Help Please Champion Blower

Anyone have any diagrams or information on disassembly and parts list for a Champion Blower... Any info would be greatly appreciated....

I have overhauled about 6 Champion Blowers. Every one of them was the type with the spiral gear drive. The first few, I just "felt my way" since I had no manual. Later on, I bought a reprint of the Champion catalog from Centaur Forge. The catalog has a pretty good engraving of a cross-sectional assembly view of the blower and gearcase. it simply showed me where I had already been. If you are at a loss for how these blowers go together, get the catalog reprint.

I do not know if Champion ever did have a manual. Remember, these blowers date from an era when people worked on farm machinery, wagons and bicycles and were pretty much on their own for figuring a lot of stuff out.

If you have ever worked on the bearings on a bicycle- the kind with a threaded cone on the axle and loose bearings- then you will have a sense of what a Champion Blower is about.

Every Champion Blower I have worke don has been a mess of old oil mixed with coal soot. Get a parts washing pan or similar, putty knife, wire brushes, and whatever your preferred solvent is for de-greasing stuff. You should wear appropriate protective gear for the solvent cleaning- eye protection, solvent resitant gloves, and work in a well ventilated area or outdoors.

If you want to diassassemble a Champion forge blower, here is how I go about it:

1. Take the front blower casing off. This is when the cleaning begins.

The main gear case is a bit of a puzzle to get apart. Looking down on top of the gearcase, you should see two "filister head" (or "cheese head") machine screws. Take them out. The top part of the gear case then has to be slid back. Do not try to lift it off. There is a slotted piece cast into the top casing which slides onto a machine screw headtapped into the lower casing- inside the casing. If you try to pry the casing up, you will bust things. Work the top casing section back away from the blower casing. Things may be bound with rust and a mix of coal soot and old oil. Penetrating oil and a little persuasion with a brass drift and smaller hammer should do it.

2. Take the blower runner ("wheel") off the shaft.
To do this, you will need to lock the fan shaft. You can try taking the rearmost bearing cap on the fan shaft off and putting a socket wrench on the lock-nut on the rear of the shaft. You might get lucky and be able to hold back on the fan with your hand sufficiently to break the lock nut loose. The fan blades ar elight sheetmetal and the spider is a casting and none too strong, so you do not want to put any kind of cheater or wrench on the fan. Do NOT put a drift or bar thru the bronze worm wheel to do this. The worm wheel is soft bronze with a thin web, so if you try to lock the fan using the worm wheel, you can easily damage it beyond all repair. The fan shaft has fine threads. Turn off the lock-nut and there will be a washer with a tab to engage the shaft key. Take that washer off and you should then be able to turn off the blower wheel.

3. When you get the blower wheel or fan off, you can take off the rear of the fan casing. This is a thin casting and at risk of breaking if you leave it on during overhaul.

4. You will need a very deep 6 point socket- I think about 1 1 /4"- to take loose the front bearing cone locknut on the fan shaft. I use an old sheet-steel combination deep socket/ spark-plug socket from some farm equipment toolkit. No size on it. It happens to fit. You can hold back on the rearmost locknut to break loose the front bearing locknut.

5. When you get the front bearing locknut off, you will need a hooked scriber or similar. Fish out the keyed locking washer. You now have the front inner bearing cone to deal with. It has two flats on it, and none too big. I suspect Champion had a special socket for working on these. I have been lucky using needle nose pliers to turn/adjust the inner bearing cones.

6. When you get the inner bearing cone started out, be careful and look for loose ball bearings. Some Champion blowers had loose ball bearings and some will have them held in a brass spacer or cage. Either way, use a smal flashlight, and get a count on the balls before you get too far.

7. Once you get the inner cone on the front fan shaft bearing off the shaft, you can draw the fan shaft (which is also the spiral gear), out the back of the casing.

8. The "intermediate shaft" carries the bronze worm wheel and a steel pinion. This shaft runs on a set of bronze bushings. If yout ake off the bearing grease caps on the intermediate shaft, you will see a set of jam-nuts and slotted-head set screws. the secscrews set the end thrust and position of the worm wheel on the spiral gear.

