Conrad Hodson

Go ahead and try that. (I assume you're talking about the traditional one-piece holddown that's shaped something like a numeral 7, right? If you still have trouble, try thinning down the "neck" of the extended part. Mine used to bounce out all the time until I reduced the cross-section behind the gripping pad by about one-half. It also helps to roughen the shank; I cross-peened the part of the shank that's inside the pritchel hole during use; it holds better that way. (Doing this on one that's used on a woodworking bench wears out the holes sooner--not generally a problem on an anvil.) Conrad Hodson

My 350 has the same thickness it seems, though the grinding scar you mentioned makes it hard to tell in places. Like a lot of Fisher owners, I love the quiet. IMHO a church bell anvil is like running a chain saw without a muffler--the work is quite noisy enough without adding to it! Smiths back then could agree at least sometimes; a selling point in some of the old Fisher ads was: "The Quiet Anvil". Conrad Hodson

As the others said, almost anything that doesn't burn or crumble from heat. I used leftover sand and gravel from some foundation work I'd been doing. Conrad Hodson

Or put the anvil in the back seat footwell. Then it's between the axles and really _is_ the same weight distribution as people in the backseat would give. If you put it in the trunk, try to get it as far forward as possible. That much weight right by the bumper could make your steering skittery in some cars. When I found my 350 pound Fisher I was going through a carless period, so I borrowed a big old Ford Fairlane from a friend. The seller and I got the anvil into the trunk (not sure how, it took four people to get it out!) but we loaded it all the way back and off to the right side as well. Those old Detroit Dinosaurs had really long overhangs, so the car tilted down at the rear corner almost as if I'd taken that wheel all the way off. The car was driveable, but looked awful. So I went by the owner's place on the way home. Thanked him for the car, as if I had finished the job, and told him everything went well "except that something went twang as we crossed the tracks, and it's sitting funny now." He looked out the window and yelled "Holy xxxx!!!!" and went running out there. Then I showed him the anvil and after he chased me around the car a couple of times he started laughing. The car was actually not harmed by all this; in fact I had occasion to buy it from him a couple of years later. I would say go for it, but really look at putting some wood blocks in the rear footwells and setting your new anvil there. The car will handle the load much better, and just plain handle better too. And get help, at both ends of the trip. Two people can handle that much under ideal conditions, but bending over into a car is far from ideal. It's the only back you've got, and it needs to last you.... Conrad Hodson

Unlike the two of you, my fires _never_ go on like that. My coal fires go out (i.e. can't be blown back to life) about two hours after the blower stops, unless I make a point of leaving a chunk of wood pushed into the firepit to hold the fire. When I was using metallurgical coke, it would go out beyond recovery in 15-20 minutes--you could take a leak but if you took a phone call it was easy to lose the fire. All I can figure is that your forge/blower combos must allow a lot more air to convect through the firepit (when the blower is unpowered) than my setup does. I do know that old-time coal stoves, without forced draft, would burn coal steadily as long as they had special grates designed to let the air up through the fuel. If the coal just laid on the floor of the firebox like wood does it would go out. Try plugging the air intake on your blower when you quit work, and check for air leaks around places like your ash dump cover. I'll bet your problem is an excess of natural draft from somewhere. Conrad Hodson

My non-portable bottom draft forge, the 30-year model, has run on coal most of its life, except for a couple of years when I was using commercial coke to see how I liked it. One amusing thing I forgot to mention--during my coke-burning experiment I ended up startling some of my friends by mentioning I was going up to Portland to buy some coke. They gave me that "I didn't know you were into that stuff" dubious look. Then I mentioned I was going to buy 400 pounds of it. They looked at me with new respect--they had no idea I was a big shot.... Then I explained that the coke I was buying was "Pittsburgh Black" with a street value of $500 a ton. Conrad Hodson

In the little side draft unit, I've been running wood charcoal mostly(the forge was built for historical demo purposes), with occasional doses of coal when my charcoal supply has run short. No signs of tuyere erosion yet, but I don't have that many hours on the forge yet. My non-portable bottom draft forge, the 30-year model, has run on coal most of its life, except for a couple of years when I was using commercial coke to see how I liked it. I never really noticed much difference in corrosion, but then I don't water my fire much, or leave the forge exposed to the rain. It stands to reason there's much more chance of corrosion from sulfurous/sulfuric acids if water leaches through green coal than through charcoal. On this note, while my forge has corroded very little, the sheet steel on the coal _scoop_, which sometimes gets left in the coal bucket, has needed replacement twice. As for other fuels, I learned on gas (someone else's) and then discovered solid fuel, and never went back. Ask the gas guys about their problems--the only one I've heard about is the way welding flux erodes their refractories. Another solid fuel is bark. One of my mentors, who was nearing 80 when I met him, taught me how to use Douglas fir bark the way smiths did in lumber camps here in Oregon, a century or so ago. The bark is almost as clean as charcoal--I didn't notice corrosion problems and clinkers were few and far between. Basically he used a larger deeper firepit, about a gallon in volume; he said the fuel was less dense so you needed more of it. And he would throw in some supplemental coke or charcoal to reach a welding heat, but the bark could get you up to the edge of yellow. Can't beat the price, especially around here, where you can clean a hundred pounds and more of bark off one log car on the rail siding a block from my house...so far that's my best effort in being self-sufficient/sustainable WRT forge fuel, though I've been meaning to make more charcoal in the coming year. Conrad Hodson

