ThomasPowers

PTree has sold several hundred trowels made from RR spikes. He buys the spikes brand new and uses a powerhammer to forge them. Not something that is commercial using only "hobby" setups. As for alloys: a nice stainless can be great for working in clayey soils (lovely description of a stainless shovel being used in what once was a clay pit in "An axe, a spade & ten acres: The story of a garden and nature reserve" George Courtauld) Larger tools generally were high carbon steel and properly heat treated adding to costs for small scale production. Definitely a market for "elite" tools but it can be hard to tap into it.

Actually early wrought iron was NOT superior to bronze having similar hardness and being much harder to refine and work unlike being able to melt and pour items to close if not their final shape. (Not to mention the whole rust issue) Iron making takes a LOT of wood too! (Some of the earliest environmental laws were put in place in England to limit the number of ironmaking furnaces as they were running low on wood to build the ships to protect the country---Elizabethan IIRC) I have the book at home, I'll try to look it up tonight.) Where early iron wins is that it's found all over the place. In the bronze age people were even traveling from the Mediterranean to *Cornwall* England to get tin to make bronze. A terrible trip with no roads and no deep water ocean going boats. You can find iron ore *all* over Europe. (Shoot in WWII Italy actually reprocessed Roman iron refining slags to get more iron out of them using modern refining techniques) Only after iron was the common metal did it gradually improve enough to be considered "superior", learning to quench harden and temper was a massive big step forward though even unhardened higher carbon steels are harder and tougher than "mild" (Pleiner's "The Celtic Sword" has great details on metallurgy of the time they were beginning to work with such materials) As to "Peak" at one time we were at peak oil; whale oil for lighting and we faced a new dark age. Technology came up with kerosene and the lamps to burn it and now few people even remember that energy crisis. It's very hard to guess the future when you have no idea of what technology will come up with. Remember the old extrapolations where NYC would be 10' deep in horse dung because of the increase of horse drawn vehicles? I know of one in the telephone business that forecast that by a certain date---now passed---every women in America would be a telephone operator. Changes in technology trump extrapolation!

real handy for some tasks. I knew a 5th generation blacksmith in Stroud OK that had one of the old bridge anvils used in the oilpatch to repoint cable tool drill bits. As is common for them the face was beat to heck. So he built a frame for it and flipped it upside down and used the massive flat base to level plow points on a task he did quite a bit of at one time... You could have that one surface ground if you ever needed a fairly accurate flat to work off of!

Well I'm supposed to be making my wife a spider using 2 pitchforks for the legs and pulling a string of lights.

OK prices should be higher than OH and lower than NM---I brought a couple of anvils out of OK when I moved away back in the early 1980's (after the crash of 83)

To me salvaging is reusing previously used items---no tie in necessarily to what the previous use was. Repurposing is just yuppie speak to make it sound more upscale than what poor folks have been doing forever!

My first guess would be some sort of counterweight myself and most likely cast iron---what does the spark test say? What does the ring test say?

Outline it with blinking christmas lights

WHAT COUNTRY ARE YOU IN? Looks old english in styling---fat waist and sharp tops of the feet. It's most likely marked in CWT system 100 being 112# If you live in the USA it would be most likely a Mousehole as they are the most common brand of that style here.HOWEVER; Postman has found over 200 anvil makers that worked in England and many of them made similar style anvils, often because they started in someone else's shop and then went off and started their own businesses... It is welded up out of several pieces and yes should have a high carbon face plate welded on top---many of them will have the plate made from several piece of steel and you can sometimes see the join marks going from side to side. If you are in England then it's more of a toss-up as to which of the 200+ makers it was.

Novelty is where the *money* is at! Doing it *right* brings in even more hardcore folks and if you get a reputation for doing it right and pretty you may need to consider limiting your waiting list...

Also remember that forging is a lot more "fun" than grinding! So forging close to size will save *hours* with the noisy, dusty, *dangerous* grinder...

Better than "I had to make my dog metabolically challenged..."

Not knowing the alloys it is very hard to give specific working suggestions. Anything we suggest might be great for certain alloys and totally ruin other alloys. If you do not know what it's made from you need to dedicate some of it for testing of working temps, quenching temps/quenchants and tempering temps. Or you can risk it all heating it above magnetic and quenching in warm oil and then tempering starting around 325 degF (note degF) and testing it to see if it's too hard and if so drawing temper again at 25 degF higher and testing; repeat until you get the hardness you want. If it won't harden enough in warm oil then you can risk it in a brine quench; but don't complain if it cracks! Do remember to work it Hot, NO forging on it when it's not a nice cherry red. But don't burn it up either---the temperatures of course depend on what the alloys are.

