John McPherson

Looks a lot like a Kanca anvil pattern. Western Europe tends to have a lot more Turkish and east European imports than we do in North America.

Around here, the plate alone would be $200, the table another $200, each large stake $50 to $150, and the small stuff that does not really belong another $100. But it all is really only good to a tinsmith, or someone who does large scale non-ferrous art forms.

Short answer: when a wrought iron anvil was forged to the final shape, there was a relatively thin plate, or several plates of high carbon steel forge welded to the wrought body as the working face. It had to be quenched under a stream of water to harden that steel face. Edges cooled faster than the center, thus ending up more brittle. Always a balancing act between the edge hardness and center softness. Modern induction hardening of homogenous cast anvils eliminates this problem.

In regards to flammable hair in a welding shop, ZZ Top style beards protruding from the hood are not a huge problem unless the owner uses some type of oily product as a grooming aid. A bushy beard seems to help block some of the reflective light coming from the chest area. Dreadlocks though, they are a problem. I had at least one student use a green fabric welding sleeve to cover the bundle sticking straight out of the back of his headgear. Looked like one of the Alien characters from the side, I wish now that I had taken a picture....

Where you are located is going to make a huge difference in your options and pricing. Since you posted prices in pounds and weight in kilos, in the UK and most of Europe, old anvils are much more readily available and cheaper than in the US. And no, steeling a cast iron doorstop (ASO) is a fool's errand. Buying all the quality that you can afford now is never a bad decision in hindsight.

"CAD/CAM, CNC plasma cutting, picking the right inverter arc welder and process/electrode/shielding gas for the job, laying out and measuring job sites with laser tools, and other needed modern production/fabrication skills are added to basic forging, shop tool usage, heat treating and metallurgy lessons to create an up to date program." I will be glad to put up a more comprehensive list of the skills in each class, and the other classes that complete the Certificate. Let's do that next week, and start a new thread. Give me a chance to put on my PPE before you all take a swing at me.

Scot Forge is one of the companies that sends recruiters to our college for NDE grads, and I have talked to the Plaid Jackets. Welders they do not need. They would love to have students with the skills that I am proposing. Scaling up is easy if you have the fundamentals.

Our Welding and Machining Technologies departments both currently use some of the online SME education products, but they do not exist for the sector that I am setting up. Unfortunately, I agree that the forging article was sorely lacking in detailed content, and the Canadian skills student document was less thorough than the Boy Scout Metalwork merit badge book. The facilitators guides were useful. Not here to name drop, but there are at least 6 shops in NC that I know of personally that produce custom forged ironwork, be it architechtural, decorative, or custom tools and knives. They all employ helpers that need to possess certain skills to be useful . Some are owned by a single individual, others are corporations. I have reached out to, and visited most of them at one time or another about what they need in a new hire. Some were willing to spend a hour or two answering in depth questions. Above the scale that I am targeting, there are shops where the "tongs" are manipulators on forklifts, and the "hammers" are giant presses and rotary forging units that make the earth shake. No community college program can be more that the equivalent of military basic training. We can ensure that they are capable of further advanced training for a specialty of some sort, and have the necessary skills to not be totally useless from the start.

