I've been dropping business cards to places all around here the last week or so, kinda slow. I dropped in at a equipment joint today and was told the usual, "we have our own certified welders", a thing I here that I take with a grain of salt lately. Anyhow, that's a subject for another time. 

So he gets to telling me that they even do repairs on hydraulic rock hammers, I've rebuilt these things/repaired and the whole nine yards. He tells me they weld the side plates when they are cracked and that everybody else just replaces them. I told him I remember checking the hardness on these hammers years ago and it was something around 50-60 brinell/rockwell(can't remember which. It had a steel ball inside a tube and the ball dropped and bounced, the height of the ball was the hardness by the numbers on the tube).

So I've been thinking about that all day now and figured I'm gonna ask the seasoned vets who I've come to respect on this site. That steel is just so hard plus it takes a beating like nothing else I've seen in construction. To get the steel so hard it's gonna have a high carbon content correct? Not to mention whatever else they've thrown in the mix at the mill. In all my years as a heavy equipment mechanic I don't recall anybody welding stuff on a hammer, maybe on the top plate that actually hooks to the machine, but not side plates and for sure not the center hammer case.

Just looking for enlightenment so the next time someone brings this up I have more than just a general idea. I sat there smiling and just saying, "oh yeah".