ThomasPowers

To quote a friend of mine "There are no mistakes in forging; just mid project design changes!"

When people ask *me* to make an offer I start at US$1 a pound and let them counter. $1 a pound was a going rate for decades and sometimes you can still get it!

Looks to be English, post 1820, in quite decent using condition since the crack is not around the hardy or horn or face areas it is probably of no importance. If it's a decent price it would make a good starter anvil. (I have been known to use damage that doesn't affect the usability of the anvil as a price negotiating point...)

I've read of it in old machinist books on heat treating small parts

Yes you will draw the temper on the cold chisel, not a problem if it's then reserved only for hot steel, shoot if you can pick up and old unplated one at the fleamarket for a dollar or less you may want to forge it down thinner so it will slit better and just normalize it after forging. To use a put a cutting plate on my anvil, lay the hot metal on top of it and stick the chisel on it and HIT taking the chisel off every couple of blows to cool in a can of water. Sometimes I will use a hold down to hold the piece, or have a student hold it with tongs while I slit. The cutting plate makes sure I can goof up and damage the anvil face. It does make the process louder so wear hearing protectors. A round punch is a "proper drift" but not a hammer handle drift or hawk drift. (I like to use hammer handle drifts as those handles are easier and cheaper to come by out here) However if you drift it out round you can generally hammer in on the sides and get pretty close to one type of a hammer handle eye

I use old steel wheelbarrow wheels for tong racks using what I find ever for the stands. The barrel's nice but you may want to remove the bottom of it so if anything drops in you don't have to remove the top and then lean way down in to fish it out. (don't ask me how I know that one, there were no witnesses and I'll lie convincingly!)

Fires were a fact of life when you heated and cooked and forged and lighted with open flames. Of course back 120 years ago if your anvil lost it's temper in a fire you could ship it to a anvil factory that would reheat treat it or would even reface it! (Some adds for these services are reproduced in Anvils in America) Now days most heat treaters charge more than the anvil cost to re-heat treat it and they are not set up to do it properly it requiring a strong large jet of water to get through the steam jacket. In "Country Blacksmithing" McRaven mentions doing one using the local fire department to provide a high pressure hosing for it.

O had a student make a forge from a Semi brake drum. *very* heavy! The fire's hot spot was too deep for him to use except for the ends of stock of it her bend the stock in two. Finally he took my advice and filled in the bottom and rased the hot spot to near the rim. Now extremely very heavy indeed!. He ended up abandoning it when he moved... Use such a large one for a base for something and get a shallower one for the firepot.

It's a beaut!

Sam you ought to get over here some time for Quad-State and see 800 blacksmiths get together for a conference and that's a minor few of all the ones out here!

A lot of the more modern anvils were arc welded at the top-bottom join. If it really worried you you could do likewise. Does it have a serial number on the front of the foot? The face looks in good using condition and I think that $2 a pound would be a good price for your location.

On the other hand if someone finds a piece of your work and tries to find you on the net it would be easier to google rivermead forge than try to figure out how to hunt for the 5 versions.

Well making hamburgers doesn't teach you much about pastry cooking. I'd suggest learning on a medium to high carbon material like auto coil spring as it does work differently and has different needs than lower carbon steels. If you do all your practicing on lower carbon steels you will have to retrain on higher ones and still be prone to make mistakes through "habit". *AND* if you do get a good one you can practice your heat treating (of which tempering is only 1 step) *AND* if that works out then you have a knife not a mild steel display piece. However it will help you a lot to learn hammer control first and there are lots of projects in the Blue Prints section here.

Use Weyger's methods, dig a bigger trench forge out back and use a vacuum cleaner exhaust to blow it. WATCH OUT FOR THE STEAM WHEN YOU QUENCH, get it in the water fast and deep! Case hardening a moderately high carbon steel is wasting more time and money.

Ian did you see my post about making a simple sheet metal "fence" that drops in the drum around the edges with a gap in the front and a mousehole across from it? Allows you to get a nice deep fire. I used mine for billet welding that way.

So what did your *LOCAL* power company say when you asked them? First place to call for a question like this----why settle for guesses!