We all have our preferences, but the fancy factory-made forges I've used don't even seem to _work_ as well as the simpler ones! Most of the little one-piece rivet forges and the like have no depth of firepit at all, and you have to build this huge mound to get out of the oxidizing zone. Did you ever see that book Aldren Watson did--The Village Blacksmith? Wonderful drawings, lousy history (seems vague on whether he's describing smithcraft as of 1750 or 1900!), and the back of the book has appendices for building a bellows and a forge. Well, the forge he draws and describes is this huge brick monstrosity, indoors with a big fixed hood. It would cost a couple thousand dollars to build unless you had an awful lot of old brick available. And after all that, you'd have serious limits on the size of curved pieces you could heat, because of the massive hood. And unless you built it dead center of a thirty foot wall, you'd have a nightmare trying to heat midsections of any long bar. Personally, the only fixed forge I want has to be freestanding, with plenty of room around it. Recently I had to make a whole bunch of U-shapes in 20-foot bars! I have a smoke hood, but it goes up and down on counterweights and isn't connected physically to the forge at all. There are forges that are no more than holes in the ground, with a buried run of timber bamboo or junk pipe feeding air from bellows to a homemade clay tuyere tip. There are also African smiths who do really nice work with those forges, and they didn't spend a dime on them. If you'd rather stand up while you work (I do) then make a raised platform of adobe/rammed earth. If you want to splurge on a few firebricks, you won't have to rebuild the firepit, but that's really all you might ever have to buy. "The more you pay, the more it's worth" is strictly for suckers--but there's so much of that attitude poisoning our society that it's easy to drift into the trap. With our toolmaking and problem-solving capabilities, smiths are the last people on Earth who should fall for that one! end of rant, Conrad Hodson Conrad Hodson

In the designs I've used, erosion of the tuyere isn't a real-world problem. By which I mean, takes a long time to happen, costs nothing to fix when it does. But then, my forges have all been homemade, so there hasn't been any BS about proprietary parts or precision fits. My first forge uses a thick-walled 3 inch steel pipe that runs crossways through an oil drum. Sand and dirt were shoveled into the drum and packed tight, until they were halfway up the side of the pipe. I drilled some 3/8 holes in a cluster of seven to make a grate in the middle of the pipe. Then I made a form in the shape of an inverted pyramid (just about the size and shape of the top of a concrete pier block), greased it well, and rigged a temporary frame of scrap wood to hold it in place. I poured refractory concrete (which cost way too much money but I didn't have a place I could dig fireclay back then) up to the height I wanted for a forge top. This forge has lasted me 34 years, and the grate finally burned out last year--all the holes started burning together into one. I took a small rectangle of 1/8 plate, hammered into a arch to fit a piece of pipe the size of the tuyere, and drilled some more holes in it. Then I just cleaned the forge out well, and set the plate in the bottom flush with the original pipe. I didn't secure it in any way, but it hasn't shifted and the forge works as well as ever. Two years ago I made a portable side draft forge for events. I bought five fairly thin, flat firebricks from a building supply, 2-3 bucks apiece. Two are flat and form the floor of the hearth, two more stand up and form the headwall. The inner corners of the upright bricks I knocked off, making a triangular hole that the tuyere comes through. The fifth brick is upright but on its long side rather than its end, and can be moved depending on whether I want a very small or larger fire. I bent frameworks of junk sheet steel to hold all these bricks, and any broken brick can be slipped out for replacement. My tuyere for this forge is just a 1 1/2 inch water pipe with the tip forged down into a nozzle, perhaps a 2 to 1 reduction of area. I left extra pipe sticking out the far side of the headwall; if the tip ever burns off I'll just forge another taper on the burnt end and shove it forward a bit. Both of these work well, both are very simple, neither one of them cost much at all. I teach my students that forges are the easiest of all the major tools to make for themselves, and that they shouldn't think that a forge should add much of anything to the price of a blower. The most expense I ever had for a forge was about 50 dollars for that first one, then I learned better. The first portable one I made was for an garden arbor installation, for heating collars before assembly. A student and I built it in a 5 gallon steel bucket, with a hand-dished grate, the top of a propane tank for a firepit, and junk plumbing parts for the air supply and cleanout. Total cost less than five dollars, and it lasted four years. The little side-draft I use now cost about 20 dollars, but that was with store-bought firebrick and black paint to make it look pretty for the tourists. Conrad Hodson

