ThomasPowers

With that anvil; yup only good for straightening nails and setting rivets if it's cast iron; if you were close I'd let you have a chunk of RR Rail I got for US$1 at the fleamarket and you could beat stuff on it. I am so sorry you can't afford to spend a couple of dollars to get a usable anvil---except that you could probably find one for FREE. Please get it out of your head that you have to have a london pattern anvil to do smithing! The japanese forge katanas on anvils that look like a rectangular hunk of steel; there is a video of a professional bladesmith forging kukri using a sledge hammer head as his anvil. NONE of the medieval arms and armour were made using the london pattern anvil NONE! I have documented plain cubes of metal with a spike on the bottom as being used for anvils for over 2000 years while the london pattern dates back a bit over 200 years. When I made my complete beginner's kit for under US$25 I found the broken knuckle of a RR car coupler and it made a great anvil---had a flat section and a curved section weighed around 80 pounds and was free. If you want to smith you will smith even if you have to use a curbstone as an anvil, ( Anstee did his work replicating early medieval pattern welded swords using a cheese weight as an anvil! "The Sword in Anglo-Saxon England", H.R.Ellis Davidson, appendices) Here's another example of "improvised" anvil ton's better than a cast iron ASO (Anvil Shaped Object) http://www.marco-borromei.com/fork.html So stop focusing on "can't" and start focusing on DO! ("There is only do or do not"...) Also if you put your general location in your profile you might get offered forging time at a local to you smithy---I have open forging on a regular basis here in Central NM for example.

Note that while a lot of us won't have Nitrogen to flush a tank with, we may have CO2 as I get old CO2 extinguishers to make bells from and have to vent them before cutting...

Never had any problems picking up free auto coil springs from a local repair shop---except that they generally want to give me more than I want to take! Take a nice sized coil spring and cut it on opposing sides to make a dozen ( pieces. Now it's easier to straighten and you can do a lot of practice on forging with all of it being the same alloy and then you can also practice the heat treat finding out what works best for that alloy by testing to destruction---and still have a couple of pieces left for "good blades" when you get done. I also get given steel at the trash transfer station when I take the household trash there once a week---the joys of rural life. I get it *cheap* at the scrap yard next door and have been picking up some old (100+ years) mining steel that's high carbon for about 10 cents per blade made...

Not very old though. They tended to get beat to pieces in the oil fields but I'd bet that anvil dates *after* 1900 and most likely from around the 1930's

Note with the hard fire brick liner I would double the burner requirements---what are you planning to do with it? That's more of an industrial set up to do lots of major forging all day long. *NOT* a good set up for a hobby forge---it will cost you so much in propane that you could *give* it away and build another forge and still come out ahead!

My brake drum forge used the base of a work stool that happened to hold it just fine. I put in a fence to make the firepot deeper and it was my major billet welder for several years even though it cost less than US$25 *total*.

GREAT FIND! Arm and Hammer made some of the most elegant designed anvils very handy for ornamental work. 225 is a good weight for a shop anvil too. Finally it looks in *beautiful* shape. Did you manage to get it?

Is it hard firebrick or soft?

This is a matter of opinion. Assuming you already have basic smithing skills and knowing that higher carbons steels are available pretty much free I hold that it's better to practice on what you will be using as you learn the habits of working *it* and not the habits of working mild. I've seen a lot of blades ruined because the smith tried to work the high carbon steel like it was mild steel. And this is how I've taught it for over 30 years now. Now if you don't have the basics down; well perhaps you should do your remedial work before taking the advanced class. And 10xx could be everything from mild steel to quite high carbon steel with 30 points being the cut off between mild and medium carbon steels. 30 -60 points for medium carbon steel and 60+ points for high carbon steel---though you do top out and turn the material into cast iron around 2%

Nice clean execution. A possible suggestion: Can you make the side walls hinged so that they could be folded in against the back wall and then *locked*. The displays we have on the SWABA mobile forging trailer do that and makes it very convenient to shut down at the end of the day on a multi day show.

The only solid brass screwboxes I have seen were replacement ones---Frank how about you?

For my long linear firepot I left the end of the tuyere open and just used a ramrod to control the length blown.

You can tell when I'm teaching a lot of classes as I burn the hair off my forearms to demonstrate the dragon's breath to new students---really opens their eyes to how much heat is coming out of the forge and not to forget about it if they drop something right in front of the forge. I've thought of making a burner shroud that suspends the burners in a larger pipe to allow exhaust preheating. However I'd have to use a blown burner so I can make SURE that no exhaust gets re-run and no fussy little parts would get heat damaged in the burner itself.

Got my tong reins crossed for you! May you find the rusty bird of anvilness almost in your own back yard....

Actually I was thinking of the song "Back in the U.S.S.R." by The Beatles so I guess I am dating myself even further...Always my favorite "beach boys song" even if it had nothing to do with them!

