ABSTRACT
The earliest days of metal forming used hammers to shape billets and sheets into useful shapes. Since the industrial revolution, xed tools such as stamping dies have become the standard for metal forming. While xed tools are highly productive, they do not offer the local control of energy density that was provided by hammer forming. Even today, difcult components in prototype production and aerospace manufacture are commonly produced with the aid of manually operated hammers. High-velocity metalforming methods in general, and electromagnetic metal forming techniques in particular, are more akin to hammers than presswork as the local impulse is controlled rather than forces or displacements. Also, like hammer work, when properly implemented, one can control the spatial distribution of the impulse.