I built a bellows about the size of yours two years ago. The valves are 3x5 inches and none too large. My valve flaps are thin cedar and close onto felt that surrounds each hole. One innovation I added: I built each whole valve assembly into a piece of board, and then set those into the leaves of the bellows. The joints are sealed with more felt and the valve boards are held in by turnbuttons. This way, if the valve ever gets out of order, or the bellows leather needs restitching, I can just remove the whole valve assembly for repair, or for giving me a comfortably large access hole into each chamber. Conrad Hodson

Right on! I'm always buying smith's tools on spec, but I don't hoard them either. Mostly I pass them on to my students, on the same basis you mention. One of the nice things about doing that is that I pass the anvil or whatever on at little or no markup, teach the student how to clean, restore and accessorize the thing, and collect tuition for it. The student learns how to make old tools live again, and gets their own tooling for mostly sweat equity. I get the tuition money and the joy of knowing I've saved another tool from the antique collectors. Conrad Hodson

Among smiths, there is more or less a market price because we're largely in touch with each other through newsletters, hammer-ins and big events. Antique dealers are also in touch, and we all know about their sort of fantasy pricing, but again they have at least a semi-standard market. And then there's the whole different world, of garage sales and people who are simply getting rid of stuff. Those prices are all over the map--from inflated versions of antique prices to amazing bargains. I may have bought my anvils years ago, but I got a 100 pound leg vise with 6 inch jaws right in my neighborhood. My partner spotted it in a garage sale, and the guy was asking 60 bucks for it. She checked the screw and it was in perfect shape, even had its spring and mounting hardware there. She bought it on the spot, and the fellow proceeded to get guilty about charging her so much. He insisted on throwing in a whole wheelbarrow full of other tools, including a couple of anvil tools, some tongs, and a ten-pound sledge! This happened just two years ago. Good deals aren't all ancient history. Our tools tend to be heavy (we must be the only people on Earth who talk about an anvil as being "only a hundred pounds") Some of the best deals I've gotten, thirty years ago or last week, have been from people who were moving, and didn't want to move that ton of old junk Grandpa had stored. Or people who were simply sick of stubbing their toe on the xxxx whatsis. (Freestanding blowers and dismounted leg vises seem to provoke people in this way a lot. Conrad Hodson

This talk of lenses vs. parabolic mirrors is neglecting designs already proven from the 19th century. The favored design for solar steam engines back then turned out to be a trackable mirror in the form of a cone with the tip missing. It had a linear (not point) focus which they used to heat a tubular boiler. Their boilers would get to red heat _viewed in bright sunshine_ and would melt down if the water feed failed, so they're surely hot enough for a forge. This design has several advantages for a forge. The work goes in through a small hole in the peak of the cone, along its axis. Which means the smithy is always in the shade, a major advantage in the kind of sunny climate you need to make one of these things useful. The heat is even, from all sides of the workpiece. One small and one large drawback: the small one is that your iron will oxidize like crazy, unless you come up with some kind of gas shield for it. (Usually, our forges have an automatic gas shield of carbon monoxide, methane or propane due to a slight excess of fuel over air in the working zone.) Putting some charcoal in a holder alongside the work, with holes or nozzles to direct the CO vapor, should help, but I haven't actually worked this one out in practice. The bigger problem is wind. Most of the 19th Century examples worked very well, until they were wrecked by high winds. Most of the areas (in this country at least) that have lots of sunshine have at least occasional violent winds, though the occasional sheltered valley or basin might be found. Some of the subtropical desert areas of the world are not so windy, and might be a good place to try this. As always with alternative energy, location is everything. The installation that works to perfection on one site can be a heartbreaking waste of time and money the next state, or sometimes the next mile, over! Conrad Hodson

Should work well enough. I assume the ties aren't already half rotten--it would be worth the trouble to scrounge or even buy sound ones. My own main anvil is mounted much this way, though I used a four-foot section of the largest size of utility pole, which is 16 inch diameter and heavily creosoted. I dug a hole in my smithy about three feet deep, and then poured gravel in and tamped it until I had the proper height for the anvil base. The results surprised me. Three blows were doing what had needed four blows before, compared to various sit-on-the-ground stumps and stands. Given that the anvil weighs 350 pounds, I wouldn't have thought the base would make so much difference--but it does. The creosote has kept rot and termites and carpenter ants at bay for over twenty years now. (I do have a roof that keeps the ground dry, though our water table comes within a few inches of the surface during our winter rainy season.) The one thing with the ties is that I wouldn't spare the bolts. You don't want one shifting past the other, since the whole point of all that digging is to reduce the amount of "give" in the system. Conrad Hodson