Jmercier

With the shelf on the front and back faces of the feet, looks like either a peter wright or a henry wright

If you want a more professional approach (for not a whole lot of money really) the henry evers company makes custom stamps for a very reasonable price. I know several knife makers who have used them and been very happy with the result.

Henry A. Evers Corporation - Everstamp, Quality and detailed steel stamps for over 100 years.

High temperature black grill paint after you wire brush / blast / whatever to get the scale off.

you need to just pay attention to what you're doing

Got if off the truck and in the shop =) I need to make a flat die for the bottom , but most of my other hardie tools fit the hole already.

http://www.tharkis.com/images/treadlehammer.jpg

http://www.tharkis.com/images/treadlehammer2.jpg

It followed me home! Took a lot of driving, but i'm happy! Now i just need to find someone to help me get it out of the back of my truck so i can use it.

http://www.tharkis.com/images/hammer1.jpg

http://www.tharkis.com/images/hammer2.jpg

http://www.tharkis.com/images/hammer3.jpg

I was going ot build a hammer this winter.. but someone from my blacksmith association emailed our email list today selling their treadle hammer, so i'm buying his instead. I should be picking it up this weekend =P Works for me !

My question for you sam, did you build a way to be able to change dies on the hammer face for drawing / etc?

I've got some wrought bar stock from the mill over in europe that was making wrought into the 70s, a smith whose gear i purchased had a pile of barstock he had purchased when the buisness was shutting down. The stuff is actually so well refined, that it doesnt make good knife hardware, because the grain is so small that it doesnt etch well. For things like knife hardware, you actually want lower quality wrought, which is why wagon wheels and anchor chain is used frequently, they were typically made of a low refinment quality wrought.

The bessmer process essentially killed the old bloomery pool and consolidate process of getting metal from ore. Making wrought iron was extremely time consuming and cost-ineffective.

There are people who on small scale make their own iron and steel still, most particularly bladesmiths these days, making their own crucible steel and wootz, but large scale production work of making wrought iron is economically infeasable these days, you'd have to charge more for it than expensive tool steels just because of the amount of work involved in generating and refining it.

I used to have 2 swage blocks, but I found that I was only using one of them and the other was getting zero use, so I sold the unused one to a bladesmith I know up in vermont.

Here's my current swage block, it's an original wally yater.

http://www.tharkis.com/images/shop/swageandtongs.jpg

and this is the one that I sold a few months ago, a green river #1 produced in Mass between ~1890s and 1910 ish

http://www.tharkis.com/images/green_river_swage.jpg

looks like a weight on the other end of the clinker breaker to keep it 'normally' hanging flat like it should be. His handle is a symetrical square, so the weight will keep it facing the right way.

Funny, i was just thinking about the same thing, having been looking for a colonial style hornless anvil for a while now, but for working on, not to just look pretty =D

JB weld looks like it did the trick great =D I had some sitting in a cabinet that i had used to fill the center of a bone i was using for a knife handle, and it never even crossed my mind.

Looks like a chasing and repouse set to me, unless those are much bigger than the picture lends me to believe, in which case what Mike said is likely correct.

"spring steel" is basically any tool steel used to make springs, the most common in the automotive industry today is 5160.

wrought iron as smiths define it is a material no longer produced, but still available by recycling older pieces of wrought iron. It's an iron that used to be produced in bloomeries and other long refining processes, and is known for it's high inclusion of slag and impurities and it's negligible carbon content. At high temperatures the amount of silicon in wrought iron essentially makes it self-fluxing, but if you work it at low temperatures the high number of impurities cause it to crumble and become useless. Wrought iron has been entierly replaced by mild steel in modern commercial processes.

Remounted one of my anvils this weekend, and got a mount for the other, and i'm working on a mount for the last (which I just got last friday)

150lb peter wright (the one posted in this thread earlier) now on a nice white oak stump
http://www.tharkis.com/images/shop/150lbpeterwright.jpg

My 75lb 4140 anvil
http://www.tharkis.com/images/shop/4140anvil.jpg

and my 120lb post anvil, which i'm working on chisling out the hole in a stump for currently.

http://www.tharkis.com/images/shop/postanvilstump.jpg

(further pictures of the post anvil can be found at Temporary Stake Anvil page )

EDIT:

I've got one more stake anvil, this one is a 55lb one, and can be seen in this picture.