You can remove the jam nuts and set screws. You will then need to take out the bushings to inspect them and the shaft as well. To get the bushings out, I had to make up a kind of "face spanner"- I turned a piece of round stock to fit into the counterbore the bushings are in, and drilled/reamed the face for a couple of drill rod pins. This tool lets me turn the bushings out and put them back in. If I remember right, the bushings are threaded in the blower casing.

9. The worm wheel and pinion are held onto the intermediate shaft with square head setscrews and keys. This should disassemble fairly easily. Mark the worm wheel as to which way it faces before you disassemble things.

10. The crank-shaft has a cast iron bull gear on it. It also uses the same "bicycle bearings", so notes about the locking nuts and cones apply.

11. The bearing "cups" are hardened steel and are a light press or light drive fit in the blower casing. You can remove them by making either a soft brass driver. The casing is cast iron with thin sections, so you cannot really get to frisky or use press. Support the casing properly in a good machinist's vise and use some pine or soft wood betwen the vise jaws and the casing to hold it. Driv eout each bearing cup and note which bearing it came from.

11. When you get things apart, clean the bearing cups and cones. Examine them carefully after washing with solvent (Brake-cleaner, carb and choke cleaner, or similar). There should be a narrow band on the cone and a similar one ont he cup, and this band may be dark to balck in color. This is the "wear groove" the balls established.
If the cup or cone have anything worse than that, or are rust pitted, that bearing is pretty much unfit for re-use. Unfortunately, no Champion Blower repair parts exist to my knowledge.

If you have a lathe, set the cones up on their respective shafts and indicate them so they are running true. Using a fine hard stone such as an "India Hard", stone the running surface of the cones, and then finish with an "Arkansas" stone.
Do NOT use emery cloth or similar as you will take too much off and may take things out of round.

Set up the cups - make a fixutre to hold them by boring a piece of aluminum that they can be lightly pressed into, chuck it and indicate it. Stone the cups with the India and Arkansas stones.

If either the cups or cones are pitted or deeply worn, you are in a fix. I was unable to locate any stock size ball-bearing assemblies to fit the Champion blower housing and the shafts int heir blowers. You are stuck using their cups and cones.I had one Champion Blower which had badly pitted cups and cones due to water accumulating in the gearcase. It also pitted out the spiral gear. Another blacksmith sold me a Champion blower with a busted fan case and missing crank handle for 20 dollars, so I made out OK for parts. If you have access to a toolpost grinder external and internal spindles, you could regrind the cups and cones if you had to. At that point, a person could simply take some drill rod and machine new cups and cones. They wouldhave to be hardened and drawn to get a high hardness, then ground.

I inspect the old ball bearings. If really good, I re-use them with their cages. If there is any visible defects, I mike the old ball bearings and get slightly larger loose ball bearings. This establishes a new running surface on the cups and cones.


12. Reassemble the gear-case in kind of reverse order. Get the intermediate shaft with the worm wheel and pinion into the casing. Run the bushings in, using a light oil (like lathe spindle oil or DTE Light). Leave the end-thrust set screws loose so the intermediate shaft can flaot alittle.

13. Get the fan-shaft and its bearings in next. You will have to work the spiral gear into mesh with the worm wheel. This is a preliminary setting. I pack the bearings with a light grease to hold the loose balls in place. Snug the cones on the fan shaft to establish a rough adjustment.
Install the front fan shaft bearing lock washer and lock nut. Run the rear fan shaft cone in or out until you get a good "free running fit". Check for play. This type of bearing plus the reliance on the threads on the fan shaft to locate the cones is never going to run really true like a ball bearing assembly. If you take all the play out of it, you will likely find the fan shaft is bound. You have to pick the best adjustment on the cones. When you have that adjustment, lock things up.

14. When you have the fan shaft bearings adjusted and locked, you can finalize the mesh of the worm wheel into the spiral gear. I put a little light grease on the end of each of the end-thrust set screws. Lock the set screws and check to be sure everything still spins free.

