Recently a combined project was undertaken at Marquette University In the first phase, a team of students undertook work to double the tonnage of a laboratory press used in forging studies In the second phase, the effect of surface roughness and lay on metal flow during lubricated hot compression was investigated during an experimental study using 1020 steel to compare with previous results obtained using 6061-T6 aluminum Ring tests were used to determine the friction factor and cigar testing was employed to examine the effects of surface directionality/lay and die roughness on metal flow While surface roughness clearly dominates, lay was also found to have a measurable effect at all levels of surface roughness based on data obtained using the “spread ratio”