http://www.tharkis.com/images/shop/swageandtongs.jpg

My main shop vise is mounted to my big workbench

http://www.tharkis.com/images/shop/viseandhammers.jpg

I've got another big one mounted to a 2x4 tower because i had a pile of 2x4s on hand when I wanted to mount it. I need to replace the spring on it though.

http://www.tharkis.com/images/shop/2by4towervise.jpg

Lastly is a pair of smaller ones (3 and 4 inches) both needing mounting hardware, and one needing a spring, which i'm going to mount in much more portable fashion once I forge the needed parts.

http://www.tharkis.com/images/shop/grindersandvises.jpg

I've got three gas forges, one purchased, 2 home-built.

first is my NC Tool Co Whisper baby
http://www.tharkis.com/images/shop/whisperbaby.jpg

next is a 2 burner venturi forge

http://www.tharkis.com/images/shop/2burnerventuri.jpg

Lastly is my single burner blown propane forge that I made specifically for forge welding billets for blades.

http://www.tharkis.com/images/shop/blownpropane.jpg

I'm getting forge envy >_< Nice cone btw Mike. I just sold mine this last weekend. Not that i really wanted to sell it, but it was the least used item in my shop and I took the money from it and put it asside towards the money I need to get a powerhammer (with an upcomming build-a-hammer workshop at a metal arts school near me).

Here's my meager coal forge =P

http://www.tharkis.com/images/shop/coalforge.jpg

And here's my fancy coal bin !

http://www.tharkis.com/images/coal.jpg (that's the cone i just sold this last weekend /mourn, but at least i know the person i sold it to and he said i can go and visit it at any time and use it whenever i want =P )

So i've got a nice big 30 gallon drum which i want ot use for a large water tub, but about 5 inches from the bottom there's a 3/4" long dent which is punctured through. I covered it over with a blob of hot glue for now and it's holding the water for the time being with a little bit of a drip-drip-drip leak from behind the glue plug, but I need something more permanant / better than a hot glue glob.

Anyone have any good solutions to a long term water-tight solution to the puncture in my slacktub... one that wont melt away if I accidentally get hot metal too close to it >_

I have an older stake anvil (more like a very large bickern) that's ~55lbs which I've been able to to date aproximately as colonial early to mid 1700s from other examples, though the surfaces arent that great anymore.

This stake anvil is like none that I've seen though, and stake anvils are something which I've always keept a close eye on everywhere I can find them. If this didnt have hardy-hole in one side, I'd be tempted to say it looks like a mid 1600s one I've seen in a book somewhere (cant recall where off hand, sorry), albiet with less decoration on the sides. The fact that it has a hardy hole of any type is one of the things that's throwing me.

I cant say Iv'e ever seen a mid to late 1800s stake anvil anywhere near this size, nor this style, all the ones that Iv'e seen tend to look like small farrier's anvils on posts. for example these two (which I was bidding on recently, but held off on biding more because i had just won this huge one =P)

http://www.tharkis.com/images/tools/stakeanvils.jpg

Hello, all. I just obtained this HUGE stake anvil and I was wondering if anyone knew of any ways to help try to put an age to it. I've got pictures up at

Temporary Stake Anvil page

It weighs between 120 and 125lbs, is 24.5 inches tall, 22 inches long from tip of each horn. The top has a 9" face 4" wide and there's a close to 1" squareish hole in one side. Looking at it you can see how the whole anvil was forge welded out of tons of layers and pieces of metal, including some voids in places and a few places like on the leg where you can see a forge weld didnt completely hold. The leg is a nice forged octogon with a little bit of a taper, from 3.5" to 5" at the top with the flange at the bottom 5" wide as well.

I've seen some large stake anvils before, but this one is significantly larger than any iv'e ever seen before. I'm mostly wondering if there are any identifying factors which could help me place this anvil in age. It was found in a barn up on the east coast of Maine and I picked it up on ebay for an extremely reasonable price.

Hey, I've thought about bringing my whisper baby 1 burner venturi forge with me tailgating and pounding out bottle openers for people in the parking lot. Havent done it yet, but I keep considering it !

Sounds like I may need to make one of those before my next patriots game I'm going to... I'd love to tailgate with an anvil-grill instead of the cheapo propane portable I normally use =D

As BT said, you dont want it sharp, too sharp and you'll crease the metal, but a tight radius is good. Anything from 1/8" to 1/4" radius is usualy plenty good, with 1/8" being on the 'sharp' side.