There is quite a few historical types here even some pre Y1K folk. Are you interested in the early metallurgy, materials, processes or are you just interested in making historical looking items using modern materials and processes?

You still have a decent thickness of face left on it and the face itself is not gouged to pieces. Don't worry about the edges if you need a sharp corner make a hardy tool with one! At US$1 a pound *I* would buy it and I'm notoriously cheap... Jump on it!

Sam I think this is merely an artifact of information filtering on the 'net I: a large number of them were not destroyed in the US Civil War---this is an "urban legend" 2: Actually there are several anvil companies in the USA whose production was in the hundreds of thousands of anvils Hay Budden, Fisher, Trenton, Arm and Hammer, Columbian etc were all major anvil makers in the US, (See Anvils in America for a rundown on makers and the numbers they did where possible) 3: You forget the size of America and the lack of population density back in the "anvil" period. Example: Area of United Kingdom 244,820 sq KM population in 1881 25,974,439 population in 2008 60,943,912 (July 2008 est.) so a bit more than double the 1880 number Area of just New Mexico---the state I live in---315,194 sq KM population in 1880 apx 150,000 population in 2008 1,984,356 so about a 10 times increase or as I tell folks; "If every ranch had a complete blacksmith's shop then the total number of them in 1880 would be about 5." My neighboring ranch is 260 sq km in size and it's a fairly "small" one out this way... So can you see where NM might be an anvil poor area now days? Places like Ohio that was thickly settled in the 1880's do have loads of anvils still about. I used to buy a good brand name anvil in great shape for under US$1 per pound every year when I lived in Ohio and of course Quad-State Blacksmiths Round-Up usually has over 100 for sale at it each year---we had a fellow go there one year and buy 30 of them for his "collection". A lot of the caterwauling you see on the net about not being able to find an anvil is pretty bogus. Folks are just not going about the right way of doing it. Sort of like going to horse shows looking to buy goats and complaining that they can't find any. In anvil poor New Mexico, I went out and found 2 anvils in one week when a friend needed one.

Look for spikes that have HC stamped on the top. Quench them in "super quench", Don't expect very much out of them. No temper or a low one---say 275 degF. OTOH the "rr clips" that look sort of like an open ampersand start out with a higher carbon content than the best of the spikes and may actually be twice the carbon content of a HC spike depending on manufacturer and quality level. You'll notice how much harder they are under the hammer! Hardening = brittling so as the tang of a blade does not need to be hardened, (some medieval swords even had a no carbon wrought iron tang welded on) why make it more brittle as well? As a pommel will not be getting much use as a "hammer" I would not harden it either myself. As has been alluded to *starting* with knives is sort of like wheeling your car onto the Indy 500 track and asking folks how to win the race when you don't know how to drive yet.

Shoot you will be within driving distance of Quad-State come September! Great place to buy new and used equipment, books, materials even without the 5 or so top notch demo's going on simultaneously! There are a couple good groups up that way, Patrick how close will he be to the one your are in?

If you are not a farrier I would skip looking at farrier anvils for general blacksmithing. They tend to be on the high side pricewise too. If you go out and beat the bushes you can probably find a good anvil for much less; shoot my 515# Fisher was only $350 and it was in mint condition.

Thickness of an American dime is the edge thickness before heat treat. Sharpening is the LAST thing done to a blade before mailing it out, after: heat treat, finishing, hilting, making a scabbard for it!

Heavy forging when hot does help refine the grain structure of steel that can help with it's toughness afterwards.

Folks; if you depend entirely on your Dr to keep up with your health you are "leaning on a weak reed" as most of them are terribly over worked these days. I know my Drs do a quick read of my folder right before they come in the door and lots of times I get the "why are you here today" when my answer is "because you told me to come back today". I have read historical accounts of folks dying of lockjaw, John Roebling chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge died of Lockjaw due to an accident during it's construction. The fact that it hasn't happened to you yet does not state much about the future----I spent 30 years before I had to have my appendix out and was 48 before I became diabetic. It's *cheap* insurance! My great grandfathers died in their 50's and my father is already 20 years older than that and I sure plan to beat them!