A 6000 ton press does not smash metal. It persuades it. At room temperature a steel billet is a stubborn crystalline solid with a yield strength of several hundred megapascals. Heat it to 1200 degrees Celsius and the flow stress collapses to somewhere around 50 to 100 MPa, and the steel starts behaving less like a rigid body and more like extremely stiff plasticine. That single fact is what makes industrial forging possible. The arithmetic is worth doing. Six thousand metric tons is roughly 59 meganewtons. Divide by a hot flow stress of about 80 MPa and you get a projected contact area of around 0.7 square metres. That is the real meaning of a tonnage rating. It is not a measure of violence, it is a budget: how much cross section the press can push through before it stalls. What is happening inside the billet: - Above roughly half the melting temperature in kelvin, dislocations climb and cross slip freely. The metal work hardens and softens at the same time. - Dynamic recrystallisa...