Oh, good grief, If you have read this far you must really be serious, so I will tell you what I know.

An anvil must be thought of as a mass floating in space... the circumstances of foundations, etc., are simply not relevant for calculating the "efficiency" or effectiveness of a forging hammer and it's anvil as a forging "system". The mass of the ram and the distance it "falls" and the velocity at the time of impact and the mass ratio of the anvil to the ram are all factors in how well the "system" will perform a given forging activity. In my experience, the anvil: ram weight ratios of 15:1 - 25:1 produce the most effective forging for the cost associated with building and powering a given forging hammer.

When comparing different power hammers, the differences in total stroke, useable stroke, cylinder size, ram velocity at the moment of impact, number of strokes per minute, anvil mass ratio, etc., etc., etc., are all variables that would need to be accounted for in a realistic mathematical comparison, and even then you would still be comparing apples to oranges, when comparing hamer to hammer.

Just because (brand X) hammer has a particular weight of anvil does not necessarily make it better than (brand Y) if the brand X hammer only hits 100 strokes per minute, and your tools won't fit under it. Most prudently, one should compare what the hammers can and should do for you or your business, and how they will continue to perform over time. The machine that does the most for you, and lasts the longest, will have the best value for you, the customer.

I have seen several recent attempts by so-called "mathemeticians" to compare the various hammers on the market today (on a spreadsheet), and so far all of these comparisons have come out absolutely false and misleading, as they are (a) incorrect in their collection of the basic statistics, (b). incorrect in their use of the math, and (c) using some irrelevant variables, while ignoring absoluteluy essential ones. Arrgh.

Someday, when I have nothing better to do, it might be fun to calculate mathematical "power and efficiency" comparisons of different forging hammers, but in the meanwhile, I'll stand by my personal experiences and the observations in real life applications of my hundreds of industrial users of my machines, and leave the arguing to others.

If I do ever take the time to do a mathematical comparison, I would only change one variable at a time, as I do in real life, that is take one hammer with a set ram mass, velocity, stroke, etc, and change out the anvil mass and test with a real forging activity (or recalculate).

I would also use two different methods of calculating blow energy, the forging industry standard, (which is simple, but incorrect) and the Newtonian physics method (which requires a ram velocity figure that can really only be measured accurately in real life), and plot both curves, but it can only be done for one machine and one variable at a time, and would still be less accurate than a real life test.

I spent a good deal of time corresponding with Chambersburg engineers before the company closed, and they had no idea what those "anvil efficiency" numbers meant. Seriously. The one man who supposedly might have known had retired, and I was never able to contact him.

I have since discovered the true meaning of the Chambersburg "anvil efficiency" table. It is quite simple really. It is based on an actual experimant, and the experiment is reproducible. The basis of the experiment is this:

A given weight is dropped on an actual sample sitting on an actual anvil, and the result plotted. The operation is then repeated using anvils of different masses, and the results plotted on a curve. The results indicate that beyond a certain anvil ratio, the curve basically flattens out, and increasing the anvil mass beyond this point produces a diminishing return of effectiveness. At the point of diminishing return (infinity) the anvil is said to be "100 percent efficient".