I did not mean to come off as flippant or dismissive: I truly value the input of this august body of voluntary mentors. I am not trying to replicate everything that the ACBA Blacksmithing program does in four years in two semester-long courses. I am trying to add a specialty track into the mainstream Welding Technology offerings. We have done the same for Automated Welding and Cutting, Pipefitting, etc. Many institutions either refuse to share information, or simply never return calls or emails.The tip from pnut was worth more than gold to me. I simply do not have 600 to 1000 spare unpaid hours to devote to course prep if there is something better out there pre-existing. Online, print, and hybrid texts for welding curricula, (whether for internal corporate training, private trade school, union journeyman program, or public college degree track), are easy to come by, and constantly updated by teams of editors. Systematic blacksmithing, not so much. I talked to owners and managers of production blacksmith shops to see what skills they wanted in a new employee. Shipyards and corporations from as far away as Washington state and Minnesota send HR folks to our community college to headhunt our Welding and NDE graduates.We pride ourselves on being a national leader in Workforce Development. I have been part of a team taking students with zero background or knowledge of welding, teaching them everything from blueprints to orbital welding, and turning them into useful entry level workers for a while now. Former students now work for Lincoln Electric, SpaceX, the Electric Power Research Institute, etc., and make a heck of a lot more than I do. Some are maintenance welders in quarries, shutdown welders chasing the next power plant offering 7/10's, shipyard workers, pressure vessel fabricators, underwater welders. Others have their own shops and have been on Forged in Fire. I never said that the basic forging chapters in many old books were not valuable, just that the context, format and sourcing data was outdated. The science of working and forge welding real wrought iron, expectations of years long paid apprenticeships working alongside masters, and walking down to the corner hardware store and picking out an anvil with all the trimmings was fine in 1919, not so easy to come by in 2019. CAD/CAM, CNC plasma cutting, picking the right inverter arc welder and process/electrode/shielding gas for the job, laying out and measuring job sites with laser tools, and other needed modern production/fabrication skills are added to basic forging, shop tool usage, heat treating and metallurgy lessons to create an up to date program.

Trying to convey the state of the blacksmithing/fabrication art and craft here and now, as it applies to money-making endeavours and not hobbys, does not come easily with archaic texts. It is like trying to teach students how to work on modern computer chipped, fuel-injected, anti-lock brake system cars with a Chilton manual for a Model T. Again, I am looking for ***one book*** that covers everything that goes on in a production shop, conveyed in a modern, concise text and illustrations. And it does not seem to exist, although many sources have useful projects, chapters or passages. Think of it akin to video editing. It seems to take about 10-12 hours of research and amalgamation from many sources to produce one hour of classroom instruction. I need up to 64 total hours text/video/powerpoint for the 2 hour/day lecture part, before heading into the shop for another 6 hours. Students are expected to show up with zero knowledge, and exit the program with enough useful abilities to be hired as an entry level worker in a production facility. (You scoff. Obviously, you are not familiar with the expectations of modern academia!)

For a collector of name brand anvils, it would have no real value exept as a curiosity. If it is at all usable as an anvil, then you did well for $1.00/lb. Enjoy it in good health, and if you are seriously still engaged in blacksmithing in a year or two, upgrade to a better anvil. BTW, the NCABANA meeting is this Saturday outside of Raleigh. The great Jerry Darnell is demoing. PM me for directions if you want to go.

Thank you all for the input. I am the NCABANA chapter librarian, and have more than a passing familiarity with most of those titles. And a short ton of others as well. And while I would love to find a simple, straightforward, step-by-step, well-illustrated text or two currently in print so as to avoid copyright problems by just having it in the school bookstore and available for purchase with scholarship funds, so far it has not happened. Sigh. I may have to write my own, starting with a bunch of projects in a three ring binder. I have a file drawer full of ideas to organize during the dreary winter months, since my shop is in "pleine air" at the moment.

That "repair plate" was masking put over the name on the side of the real anvil when it was used as a pattern. This ASO (Anvil Shaped Object) was then cast from that pattern. As it was a low grade of casting and full of holes, they attempted to make it usable by putting a steel plate on the face when cast. There was a sophisticated method of doing this by several reputable companies. This example was not made by one of them.

The most common shape from England was the London pattern with the drop from face to horn, but Soho and Engine smith patterns were standard as well. On the Continent, the drop was, and is, much less common.

Norrisez, were supposed to be pretty good anvils by reputation, though I have never used one personally.

