ThomasPowers

Seems to me that you might be able to find dies already made for this sort of thing. Best would be to find someone to whom the punchouts were waste material and buy them at scraprate. I had a friend making cowboy hats that had a bunch of circles cut from sheet metal at a price until he found the local Pipe & Iron supply store was selling them for a lot less as ends for welding on pipe. He said they were slightly domed but one whack on the anvil and they were flat.

Find the local ABANA affiliate if there is one, attend a meeting and ask if there is anyone near you. I saw 3 affiliates listed for Georgia and there is the possibility that one in an adjoining state is actually closer. Georgia Alex Bealer Blacksmith Association Ocmulgee Blacksmith Guild Southern Blacksmith Association - SBA

Note that some of the fiberglass handled hammers have very small eyes and are not suitable for converting to wooden handles.

Worth is subjective and I'm cheap. My 515# anvil cost me US$350 in the mid 90's and is in mint condition.

Learning to stop *before* you make the un-recoverable mistake due to tiredness/lack of focus is a big part of experience in my experience.

I know a number of folks who got started in smithing doing specialized tools for their woodworking and ended up smiths instead! One fellow was a bowl turner and wanted some specialized curved shaft tools designed to hold carbide lathe inserts. So I invite him over, take a piece of stock and heat it up and stick the hot end in the vise and tell him to "grab the cold end and bend it to suit himself"---"oops too far!" "So bend it back..." "Perfect". We let it cool and next weekend he bought an anvil from me and started to build his own forge.

I have a PW missing a foot. The rest of it looks pretty *MINT*. I love the missing foot as that dropped the price to what I could pay yet has no effect on *using* it.

Well there are "mistakes" and then there are "mistakes". Try to avoid the ones that for me go "Dear, I've just done something stupid, can you take me to the hospital---quick!"

If you solution the alloys and quench they are quite rust resistant. Electo polishing or passivation are needed for very tough environments! I like the black of hand forged stainless. I've done an eating set that has gone 20 years of abuse---acidic foods, dishwasher cycles, etc and never was passivated or electropolished and has never rusted---and it's several stainless alloys, 440C for the knife and random common scrap for the fork and spoon.

Sorry european diseases wiped out close to 90% of the native Americans soon after contact with Europeans. Hard to continue a culture when 90% of the folks have died. Now in general the Europeans did *not* do this on purpose as they were as clueless as everyone else about disease mechanisms. Smallpox in particular was a terrible killer, we have a Mayan/Aztec? codex showing people suffering from it. No need for "enhanced Farming techniques" especially as most of the colonial accounts say that the Europeans were lousy farmers and almost starved to death before they learned the local methods of farming...

Paulky what it's worth is somewhere between scrap rate and 4 dollars a pound depending on CONDITION, STYLE and LOCATION. So can you answer this question for me: I can buy a ford pickup---what is it worth? Kind of hard without details! As for loading and unloading when I bought my 515# fisher I used a 600# rated 2 wheel dolly to move it from the garage to my pickup and then used a "cherry picker/engine hoist" to pick it up and put it in the truck. I used a STOUT tree and a come along to remove it from the truck and used the truck to drag it in front of my shop and then had 4 stout friends lift it with rods through the hardy holes and bring it in the shop. I recently moved it again by laying 2x6 on the shop floor and pushing the anvil off the stand onto them then using a chain and the truck to pull it to the new location then I put a rod in the hardy and pulled back on it to lift the front section and placed a piece of 2x6" under the front and then pushed on the rod to lift the back and placed 2 pieces of 2x6 under it and continued alternating which end I lifted with the rod and the direction I stacked the wood pieces until the anvil was the same height as my stump and then worked it over onto the stump. This method works very well as long as you are *CAREFUL* to keep your wood stacks stable as you build them. And as always keep yourself out of the way of any possible failure mode. No problem dropping the anvil on the floor---big problem dropping it on *you*!

You could set up and do reasonable amounts of blacksmithing very nicely in a 3mx3m area with forge, workbench with postvise, anvil and tool rack. You could do small amounts in a 1mx1m area. I have built a one fire brick forge that uses a plumbing torch and it and all the equipment to use it fit in a 5 gallon bucket for transport! You can quiet anvils down substantially by tightly affixing them to their mounting set up. As noted check with your neighbors *first*. Coal smoke is not very nice so many people in tight quarters use charcoal or propane forges---no smoke, no bother! "Bribing" your neighbors with hand forged items is a time honoured tradition in smithing...

The Sri Lankan furnaces were blown, (actually sucked as the wind passing over the top of the furnaces had a greater affect than the wind hitting the faces with the tuyeres according to the write up in nature...) The self drafting furnaces are based pretty much on the same principle as the side sucker chimney for a forge. Hot air rises pulling in more air. All the furnaces we toured at the IronMasters conference in Ohio were blown, some even by steam engines! Most were cold blast as I recall

Well a bloomery doesn't deal with molten iron---more like old library paste a sort of sludgy mess oozing it's way down. (Unless you are making cast iron which is sort of a "mistake" save for it's carburizing properties...)

David; I find that funny as I am almost guaranteed a sale when I demo an item. In fact they want the items I made in front of them and not the identical thing I made in the morning before people showed up! Even if the earlier one has a better finish on it as I had more time to let a finish dry.

I'd check to see if it shows any signs of "working" in use.

Some of that crack around the horn might be from the original forge welding of the horn to the body and not mean much

1forgeur: are you sending our wives postcards advertising that you will give money for smithing equipment? If you have solid plans for a hammer you might outline a spot for it with some fiber board to make it easy to remove when you want to build a block to place it on.

Tig welding of tendrils gives the flow and avoids cleanup issues. Perhaps looking into a weed burner and a propane torch for spot heating---helps a lot of have firebrick around it to help hold heat. Look into blacksmithing!

Well he was cleaning up stick welds

They are mounting holes and probably a retrofit by some owner during the long history of this anvil.

Heat to scaling temp and let cool, or paint

A *big* hammer will need an isolated inertia block anyway and 4" is easier to cut through than heavier thicknesses and is ok for a 25#'r. Rolls don't shock the floor and so only their weight is a consideration.

"stressing the weld"---make good welds! I took a pattern welded billet once and set it on end and forged it down into a disk without the welds shearing!

One of my students built a semi drum forge and ended up abandoning it as he had no way to notch it and couldn't get the work piece to the hot spot. I'd say notch down to 2-3 inches above the tuyere---depending on the fuel which you didn't mention. For charcoal you can notch higher off the grate. When I made a brake drum forge I went the other way. I used a light drum and built a "C" shaped sheet metal fence to extend the walls up with the gap taking place of the notch. I also cut a mousehole opposite the gap at the hot spot height so I could push long bars through. If I needed to get large forms hot I could pull the fence and lay the workpiece over the top of the shallow brake drum and pile coal/coke on top of the place I needed heated. I could also lift this forge with one hand...