-forge.html

The author's later, parallel article refers to the Japanese building one too and has several fine pictures of the machines and their end products:http://boingboing.net/2012/02/13/machines.html

[KenWats]

Very neat. I guess the laws of physics don't change over time. Or maybe, they didn't adhere to the modern engineering principle of "design life". Still, it's got to be a bear to maintain something that old and that big. You can't just go down to the hardware store if one of those 40 inch thick bolts crack.