Forge braze the leaves and then incise veins with a small chisel. I tend to take abrasive paper and run the pins between a fold of it held with thumb and forefinger until very smooth indeed. a thin coating of wax can help too. (of if you are going for all "non-modern techniques" I will smooth items with natural sharpening stones

I'm a little concerned about running exhaust back through. I'm assuming that the large pipes the burners are mounted in are to preheat the fuel/gas mix---or will you stuff kaowool around the burner pipes? Re-running exhaust spikes the CO output---perhaps a baffle to help direct any exhaust away from the intake?

Note that all prices have been give in dollars---should we have specified Peso's, Euro's, Rand, Rupees,...? Mentioning even what COUNTRY you are in in this World Wide Web can help. Even in the USA there are location differences: I would expect such an anvil to go for about twice as much where I live now than where I used to live. As for rebound you might get a 1" ball bearing and print out the rebound test results over at anvilfire and get an idea when you go look at it. They are a unitless value and so doesn't matter if you are using metric or "english" measurements.

I tend to source components from a scrapyard or from a Habitat for Humanity ReStore. Bought my 2" nipples and Ts for a couple of dollars apiece at the ReStore---unused. (prices tend to vary wildly at the ReStores I have visited, some stuff priced for more than new prices; some for giveaway prices. I visit when I can and hunt for the latter stuff) One of the problems posting such videos is people get hung up on how it it was done on the video and so start spending lots of money to try to replicate that set up when it originally may have been just what the original builder had handy on their scrap pile... Notice the range of suggestions: smaller pipe, car exhaust, sq tubing, used/ReStore components---my standard refrain when I teach is "There is only *ONE* correct way to do Blacksmithing---and that is "ANY WAY THAT WORKS!"

Note that using wrought iron as a filler rod won't work quite the way you want it to. Part of what makes wrought iron wrought iron is the presence of close to 2% ferrous silicates (slag) distributed as spicules in the material. (Was reading the 1948 ASM Handboook section on Wrought iron at Breakfast Saturday Morning...) once it's melted the ferrous silicates will float to the top of the puddle leaving just "mild steel". Easier just ti go with a regular filler rod and skip the slag issues. Macbruce: I've been hunting some real wrought iron wire for quite a while; interested in selling/trading some?

"Anvils this big are hard to find I can have neighbor help me load it. It is very heavy." Pretty clueless alright. Advertising their Cadillac as a Yugo and thinking that a 110# anvil is unusually heavy and hard to find...The "pickup only" may hold the price down a bit what with the price of gas in CA...

For over 2000 years the "common" anvil shape was like a cube of metal with a spike on the bottom to set it in a tree stump. The closer you can get to that shape the better. (I have found examples of this type of anvil from Roman times through the 1700's)

John; I have told all my "friends" that my blacksmithing stuff is going to be melted and poured over my coffin in the ground. Did this just so I didn't have to worry about eating or drinking anything my "friends" would give me---now they are trying to extend my lifespan so they can use the stuff i have gathered!

Small but large enough to really use anvils tend to go at a premium. Depending on the features and the condition US$2-3 a pound would be the range I would advise someone to pay and in your area I would advise them to be looking at the lower end of the range unless the condition was *mint*.

Knowing how it will be used and how the owner likes their blades helps a lot too---a knife used to split kindling for the cookfire needs a different temper than one just used to shave every now and then as a bragging piece. So it seems backwards but "heavy" knives I tend to temper softer than very light delicate ones as they tend to get heavy usage and the lighter ones tend to get lighter usage.

Fleamarkets are usually *NOT* good venues for hand forged items as it's full or folks trying to get stuff as cheaply as possible, (like me!) You need to find a venue where there is an expectation for spending money for handmade goods. If I was going that route I would talk with our local western wear store and see if I could get a small display case in it. People willing to shell out a couple of bills for a top of the line hat or pair of boots might be willing to buy a quality blade as well.

For my fine woven tunics I use a sewing bodkin to make eyelets and stitch around them like a button hole to have a dedicate penannular brooch fastening location. For my coarse wool brats they work fine as is. Do tone down that twist though the pin should slide easily through the fabric and not "file it"