15. Reassemble the crank shaft, bearings will need adjustment same as the fan shaft bearings.

16. Grease the front fan bearing using a grease gun with a needle. Put the grease cover on the front fan shaft bearing. Put the blower wheel onto the fan shaft using "Never Seeze". Your heirs will then be able to overhaul your old Champion blower.


FWIW: Champion advertising would be held under close scruitiny today. they claimed all sorts of things about their forges and blowers, indlucing claims about things being "noiseless and firctionless" and made as perfectly as anything man has ever made. Champion advertising referred to their forge and their blower as the "one great Heirloom Blower".

For lubrication in use, a heavy gear lube is too heavy. People have used Dexron (automatic tranny fluid) or they cut regualr 75-90W gear lube with kerosene to thin it out.

My own test as to how a Champion blower gearcase is set-up is to crank the blower for awhile and then let the crank go. Things should coast for at least a full turn of the crank. It is a trade-off: if you adjust the bearings so things are nice and tight, you may find yourself with a sore arm from cranking the blower. You have to live with a little side-play in the ball bearings of a Champion blower, maybe 0.003-0.005" if my eye and feel are right.

Joe Michaels

Which reprint do you recommend which year? thanks for the input .... This should help alot ....

Champion made three basic styles of hand-cranked forge blowers. Their top-of-the-line model was the one with the blower at 90 degrees to the crank. It is the one which used the bronze worm wheel & spiral gear for the final drive to the blower wheel. Champion did not make a lot of changes to their blowers over the years they manufactured them. They apparently made a LOT of that style blower. The same gearcase was used on several different sizes and configurations of blower casing. The smallest was about a 10" fan, used on rivet forges. The 12" and 14" were used on bigger hearths. All of the spiral gearcases will interchange onto any of the different sizes of fans and fan casings.

Champion's other two blowers used gear drives which did not turn 90 degrees. They had their "Midway" line which had a combination of spur gears and, I think, a helical gear set for the final drive. Their bottom-of-the-line blowers had simple spur gearing & plain bushings in the casings. At Blacksmith's events and tailgate sales, I almost never see these other two lines of Champion Blowers. The top-of-the line ones with the spiral gearing seem to have been all over the place.

If you obtain any of the Champion Catalog Reprints, the informaiton about the blowers should be pretty much the same, regardless of which year's catalog was reprinted.

Another thing to be aware fo with the Champion Blowers: The gearcases on the spiral-gear drive blowers were never meant to run "wet". These blowers and gearcases were designed in the era before automobiles. As a result, there was no use of oil seals or ball bearing assemblies. These came into common use along with the automobile. Instead, it was "bicycle" type bearings and no oil seals. Champion clung to their design into the 1950's or later- no modern ball bearing assemblies and no oil seals. Perhaps they held to the old design as it would have meant changing patterns for the gearcase casting and chaing some of the shaft journal designs to accomodate "modern" bearings & oil seals. Perhaps also, they realized that if they went to the modern types of bearings and seals, the friction "drag" on the blower would not make for a good hand blower that could turn freely and coast down. In any case, do not expect radical changes in design of Champion's blowers over the sixty years or so they made them.

FWIW: as you use a Champion forge blower, you squirt a little oil into the brass lubricator fitting on top of the blower casing. this drips onto the gearing. As you squirt the oil in, you crank the blower slowly. As you work at the forge, every so often, you give the gears a shot of oil. Sooner or later, the bottom of the gear case gets flooded with oil and it will get past the grease in the fan shaft bearing. That's when oil starts seeping down inside the blower casing and eventually down the blast pipe towards the forge. Never seen a Champion Blower with any use on it that did not have a mess of coal soot and oil caked into the blower housing.

You are dealing with a real piece of antique machinery. Do not expect to overhaul it and get it to run like a gearcase with modern antifriction bearings (ball bearing assemblies or needle bearings). It will have a little slop in the bearings if it is to turn/coast freely. It will have its own sound. All hand forge blowers have a pretty distinctive sound when you crank them. There is no such thing as a "silent" or "frictionless" forge blower, despite what the old advertising may claim to the contrary. Do not expect a hand forge blower to be a "clean" thing- it will seep oil over time.

