stuarthesmith

my biggest vice is buying big vises

Here is a knife a 13 year old student of mine forged.....

I got tired of the old stump, so I went to a tree surgeon member of my guild. He milled, planed, and polished a sycamore 20x20x24 stump for my 700 pound Hay Budden. A 300 pound block of wood!

Mod note: How many times do you think you need to repost this here? you have one posting on the first page, that is enough. the 5th post in this thread, dates October 30, 2011. This is now the 4th one I have had to remove, and other mods have informed me they have also removed 5 other posts over the past 2 weeks. This is spamming and self promotion, either that or Alzheimers. If you cant remember what you post we will do it for you and moderate your account I dont care that you have used the "ignore" feature to block staff, its no excuse. It is your fault for doing it even if you refuse to read the warning PM's you cant say you dont know the rules. threatening any staff over this again will get your account closed permanently You are an adult and we expect you to act like it. Pretending innocence while blocking all PMs from staff is a childish game, and you lost.

well, in this case the perfidy was extreme

this analogy is apt Many years ago, when Woody Allen was first starting out, in his stand up routine, he had this joke. "A bullet once saved my life. Someone threw a book at me, and the bullet stopped it in my top pocket". Myron Handelmann, another stand up comic, pawned Woody's joke off as his own on the Ed Sullivan Show. The reason nobody knows who Myron Handelmann was is that after that, he was blacklisted from ever doing comedy again. The same goes for stealing blacksmithing intellectual property

some things qualify as common knowledge. Some things are intellectual property. As an admin on a blacksmithing page on Facebook, I will say this. We take a dim view on stealing someone's intellectual property, and if caught, we oust them with immediacy. Many times, the difference between bankruptcy in this craft is the tenuous hold on one's intellectual property. Copying someone's work to increase skill set is one thing, but vending someone else's intellectual property constitutes theft That being said, if you forge something someone else designed, at least have the common decency to attribute the concept to the originator of it

In business, your word is everything. My policy with everything in business is best expressed in the movie Thunderdome.......break.. a deal, face the wheel....EXILE!!!!!

In for a penny, in for a pound sterling. Go big or go home buy the hammer for 3 k and build a tire hammer for 1 k. problem solved.....

well, we kinda agree......he should get an industrial trip hammer and a shop anvil, and a good sized leg vise........unless he can BARGAIN DOWN the guy with the big anvil,,,,,,if he can squeeze the seller down to 2500, he may be able to purchase a decent hammer for 1500.....

OMG, decisions decisions this entire thread is giving me a headache, lol!

was I "alluding to business" at age 22 when I bought my big anvil......YESSIR I was, I always intended to go into business! Isn't that the dream, to do this for a living!!!!!!

here is my take on that.....excellent question, Thomas! My first anvil bought by my parents as a high school graduation present, back in 1972, was a pristine 220 pound Peter Wright, along with a rivet forge. As luck would have it, my second anvil was the 700 lb. Hay Budden seen above. At THAT time I was serving a 5 year apprenticeship in an industrial shop, back in 1976, and paid 650 dollars for that anvil, which was a LOT of money! My father loaned me the money, which I paid back GLADLY! To provide perspective, over the last 40 years, I forged in excess of a million dollars worth of merchandise on that anvil over the thyears. When I incorporated in 1982, my accountant depreciated that anvil, along with everything else, so in effect, I got the anvil and everything else for FREE. From my BUSINESS perspective the anvil is a good buy for him, especially if he goes into business later.....

reach for the stars, and NEVER settle You will kick yourself if you don't if you decide not to buy it, please give me the guy's phone number, lol!!!!! my 700 lber needs a "wife" big anvils aren't sellable?? You' re kidding, right?? Every blacksmith tool dealer in north america is waiting for me to kick the bucket so they can maraude my shop!!! to the person who posted that "big anvils aren't sellable", my pickup truck is gassed up, and I have a wad of cash in hand......wanna sell all your 500 pound plus anvils to me?

damage????? what damage!!!!! Aesopian tale of the fox and the grapes that 490 pounder is as clean as a whistle

