ThomasPowers

Since the previous owner was Japanese I would go with it being a hammer he liked, though the offset hammer is no more Japanese in style than western---it was a fairly common style in Europe historically as 150 year old engravings of the cutlers at Sheffield England show as well as the saw tuner's hammer still found in America at times.

make a mock up and try it out. To me it looks like the center of percussion will not be at a handy place with the straight blade, unlike bolos and kukris that have the swell to make the impact spot more normal to the blow.

I know of two wests out here in NM but both are over 700 pounds---I've never seen a "baby" one! (and one of them was *given* to a friend of mine, grr grr...)

When I moved out here I had over 100 handled tools in my rack---that was about 8 years ago and they are still accumulating---added two Atha double jacks (4 and 10 pound) and a 7 pound straight been with the British broad arrow on it the last couple of months---paid less than US$20 for the lot of them but did re-handle two of them so an extra $5 for the two handles. I'm very much a "right hammer for the job at hand" especially when doing weird stuff---I have a couple hammers I've only used to peen rivets in the tops of early medieval styled helms... I also tend to start with a lighter hammer if I'm out of practice and then move to the larger one as I warm up and then taper off to a lighter one as I tire. I used to use my 1500 gm Swedish crosspein for everything but I noticed I was really pulling the blow for delicate stuff and decided I was old and smart enough to stop stressing my joints and use a light hammer for light work. When I teach at times I like to take the hammer the student is having trouble with and use it to correct the issues to show them that the problem is *NOT* with the hammer...

I was at the fleamarket once and a fellow was selling mill balls for a dollar each. 3 booths up the aisle a fellow was selling the same balls as cannon balls $8 each! (He argued with me that they were cannon balls even when I pointed out they were the WRONG SIZE for any cannon used in America since the 1600's) Being associated with armour maker's I'm always keeping an eye out for balls and have crane headache and demo balls, flagpole balls, mill balls, ball bearings, shot put balls, ornamental iron balls; but not one I can say 100% was a cannon ball. And Hayden I'd be seriously concerned if that was a real one. They take out people on a regular basis http://www.military.com/news/article/civil-war-cannonball-kills-collector.html you might give some thought about turning it over to the sheriff's department for disposal.

Look at the use of the spring on that example---I would definitely say not 17th century in my opinion! Maybe 18th. As for tilthammers the earliest I had good info on for ironworking was from the 900's, from a discussion on the subject I had at the Medieval Technology Conference held at PennState in the 1990's. As for use of an oliver---why spend expensive materials and time to make one when you have your apprentices and journeymen just standing around eating your food! The idea of having a single smith in a shop is pretty much totally a "modern" thing based pretty much on the American frontier where the lack of manpower was a given *and* the many shops that gradually withered as smithing be came less of a money producer and many old smiths gradually slid down the slope of their career until death---also in pretty recent times. Back in "the day" having a single smith in a shop would be about as common as going into a hospital surgical suite and having *only* the surgeon working there nowadays. Even the stave church door carvings from over 1000 years ago show the smith with a helper and the Greek and Egyptian depictions show a *crowd*!

BEST for what? Anthracite is one of the worst for coking and not nearly as good for forging as a good Bituminous I'd rate it under using plain coke for smithing. Best is meaningless unless you give the criteria it was graded against Of course folks have smithed with peat before which is pretty much off the bottom of the coal scale being even below lignite. You use what you have; but personally I'd use charcoal before I'd use anthracite.

Caplet indentation, IIRC that's generally a Trenton, (can't recall if it's Trenton or Arm & Hammer without looking it back up in Anvils in America; but they were both anvils made in Columbus Ohio and sometimes may have shared their steel base castings back and forth) Either one is a top brand!

What does the bottom look like?

Some of the first environmental laws in England were to limit the number of iron producing furnaces (often called forges in older works---language drift makes research *fun*, medieval works use the term coal to mean *charcoal* and the rock form is known as stone coal or even sea coal as it would wash up on beaches from under sea veins in England) in England as the deforestation they caused was impacting shipbuilding and thus National Security! Even though smiths started to use coal as a fuel in the high to late middle ages, ("Cathedral Forge and Waterwheel", Gies & Gies---has period illustrations of blacksmiths too!) iron was still smelted from ore using charcoal until the 1700's when Abraham Darby figured out how to do it *commercially* using coke. In the Hanging Rock region of America (SE OH) the last charcoal fueled blast furnace went out of blast around WWI---(lecture/tour at the Iron Masters Conference held in Athens OH) As coke introduces sulfur into the metal "charcoal iron/steel" was still preferred until fairly recent times when they figured out adding Mn to the steel would deal with the sulfur---why even the 10XX steels have Mn as a "given" in the alloy. Sorry I get carried away...

May I commend to your attention an article on DIY anvils: www.metalwebnews.com/howto/anvil1/anvil2.html Unfortunately heavy stock is less likely to be a higher alloy than some lighter stock---it costs a heap of a lot more and so they tend to economize on it. So you most likely have A-36 which is generally used when you need steel over cast iron and don't want to pay out the nose for special alloy stuff. The grinding should tell you. If you can do good deep welds I'd go for the two piece anvil and would suggest you think about hardfacing it as Ernie suggests. They are a bit small for a good sized anvil even welded all together so separating them would not be my suggestion. OTOH just using it as it stands and grinding it smooth as necessary is a very valid way to go as well.

Vulcan is my bet. Is that round piece the leftover of the arm and hammer vulcan logo that stands proud of the surface? Vulcan's are cast iron with a thin steel face (*never* clean up a Vulcan's face by grinding!)