I am dealing with this now, part of why I have been gone so long. Finally (12 years!!! later) have gotten the state of NC to approve Wrought Metals I & II into the Welding Technology curriculum. Sooooo, now, all I have to do is get an area at the community college set aside & enclosed, wired for 120/240/480V, compressed airlines for power hammers & etc, secure funding for all $100K of tools, write 2 semesters of course outlines with tests and projects, pick a textbook... and still teach a full load of regular welding classes while maintaining some semblance of a life. Wish me luck.

I have found that companies that cut out sink openings in kitchen countertops, often give piles of stone oblongs and discs away on freecycle and similar websites. Use drill bits made for cutting glass, make a dam of clay around the spot, and keep the bit wet. youtube has lots of videos.

If you will take the time to read the lettering on the pitman arm of that massive horizontal metal bender, you will find that it is "The Bulldozer". Years later, recalling the action of that standard shop tool, someone took to calling the impressive earthmoving capabilities of a push blade on the front of a tracked site preparation tractor by the same sobriquet, and the name stuck.

1 x 112 + 0 x 28 + 6 pounds = 118 when new, which was prior to 1906, since it was not required to be stamped 'England" for export.

I am not aware of a guide to all of the ironwork for Savannah like the one for Charleston, SC. The wrought fence at the Girl Scout founder's home was actually made by her. (Juliette Gordon Low) Georgia State Railroad Museum, 655 Louisville Road is another point.

Gauges and meters can lie. They either lose calibration, were never calibrated to begin with, or in the case of gas gauges, are set up for the wrong density to gas or gas mix. That being said, the right, high quality flow meter is worth it's weight in gold if you are going to do this a lot. Certain shops test new welders by taping over the amp meters and flow meters, and have the applicants set the machine up by visual and audible feedback. If you actually have the field experience, it takes two minutes to get it dialed in. If you don't know where you are going, anyplace you end up is OK. If you have a certain destination in mind, and have never been there yourself, maybe you need a map or a guide.

Do nothing: anything that you could do would destroy the market value and history. It is perfectly usable just the way it is for 99% of the things that an average blacksmith would do. Most of the time you only need a flat surface under your work the size of the hammer face. The gentle curve is actually useful when trying to get something perfectly straight, metal has a memory and tends to rebound. If you ever do need a perfectly straight and flat surface with absolutely square edges for a special item, make a plate with a stem that fits in the square hardy hole.

Google search for the "Scary Sharp" method of sharpening: lots of wood worker pages and youTube videos to help you out.

Working by myself, I would use a hammer, anvil, butcher tool in the hardy hole, and a monkey tool to shape the tenon. But there are probably half a dozen other ways to do it, depending on how complete your shop is, and what your time is worth. Are you primarily interested in making money thru production, and blacksmithing is simply a means to an end? Or are you interested in the art and science of blacksmithing, and making stuff and having to sell it to support your hobby is a necessary evil? Somewhere in between? The fastest way to make money from metal is to buy a CNC plasma table, a cheap MIG welder to use as a metal glue gun, and buy items from an architectural catalog to bodge together to sell at flea markets and the like. Soulless, lifeless, and I see hacks selling $10K worth on a Saturday. The fastest way to go broke is to buy every tool offered on the market, hoping this next one has the the magic inside to make you an artist. Or, you could learn the basics, and work your way up thru the skill levels a little at a time. The traditional way, making a hundred of everything util you get it down pat, then moving forward. Then you would know if a tool or jig would help you make a better product, and why.

What we all want to do is have it all, now. Barring buying a winning lottery ticket or inheriting a fortune, that's not going to happen. A barn full of tools does not make you a master craftsman, anymore than owning a katana makes you a Samurai. We are all born with hands and feet, but it takes tears of training to become a Black Belt. What you need to do is acquire skills, basic and advanced. Fancy jigs and power tools just help you make more mistakes faster if you don't know what you are doing wrong. Take classes. Join a group. Go to hammer-ins.Texas is full of those things. Save your pennies and go to national conferences.