Champion made three basic styles of hand-cranked forge blowers. Their top-of-the-line model was the one with the blower at 90 degrees to the crank. It is the one which used the bronze worm wheel & spiral gear for the final drive to the blower wheel. Champion did not make a lot of changes to their blowers over the years they manufactured them. They apparently made a LOT of that style blower. The same gearcase was used on several different sizes and configurations of blower casing. The smallest was about a 10" fan, used on rivet forges. The 12" and 14" were used on bigger hearths. All of the spiral gearcases will interchange onto any of the different sizes of fans and fan casings.

Champion's other two blowers used gear drives which did not turn 90 degrees. They had their "Midway" line which had a combination of spur gears and, I think, a helical gear set for the final drive. Their bottom-of-the-line blowers had simple spur gearing & plain bushings in the casings. At Blacksmith's events and tailgate sales, I almost never see these other two lines of Champion Blowers. The top-of-the line ones with the spiral gearing seem to have been all over the place.

If you obtain any of the Champion Catalog Reprints, the informaiton about the blowers should be pretty much the same, regardless of which year's catalog was reprinted.

Another thing to be aware fo with the Champion Blowers: The gearcases on the spiral-gear drive blowers were never meant to run "wet". These blowers and gearcases were designed in the era before automobiles. As a result, there was no use of oil seals or ball bearing assemblies. These came into common use along with the automobile. Instead, it was "bicycle" type bearings and no oil seals. Champion clung to their design into the 1950's or later- no modern ball bearing assemblies and no oil seals. Perhaps they held to the old design as it would have meant changing patterns for the gearcase casting and chaing some of the shaft journal designs to accomodate "modern" bearings & oil seals. Perhaps also, they realized that if they went to the modern types of bearings and seals, the friction "drag" on the blower would not make for a good hand blower that could turn freely and coast down. In any case, do not expect radical changes in design of Champion's blowers over the sixty years or so they made them.

FWIW: as you use a Champion forge blower, you squirt a little oil into the brass lubricator fitting on top of the blower casing. this drips onto the gearing. As you squirt the oil in, you crank the blower slowly. As you work at the forge, every so often, you give the gears a shot of oil. Sooner or later, the bottom of the gear case gets flooded with oil and it will get past the grease in the fan shaft bearing. That's when oil starts seeping down inside the blower casing and eventually down the blast pipe towards the forge. Never seen a Champion Blower with any use on it that did not have a mess of coal soot and oil caked into the blower housing.

You are dealing with a real piece of antique machinery. Do not expect to overhaul it and get it to run like a gearcase with modern antifriction bearings (ball bearing assemblies or needle bearings). It will have a little slop in the bearings if it is to turn/coast freely. It will have its own sound. All hand forge blowers have a pretty distinctive sound when you crank them. There is no such thing as a "silent" or "frictionless" forge blower, despite what the old advertising may claim to the contrary. Do not expect a hand forge blower to be a "clean" thing- it will seep oil over time.

Joes description of the champion 400 and its smaller brothers and sisters is quite good.

I have been through 3 or 4 myself.
I would recomend makeing up a good spaner wrench for pulling the bronze bushing clamp nuts and a set of tools for adjusting the bicycle bearings.
I also turned a set of support bushings that slip into the bearing holes so that I can tap out shafts with minimal stress on the castings.
Its alot of effort until you snap a casting.

I have removed the bearing cups useing a slightly different technique.

Find a washer that will just fit in the hole behind the cup, pass through a piece of all thread and put on a nut behind the washer. Then put a large washer over the front end of the system and add another nut. This creates a poor mans gear puller and start cranking. They pop loose quite easily in my experiance.

The correct socket is 1.25", usualy. I had to bore out a deep well to extra deep for it to work.

