ThomasPowers

Most anvils being made today are made from cast steel---a big ladle pouring molten steel into a mold looks the same for an anvil or for a RR wheel... There is once company in Germany that may still forge anvils. I'd ILL a copy of "Anvils in America" that at least has a good shot of open die forging of an anvil in it. Note that Quad-State will have refacing an anvil the traditional way (forge welding on a new face) as their Friday night demo...

The traditional method was to dress the anvil and forge weld a new face on it. Takes a crew and some experience! If you look for Rob Gunter's anvil repair method on the web say www.cvbg.org/anvilrepair699.pdf for example he gives good instructions for building up using an arc welder with information on pre/post heat and the type of rod to be used (most welders guess wrong if they don't know about anvils)

You will waste much more in time and money over the next year than the cost of going to Quad-State and learning a lot *fast*! You have a month---I could probably mow lawns and make enough to cover costs in that time. Note that these are some of the top smiths in the world coming to show folks how to do stuff and there is a specific beginner's area. While the smith at the Renaissance fair could be some untrained hack---shoot I demo'd at a renaissance fair when I had been smithing less than a year and often brought my students to the OSU one twenty years later. Your call; but I bet the cost of getting into the fair would be a good chunk of the $30 to spend a day at Quad-State, especially when you can bring your own food. You'd be welcome to park a cooler in my camp. BTW if only 1 day go for Saturday!

Well the last time I can recall Emert smithing he was in his 90's and there was a smith in NW AR who was going strong at 86 when I met him---30 years enough for you? Shoot I learned enough to get married in only 28...

I had a smithing meeting once where the end of the meeting was putting rod through both hardies of my big new anvil and having everyone gather round and move it into the forge building...(it was the 515# one)

Not knowing what you plan to be forging makes it hard to say if this would be a good forge for you. Like me asking if this sports car would be a good one to get without telling you if I need a dump truck, a 5 child carrier, or just something to blow off steam on weekends.

Working metal cold does not refine the grain size *unless* you bring it up to renucleation temps afterwards. Working it cold messes up the crystalline structure by introducing dislocations that act to work harden it.

Frosty I have one of those too---but it doesn't come apart mine was cast as a solid with a hole all the way through it and another with a threaded section. I had a friend who does hobby machining make a threaded rod to fit it as the shaft. It just fits in a milk crate and is quite a hefty ballstake! Axle material should make a great stake if handled right----From a friend of mine who used to work in an axle plant: "For axles the industry standard was 1045H below 1 3/8" stock and 1541H for axles above that size, for trucks.These modified steel are much more prone to quench cracking than plain 1045/1050, and I would suggest quenching in oil. These steels are also prone to grain growth if held at forging temp for very long without working the steel."

As an interim it's fairly easy to take a longer section of rod and bend it in two and fit the bend in the hardy hole and then bend it again to rest on the anvil with one leg of the rod parallel to and slightly above the other---so you fuller on both sides when you stick the work piece between the legs

You lucky dog! You live close to one of the greatest blacksmithing groups in the USA---SOFA which holds their meetings in Troy OH---we used to carpool from Columbus to go to them. They sell coal to members (and membership is dirt cheap!) And most of all they put on the greatest annual blacksmithing conference in the world IMNSHO! It's just a month away and has really great tailgating and a beginner's session at it. PLEASE think of attending it. I'm going from here in New Mexico unless my wife's surgery prevents me! As to your problem: Forge welding is one of the more advanced techniques and is a lot more involved than just folding it over and hammering on it. I would really suggest you learn the basics before worrying about welding. If you want to learn forge welding one Saturday afternoon being coached by someone who does it a lot will save you about 6+ months of trying it on your own---but you should still know the basics of forging before hand. Rebar is often not a good alloy for hatchets for something that small you might want to try a HC marked railroad spike and quench it in "super-quench" (Not really a good alloy either but everyone seems to go through that phase---the weird "ampersand" RR clips are actually much better steel. Now working on a section of track is not usually a good way to go. A big solid lump of steel makes a better anvil. If you can find it a large piece of sq stock mounted *vertically* in a bucket of concrete makes a dandy knifemaker's anvil. The hammer "sees" only the mass directly below it so even a hefty chunk of rail laid sideways has very little metal under the hammer face.

With lots of cribbing and a lever I have loaded a triphammer into my truck by my self! One of the things that really hurt when I had to move to NM was giving up a 15 year collection of cribbing and so not having any here to work with. (when I think of screw eyes I don't usually think of them as having eyes large enough that a good sized rod for supporting 300+# from the middle would fit through them---too big a screw thickness and they degrade the strength of the piece of wood they are in. Good to know you are aware of the vector issues with flexible lifting materials!)