If I were Benjamin, I would show up with 30 c notes in one pocket and ten in the other, and try to get the anvil for 3k......cash talks and chin musac walks

the hammer price was as I specified which means, my good friend, that the back bidder bid 14,340, one hundred dollars less. Not MY fault that the "winning bidder " chickened out. The seller got ROOKED the back bidder,. who was serious and bid in earnest, bid $14,340 dollars, and was willing to pay that.....so be careful who you point the accusatory finger at, my good friend! as far as missing opportunities, the day I bought my 700 pound monster, there was a 485 pound baby elephant Hay Budden sitting on the floor alongside the one I bought. I was so smitten by "anvil fever" that I didn't even consider buying the slightly smaller one. Big mistake that I am kicking myself for 40 years after the fact. I could have flipped the extra monster for an enormous profit and gotten the bigger one for free! I was young and stupid in those days

Benjamin, you are well named...Whip out forty benjamins and own that anvil!!!!! A 634 pound Hay Budden just sold for $14,440 dollars on an auction site not allowed to be mentioned on this page.......behemoths are rare.....you will kick yourself if you don't buy it..... my 700 pound hay budden is probably worth 18k I have said for a long time that anvils are a better investment than plantinum, lol

I noticed the pictures, like many others, disappeared into thin air......lucky I saved them

THREE WET SMITHS AND A SWAGE BLOCK.... The auction was posted in all the local papers. It was a farm auction, complete with the blacksmith tools that had been around the farm for four generations. In the middle of the field, along with the flatbed trucks, John Deere Model B's, cultivators, balers, tetters, rakes, mowers, manure spreaders, farm generators, welders, hit and miss engines, chevy blocks, pallets of pulley blocks, rope, baling twine, barbed wire, and other farmacopoea, was an anvil, a forge, and a swage block. Right in the middle of the auction, AFTER I bought the anvil and rivet forge, a big dark cloud approached the participants hovering around the swage block in the middle of the field, with the auctioneer with his battery powered megaphone about to "hammer down" the swage block. Almost as if scripted, it started to rain. Not just a drizzle, or a normal freshet, but a thunderous downpour, torrenting over our heads. The crowd scattered, except for the four of us, the three interested parties, and the dripping wet auctioneer. One hundred, one fifty, two hundred, two fifty, at three hundred I dropped out, fleeing for cover from the torrential downpour. They still proceeded, ending at five hundred and fifty lusty dollars. The FUNNY part about this story is that it was 36 years ago..........apologies to the folks who think "blacksmithing is a passing fad" and that blacksmith tool prices will eventually level off, anyone believing that anvil prices will eventually taper off are living in la-la land

with BIGGGG anvils, you can hit near the heel with impunity

In order to shoulder the shank on a hardy hole tool, you sometimes have to upset the boundary between the shank and the business end. This should be done at a yellow-white heat, and can be done using the hardy hole of the anvil, albeit carefully!!!! We had a meeting yesterday of the Philadelphia Blacksmiths Guild, in which I showed people how to forge hardies. The meeting took place at the shop o hwned by Lincoln Wolfe at his Hay Budden Museum. The anvil we used was a 330 pound Hay Budden, sporting a 1 3/8" hardy hole. All five anvils in my shop have 1 3/8" hardy holes, because I HATE making excess tools for five different hardy hole sizes. The Guild member needed a hardy to fit his identical 1 3/8 hardy on his own personal anvil. With the hot shank dropped into the hardy hole at a yellow heat, using a humongous axle shaft as stock, we upset the shoulder using ten pound sledges. The INSTANT the tool cooled down to orange heat, we removed it from the hardy hole to reheat. Why????? Because it is catastrophic to get the shank stuck in the hot hardy hole, so it gets removed from the BOTTOM OF THE HARDY HOLE to be reheated, using a punch from UNDERNEATH. If you do not remove the shank thusly, you risk busting the heel off your anvil. Reheat, and upset again, until you have a pronounced shoulder on your tool!

After 41 years of professional blacksmithing, I have MASTERED one thing......keeping keyboard masters at bay....

I teach youngsters how to forge. One of my Guild members, Gavin McCloskey, has a 13 year old son named Jon who took to knife forging like horses take to apples and carrots. This work is not only good for a youngster, but is good for an adult!!!! I love it when the lightbulb turns on in someone's mind!!!!!!

thank you sir