Other thoughts- blower handles are often stuck.
On larger blowers the handles usualy have three screws. One in line with the shaft that clamps the handle, one clamping the handle to the shaft and a second clamp screw perpendicular to the shaft that clamps the handle. Get the crank free of the drive boss. It may be necessary to heat the counter weigh clamp screw red hot to free the rust up. Remove the screws and use the screw hole in line with the shaft an a hex screw that has been chase full lenght like a gear puller. This puts no stress on the gear case, unlike prying or wedging.

A few other thoughts. Dont go tapping out holes until your sure of the thread diameter and pitch.
I have never had problems with a Champion, but some Canady Ottos have an odd screw you would sware was a 1/4 -20.

Also
Worm drive blowers - if the bottom worm is good, and you have the bottom mount bracket you have a place to start. Usualy these are the dammaged parts on a good "parts blower".

Rain gets in the oil hole and rusts out the worm.
Bottom brackets are just no fun to build for the old 400 type blower.

Finaly, 400s are fine blowers if adjusted properly (loosly). They also leak like a sive unless the fan bearing cover is equiped with a leather seal. Yep it rotted away a long time ago in most of them, but it was there on some I took apart.

I agree with AHall on all counts. Service tools for a Champion 400 series blower are pretty nearly a must. I have seen a few of the blowers where people took a drive punch to the ends of the bronze intermediate shaft bushings to turn them out. I refaced the ends lightly and then used my spanner.

The bottom or mounting bracket for a Champion 400 series blower is one tricky part to build. Champion used a set of special castings which grabbed the blower gearcase along the bottom section ( a cylindrical portion) where the spiral gear/fan shaft is housed. If you do not have that cast bracket, mounting a Champion blower can be a bit of a job.

I have seen a few blacksmith forges made up using the 400 Champion Blowers and home-made mountings. They were pretty crude, being mostly piece sof all thread rod used to pull the blower casings down into a shoe cut from a piece of pipe wall.

I made one bracket for a Champion 400 series blower from scratch. It resembled two small vises. These would be the kind of vise some guys may have built in HS Machine Shop class- back when they taught such things to kids. I took two pieces of 2" x 2" Hot Rolled steel and milled them to make two pair of matching "squares". Each pair was then match-marked and dowelled together. I then bored them as two sets to the diameter of the Champion gear case bottom, plus about 0,020". I then split the sets, skimmed about 1/16" off the mating faces, and milled a little vee groove to mate up with the cast vee ont he blower case. One set of dowel holes on each set of squares got a 1/2" diameter CRS guide pin, and the other set of holes was used for capscrews to pull each "vise" together. I used socket head 1/2-13 capscrews for the "vise screws".

I then clamped the "vises to a spare blower casing to jig and locate them. A piece of 2" angle iron was then welded to the bottom ends of the "jaws" on one side of the "vises". The angle iron's vertical flange was then drilled for a couple of 1/2" bolts. This lets that blower get mounted on stuff a person can fabricate themselves. The result is a neat bracket.

It is news to me about the leather "oil seal". I imagine that it was nothing more than a leather washer which fit close on the fan shaft. Considering the shaft is threaded and keyed where it runs thru the bearing, I do not think the leather washer would do much sealing. Probably, it was meant as more of a dust seal to keep coal soot out of the bearing. In any case, AHall has given me a reason for saving my worn-out Redwing work shoes. I will punch out a piece of leather from the uppers on a really worn out pair of Redwings. That ought to be a good piece of leather which will work well in that application. It is something the real old time mechanics used to do. They cut washers and protected vises with scrap leather from worn out shoes or harness. They punched felt washers out of old hats. They made pump valves (for recip water pumps) from rubber shoe heels. I have been saving a couple of pairs of really worn out Redwings on the off chance I would use them for really dirty jobs or when welding or forging. Wife has been after me to get rid of them. Now I have a reason for keeping them- leather washer material.

dimensions

Do you have the dimensions for the front cone bearing? I have a champion 400 but the front cone is busted into four pieces and I can't find anyone that has one. Any help? Thanks!

