ThomasPowers

Like the indentations on the base of some types of anvils...

Pearls before swine!

The bottom section of my woodstove flue is stainless and has achieved a deep purple temper colour after about 2 years of winter use. I don't even try to touch it! The flue on my coal forge is a nice hand warmer just a couple of feet up from the bottom. Funny that most people seem to expect the opposite.

I built a shovel from gravel shaker screening that I use to scoop up coals from a separate wood fire, shack out the ash and small bits and dump the burning charcoal into the forge. I prefer not to have the wood smoke and flame in my face while forging and in the summer the fire can be positioned so as to not increase your temps while forging. But yes I also sieve the ashes from our woodstove and have been known to, with permission, collect charcoal from a structure fire the VFD put out or HS bonfire or ... Free charcoal is free charcoal and you will use quite a bit forging!

An old tool forum might be a better place to ask about this than a blacksmithing site.

Blade de Foie Gras; a specialty of the smith. As I recall there was a series of discussion on phosphorus in iron alloys in the Archaeology Metallurgy mailing list. You might search on the archives. And as the Saga attests---don't mess with a smith!

My beast is an old Milwaukee.

Start looking for the Locomotive they hid...

One thing I have noted being involved in re-enactment is the tendency for "cookie cutter" items and way too much physical culture stuff per camp---example Every camp has an Oseberg Tripod and a Lund Spit and ... and they all look identical; when in reality there would probably be *1* for a large group of people and there would be great variability among them. We all want to show off all our goodies; especially if we have gone to the trouble to forge them from real wrought iron in a charcoal forge. I suffer from this myself! I at least sized up the Lund Spit to fit modern chickens, (larger than medieval ones). People assume it's a weapon until they see me stick a chicken on it and put it over the fire. (It's also an easy one to do in real wrought iron and so good practice towards higher levels of authenticity.)

A discussion and several recipes can be found at: http://www.historicfood.com/Wafer.htm

I like stainless for items where I don't expect the end user to do regular maintenance to keep them from rusting.

Frosty; you notice than when people fantasize about using a volcano as a source of heat for blacksmithing they never address the problem of all that sulfur damaging the hot steel? (And that was a gneiss one!)

AinA said they did make smaller ones---like 100 pounds and were cast from Vanadium Steel and were good anvils. The smaller ones had W as a trademark.

I think that the stomach acids were thought to remove bad stuff from the metal as well as the addition of the phosphorus.

"Frosty's Home for Wayward Anvils"---just drop the anvil and run!----I mean RING!