Heat treating is a number of differing techniques. If your axles are high carbon steel heating them till non-magnetic (glowing red) and quenching them in oil will make them as brittle as glass if you don't then draw temper on them. If they are a low end of medium carbon steel it might just make them harder to bend though tempering is always a good idea after hardening! If they are a very low carbon steel then heating them up and quenching them in oil may actually make them softer! Talk with the manufacturer first before experimenting! And note that steel will often bend or warp during heat treat

Well it's nice being able to hold your piece longways across the face and still have your tongs not interfering. Using the step for bends is a common method. I used to do that to curl the body of rasptlesnakes before I rigged a swage to do that in.

Alas, no pictures seem to have survived of it. I've even sold off my swiss army HEAVY crossbow since then. BTW you might be able to cant the bow to lift the string a bit more through judicious filing of the wood where it's mounted.

Melt the plastic hairdryer, not the drum.

DANGER look at the loading factors from using two points separated! or for an example: drive your vehicle about 20' from a tree. Tie a rope from it's bumper to the tree. Grab the rope at the midpoint and pull it sideways and see how much effort it takes to move your parked vehicle! I usually use: inclined plane, rollers, pulleys, comealong or enginehoist to move anvils. To lift my main shop anvil I used two lolly columns helping to support the shop truss with a heavy strip of steel between them and then used a chain around the truss and strip to fasten a comealong to---it's a 500# anvil! We used a 600# capacity engine hoist to get it into the truck when I bought it>

Depends a whole lot on the type of equipment you have access to! I just did a couple of armouring stakes where I used old odd shaped sledgehammer heads for the tops and forged out the shafts from 2.5" square stock---ONLY because I was able to borrow access to a 100# LG triphammer and a 500# Chambersburg powerhammer http://s941.photobucket.com/albums/ad257/gridlok/Aug meeting/Projects/Armour Stakes/ (if you dig through them you can see a shot of the sledge hammer head I was working towards---the RR spike driver on the swage block) Doing this by hand would be the death of me! Note too that most sheetmetal stakes are pretty soft. Hard is nice but generally it's more important to have the mirror polished hammer than the stake.

Blacksmithing, like cooking, has a "Work Triangle". In smithing it is the Forge-Anvil-Postvise especially when working small items you want these to be withing a "turn" of each other or at most a turn and 1 step. I suggest you get some sidewalk chalk and lay out a suggested set-up and then try moving around in it remembering you don't want to feed your tongs/elbows into the forge zone when using the other items. (even better if you can manage it is to get some boxes the right size and put them in place and holding a piece of stock in a pair of tongs try to maneuver around in it)

A classic example is that of the traditionally made japanese sword. They start with tatara made tamahagane steel that can be nearly 2% carbon and after the repeated folding and welding in a charcoal fire they end up around 0.5% C.

If the face is not hardened then the anvil has been through a fire as all PW's were sold with a hardened face! Very Good Deal for an excellent brand of anvil.

The original stand looked noisy, flexible and subject to tip over. The stack of wood stand would work better if the wood pieces were going vertically rather than horizontally---a lot less bounce. I would not post that one as a suggestion myself. You will need someway to tie the anvil down. My main shop anvil is 500+ pounds and it will still shift on it's stand when I'm doing heavy pounding on it! Tieing it down helps the noise aspect as well. Doug, build a design where you can bolt things together and then weld it up so the bolts are a "failsafe" backup.

The bow should be placed so that there is no string pressure down against the stock---the string should ride about the thickness of a 3x5 card above the wood. The nut is *not* supposed to be supported by the bolt through it, that's just to keep it from falling out when you turn it upside down. The nut runs in a "bearing race" so that you can have quite strong loads on it without the danger of the pin through it bending or binding. Is yours set up that way? You may want the tiller longer and closer to the stock. Also remember that the stock of a crossbow was not placed against the shoulder like the stock of a rifle is today. And most importantly *EVERY* state I have lived in that allowed crossbows for shooting deer in season required a positive safety and so that bow would not be legal to hunt with and the laws are quite draconian on the subject! (built my first crossbow around 1985 using the plans in "The Crossbow: Its Military and Sporting History, Construction and Use" (ISBN: 160239010X / 1-60239-010-X) Payne-Gallwey, Ralph---who was a curator at the British Museum when he wrote it...)

Make your mistakes on knives, *much* faster turn around time and so the learning process is faster. Once you can reliably make a *good* large knife start working towards a sword. Now as to which is best, what type of swords do you want to make? For japanese start with tantos, then wak's then katana not moving forward till all the mistakes of the previous versions are dealt with. For european I would (after the knives) start with a single edged saber and then go to a double edged blade like a roman gladius and then to a double edged with fuller(s) like a viking blade and then onto high middle ages blades and then on the renaissance blades---both great swords and rapiers.

Avadon, the manufacturers of quench materials will probably have tech sheets for their products with information on suggested ones for specific uses.

Most older armour plate were not high carbon steels wanting *tough* over hard. Nickle steels were common. I do not know much about the more modern stuff though I have been assured that some changes have been made since 1900...