As much as I've worked on Champion forge blowers, and use one on my own forge, I never had reason to mike the bearing cones. Let's backstep a bit: you say the "front cone" is broken into 4 pieces. Is this the outer (female race) cone or the male cone which screws onto the worm/fan shaft ?

Either way, if you are handy with micrometers and similar, you can "reverse engineer" the cone that is broken. Here is where it gets interesting. Years ago, I miked the cones and journals on the "bicycle bearings" in a Champion 400 series blower with the hope of getting modern sealed ball bearings. No luck as the dimensions did not match up to any standard sized bearing, either inch or metric as I recall. The result was I cleaned up the Champion parts, put new/slightly oversized ball bearings in, and put things back together.

If the male cone is broken, you are in for a little bit of a job: I believe the thread on the worm/fan shaft is non-standard. You will need to either hunt up a special thread tap (and pay accordingly), or cut the internal thread in that cone in a lathe. There is a reason why older terminology for lathes referred to some of them as "screw cutting".

The angles on the cones are- in my opinion- not all that critical. My reason for saying this is the fact that loose ball bearings (or ball bearings held by a brass "star" or cage) are used between the cones. As I wrote in the previous posts, over time, the balls wear a groove or track in the cones. I went to oversized balls to get line or point contact with the cones and let the oversized balls establish a new track.

The rest of the story is the cones were hardened to a high degree of hardness, and then ground to final size when the bearings were made. If you do make new cones, you need to use a steel that is hardenable, and preferably will not distort or change dimensions appreciably from the heat treating. For a home-made replacement, I'd use an O-1 drill rod for making the cones. It is sold in the dead soft state, machines nicely, and hardens in oil with less chances of a quench crack happening. I use used canola oil ("Wesson Oil") for oil quenching small parts and it works fine. I draw the temper on small parts in the kitchen oven. About 400 degrees F in your kitchen oven will give a "light straw" color on the parts and will give a very high hardness.

The next trick is finishing the cones. If you have a small toolpost grinder with an internal spindle, you are golden. If not, a simple approach is to mount a die grinder such as a "Dremel Tool" on the compound of your lathe. Even mounting the Dremel Tool in a block of hardwood will work. You will need to grind the "lands" or surfaces of the male & female cones where the balls run on. If you have no grinder, then getting some small, fine oil stones and stoning the bearing surfaces while the cones turn in the lathe is another approach. Not so good as a toolpost grinder, but for what those bearings are, should work OK.

I have no idea when Champion stopped building the 400 series blowers, maybe as late as the 1960's, but that is still 50 years ago. Finding a blower with good cones but enough other damage to make it a "parts blower" is going to be difficult. As for how the cone got busted in the first place, my belief is you are talking about the outer or female cone, and someone may have driven it in or out with a hardened steel drift or drive punch. Champion made those parts "glass hard" or very nearly so, and as such, a sharp blow from a steel drift or hammer will shatter them. The old backwoods trick of driving in a bearing race using a socket and hammer is a sure way to shatter that outer cone. A chunk of something like copper, brass, aluminum or hardwood is what should be used, and then with light tapping of the hammer.

As has oft been stated here on this 'board: if you are going to own and use old machinery, either you have to scavenge used parts or make them from scratch. Basic skills in measuring, making a sketch or drawing, and "reverse engineering" are required, along with basic machine shop skills.

On a related note, I happen to have a Champion 400 blower that is now a parts donor. Someone left a screw inside the casting and it got stuck between the worm gear and the housing. The worm took all the damage. I'll see if I can measure the front cone on the worm next to the fan. If it's in good shape, I'll post some photos on here. Anyone need other parts to one of these blowers?

All of these are eyeball measurements. I agree with what's been mentioned above that this kind of part doesn't need to be exact. And the cone I'm measuring is in rough shape. Major Diameter - 1", minor diameter - 0.75" , part length 0.5", taper length 0.35". According to the calculator, it's a 40 degree angle. But, as I mentioned, this a worn part and measured with eyeballs and a dial caliper.