Well it comes down to do *you* think it needs a chimney? What's ok for one fellow will be impossible environment for another. Outside forges do tend to need more of an enclosed fire area to profit most from a chimney though. One question your profile says location Georgia: is that Georgia in the USA or Georgia in the USSR?

you may need to go though an abrasives supplier that will custom make belts for you.

If you are in the USA anvils tend to have a selling price peak around 100 +/- 25 pounds---most handy size for many people and then another peak starting above say 300#. They tend to be cheaper in the USA in the midwest and more expensive toward the coasts. Ohio is a low point while CA is a high point---*generally* they are also rare in areas with low population densities around 1900---like NM for example. Where you are I don't know but we could ask our friends in England, South Africa, the Netherlands, Australia,...to chip in if you are not in the USA.

I think the important thing you learned was that you need to experiment with PW patination to figure out what works best for what *YOU* want! Thanks for the various pictures showing different processes on the same piece.

Well find a local Metal Sales place and call them and ask about their prices for: 1/4", 3/8", 1/2", 5/8" and 3/4" hot rolled steel in Sq and Round, 20' stick. They are *used* to this as that's how it works in the market. Now compare your price to the going rate and decide if it's a good price in your market area---and don't forget to factor in travel time and distance, my local place is a lot cheaper if you consider it's an hour each way and so about 1/2 a day too to get steel at the *cheap* big city places... Also I budget my scrap yard time under "entertainment" as it's like a treasure hunt every time I visit the yard.

Ric; I had fun at that Demo and I must say you dealt with the floating eyeball in the quench tank very well... I originally started out with an electric blower and later switched to a hand cranked blower as I decided I liked it better. Later still I found that I preferred my double lunged bellows to the hand cranked one---save that it was a pain to travel with (and got left when I made my last move as it was 20 years old and needing to be replaced rather than patched all the time...) As I do historical demos, I have a Y1K set up with two single action bellows with no check valves---it is my least favorite method because it really requires a helper to do substantial work with it and is a pain to do *any* work single handed. HOWEVER I can say that a "good" example of an air mover is LIGHT YEARS BETTER than a bad example of the same sort of thing---I could pump my double lunged bellows with my pinkie, a friend messed up his rotator cuff using a double lunged bellows *not* set up properly. My hand crank blower was easy to spin and would make 3 full turns after letting go. Other small rivet forge blowers or large fancy blowers took considerable force and constant cranking, etc. So if you don't like how a method is working for you it may be that the specific system is at fault rather than the method!

Columbian Anvil---these are cast STEEL anvils and so tend to have more edge issues. HOWEVER being solid cast steel they can also be fixed with less possibility of catastrophic failure. If you do a search you will find that I hardly ever suggest folks weld on their anvil---but in this case I would give thought to using the Gunter method of anvil repair to make that anvil a show piece. DO NOT have some random welder work on it without knowing if they know squat about anvil repairs. The Gunter method is a tried and true method. Best would be if a local ABANA affiliate is holding an anvil repair clinic and taking it to one of those. (I've been to ones in Ohio and New Mexico so far...) If that anvil was in better shape that would be a *bragging* price indeed so no buyer's remorse needed And don't fall for the "lets put a sharp point on the horn" idea. I find that blunt horn impacts on my legs and nearby places are lots more fun than sharp horn impacts and if I need a small sharp horn I can forge on to use in the hardy horn, (and have done so for most of my anvils over the years)

I don't see where heat removed from the firebox and fed back in would make things hotter? If it's not sapping a lot of heat from it then it's not heating up the input air much either; but every BTU used to preheat the input *is* coming out of the firebox's heat balance. Stealing it from the exhaust making the exhaust cooler and the input hotter looks like a heat balance on the positive side for the firebox. It's a good thing to think about; as reducing energy usage goes directly to the bottom line for us. Also factor in buildability and maintainability on your system as there are things it's possible to do that may not be practicable to do. (Doing all your forging in a hard vacuum would certainly deal with those scaling and decarburization problems! but the PPE tends to be expensive...)

Sq is not necessarily simpler. I made my round one from the axle covers from a banjo rear end. Bought a set of them made into jack stands for $3 at a fleamarket dropped it in and was DONE---about the time you got your welding leathers on...Sill using the first one 25 years later, second one is a "spare" I'd go with what you have to hand and see if it fits your needs. Corners have no special value that I have found in 30+ years of smithing. If you have to fabricate it from ground zero they are easier to weld and often Sq ones can have extra depth to them. NOT KNOWING HOW YOU PLAN TO USE YOUR FORGE it's all just a guess anyway.

Just a reminder that the London pattern anvil is a couple centuries *after* that axe. (Always hurt me to see great medieval replicas stamped with modern anvils as the anvil and crossed hammers is a fairly common smith's marking these days) Have you thought of a design using you and your kids initials?