Eighty thousand tonnes of force. One squeeze. The most powerful forging press ever built sits in Deyang, Sichuan, operated by China Erzhong. Rated at 800 meganewtons, it entered trial production in 2013 and has held the global record ever since. The structure weighs roughly 22,000 tonnes and stands about 42 metres tall, with a third of that buried below the shop floor. Why does raw tonnage matter so much? Closed-die forging works by forcing hot metal to fill a die cavity completely. The force required scales with the projected area of the part multiplied by the flow stress of the alloy at temperature. Titanium and nickel superalloys are brutal here. They stay stiff even at 950 degrees Celsius, demanding well over 100 MPa of die pressure. Run the arithmetic and 800 MN buys a forging footprint of several square metres in a single stroke. That single stroke is the entire point. - One heat means one continuous grain flow through the finished part - Fewer reheats mean less alpha case, ...