When I married I was very careful to choose a wife that had a consuming passion for her craft *and* that it wasn't the same craft as myself. She quite understands why I need another anvil when I have a bunch to hand just as I understand why she needs another spinning wheel when she has a bunch of them already. Now being different crafts we have to spit the spending money *but* she is never hogging my equipment or shop space and if the worst would happen she would have no interest in *my* tools. 27.5 years and counting! She jokes with me that the only thing she would want in a divorce would be a shovel because she would just inherit *ALL* the stuff anyway. Works for me.

Usually you identify them by how aggressive they are. Normal honey bees I mowed the lawn right up to their hive box---no problem. I had a friend who did bee removal in the oilpatch in TX and he talks of having to wear *FULL* equipment and being chased 1/4 mile down the road by AHB's. He says they make good honey though and being so aggressive it kept him employed---though wearing a full suit in west TX in the summer would not be my choice of employment!

Best smithing coal is metallurgical grade bituminous. To buy decent coal I have a over 2 hour trip myself; but the seller usually brings a load to our conference or I can get some off another smith making the trip. (our conference is a 2 hour trip the other way; but I;m already making it to go to the conference. I also pick up a bag or two of Sewell Seam when I drive 1500 miles to Quad-State just to punish myself with memories of how good the coal is near to where you are at!)

Hey Trip arguing back and forth is how the truth gets out! Being in LH for over 30 years you sure get used to piling up sources and evaluating how good they are and arguing little bits way past their value. Starting from a source that should be good is a great way to go! Why I'm so fussy on IFI---people expect us to *know* what we are talking about and so we should be careful to hedge our statements so they don't generalize a specific. Like "pagan blacksmith wedding ritual" Neopagan? I don't recall any Greek, Roman, Hindu, or Druid wedding rituals involving blacksmiths. I am not very read up on Sub Saharan African or Shinto or a heap of others. I shared an office for a handful of years with a fellow who went back to India to marry and we went over his ceremony in pictures in detail and there wasn't any smithing aspects to it---riding a horse yes. Now charcoal, Rehder in "The Mastery and Use of Fire in Antiquity" (a great work on biomass fueled furnaces BTW) mentions that in a charcoal fueled bloomery the reducing zone is about 12-13 times the mean diameter of the fuel above the tuyere. So you can see where 1" cube charcoal needs a nice deep fire compared to 1/4" coal to get a reducing fire. (Note this book also contains plans for a "foolproof" small bloomery in the appendix) As for insulation: packing things tight usually makes for worse insulation rather than better. I think coal does better in that it tends not to be burning outside of the central fire and with smaller size pieces tends to have fewer paths to let heat travel out by radiation and gas flow. However if you had two large pieces one of charcoal and one of coal and put a torch to one side I'd bet the heat would transfer through the coal faster!

One suggestion: drill a series of small holes along the middle of the top tool and source a light duty compression spring so you can use a roll pin to set you system up so the dies are open just a tad larger than your intended work piece; but will close with no effort when you hit them with the hammer. My favorite swing arm fuller has a die spring mounted in the pivot to keep the arm aligned and positioned where ever it's set but doesn't sap energy from the hammer blow. It also has the swing arm extend past the pivot point so I can tap it with the hammer and it opens to where I need it for the stock I am using.

1095 is overkill---save it for blades!!!!!! Also 1/4" is way thin: 1/2" to 1" is better. I'd go with something like a truck (semi, dumptruck, etc) leafspring piece and remember to preheat when welding! Heat treat to normalize will probably work fine.

Howdy, Welcome; lots of good ornamental work in NYC; not to mention the museums like the MET, Cloisters, etc. What kind of metalworking are you interested in? I'm out in New Mexico herding bits for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory; but my job ends the end of this year when we switch from construction to operations on the ALMA project. Know of any jobs for a geologist out around NM? I have a BS in Geology and a BS in Computer Science and a strong interest in historical smithing particularly early medieval through renaissance.

I lucked into a bunch of CP when I first started using it and now have a tendency to let my apprentice have the alloy bits as his arm is about 30 years younger than mine...

Looks to me that someone wanted to use a die from a different type of hammer that they had to hand and so botched that up to make it work. My latest Champion came with a LG die in it which is very different than a champion die!

Can you use a drill press in UNPOWERED mode to apply pressure and give you a larger piece to grab and rotate? My press is large enough that I can slip a bar into the cross hole that allows you to knock the taper bits out and have an easy lever to turn.

If it were mine I'd take it over to a local VoTech machining program and ask if they could make another one and how much it would cost. I've had very good luck that way with only nominal contributions to their end of semester party fund. Tolerances on that part are probably fairly loose with only the inside diameters where the shafts fit being fussy at all. You might even forge a preform to make machining cheaper.

Broken pitman? No biggie I've seen them re-cast in bronze and machined, Machined from steel or bought from Sid if it's a LG part or can be modified from an LG part.) On my Champion it's bronze

Now to check out those sources in the bibliography---though I wouldn't use the term "officiate" for something done by the couple themselves where the smith had no part but as witness. Seems to limit it to english colonists too. But at least you do have a better source than all the blacksmith urban legends that are so often spread. My apologies. Don't know how deep I'll get to go as I'm prepping for a trip to the UK right now; mayhap I'll find one of those sources while I am in Hay on Wye book buying. Most of my sources to hand deal with medieval and ancient times. (And it's amazing how bad some info by renowned scholars can be! Norman Cantor of "Inventing the Middle Ages" fame was editor of a Medieval Encyclopedia that still had the victorian canard about knights needing a crane to lift them onto their horses before battle---when in actuality a knight's armour weighed a lot less than what a friend of mine was supposed to carry and fight with as Special Forces in Nam!---and distributed better to boot! Of course his area of expertise was not in armour and so he couldn't judge the entry properly.)