MLMartin

was that a brand new file you cut that out of ???

you could always take your schedule 40 pipe and coat it with what ever clay you can get, down here in GA you can dig up red clay anywhere, ive seen clay dug from the ground used to make many forges with pretty good success. and i know many old Celtic forges had clay used to make the air inlets, so why dont you just use a heavy wall piece of pipe, then cover it will clay, sounds good to me, if it dosent work your not out much time or steel

go team venture!

if your going to weld a face plate onto the top of a anvil i would definitely recommend cutting the top of the mild anvil to a near point before you start welding the plate on, so that the plate will be 100% welded on, no gap in the middle, while i dont think the face plate will ever come off, if there is a place in the middle that is not welded it will create a dead stop, and no matter how close the top plate and mild body are together they will still vibrate and you'll lose alot of rebound, now and then old wrought iron anvils have there face separate in this middle some, and the outside edges still look great, but the rebound is never the same. a big 5inch anvil is great, but you would need to bevel in 2.5 inch to the center for either side, thats alot of welding, if you have a big enough welder and enough time, go for it, just make sure to look up alot of info on people that have replaced face plates and made there own anvils
best of luck, if you go for it we would all love to see pictures and know how it goes

O i dident know that, acutely i dident know they even regularly made anvils that large, ive seen a picture of one that was like 1400 or something but i think it was at the worlds fair or something and that it was just made for that show. ive never seen a fisher bigger than 300lb other than above mentioned

answers??? you have not asked any questions, fisher is a nice anvil brand, they have a cast steel face with a cast iron base, early made fishers and little anvils tend to not have the two bolt down holes on the base. but all the rest have them. a quit anvil to work on because of the cast iron base

there are 6 euro anvils in my school and they take alot of abuse from people just lurning the trade. only been in use about 4 years now. they show little evidence of use, vary shallow dents, little bit a horn drooping right at the last inch of the horn. definitely still in mint condition. and thats with people coming in and abusing them 8 hours a day for 4 days a week, often with sledge hammers.

so yes i think the face is just a little soft, hence the light dings and little bit or horn droop for the last inch, but its much better to have that than a super hard face that chips and cracks in my opinion.

not my favorite shape (i dont like the hardy hole right next to the horn), but i cant say anything bad about them, there good solid anvils.

o we use the 175lb i think

i was always vary pleased with OBG it was a great guild along with the Alexbealer guild, but i moved up to SC Charleston so cant make it to the guild meeting any more, was a member of both guilds for about 2 years. Eddie Rainey is a great smith and a good host to guild meeting

nice hammers only started fooling with some about a month ago myself, the cross peen is my main forging hammer, maybe 2lb surly not over 2.5lb, the second i made last night, a little dog face hammer, or cutlers, what ever you want to call it. the cross peen is 1045, drilled little guide holes then punched, hardened in water then tempered in oven around 400 to 500 for about 2 hours, the dog face hammer is some part of a huge spring that was attached to a plow blade on some pice of equipment that had maybe 10 plows on it there was alredy a little hole in the end, just drifted larger, then filled the sides to a nice shine. hardened in oil, just headed the face with a torch, quenched in some old cooking oil, then ran the colors to about a purple

thats a great looking little hammer, 20LB head you said? about how much one of those things cost? it is all self contained right? and how much for the 33LB

i have a little 70 pound vulcan anvil that i use right along side of my big 500lb PW, the vulcan has nice sharp edges and a good little horn (yes normally sharp edges are bad on a anvil in my opinion, but my big PW has enough rounded edges for normal work, just random things that i do that i like to have sharp edges for ) for getting into tight places, and i repaired a few of the edges on my vulcan easy as can by, just heated up some little springs and pulled them out straight to use as tig filler rod. the little springs leave a bead so hard that a file wont scratch them, like i said i just used a tig to work up some little chips off the side and some bad scars some knuckle head put in the top cutting straight on the anvil with a cold chisel. just welded quick little short beads to keep the heat down, the face it still pretty dang hard, i think its a great little anvil, i keep it on a stand about 6 inches higher than my normal working anvil, makes a good height for small things that im doing light work on, don't have to bend down at all to see what i doing

i payed 100 for my little 70lb and think its great

well if its a press you could make cookie cutter dies and use it to cut things like thin wood, leather patterns, cloth, and rubber sheet. if you needed to cut tones of the same thing that is

just quickly forge some of the stuff down then, just a few inch's long and grind a little edge. take a some of it and quench one in water and one in oil, temper them. if nether break then stick them in the vice and give a little tap, on the side, if one snaps pretty easy then that's not the quenching medium for the steel, it would probably be the water quenched one that breaks if one does, also try and look to make sure that theres not already a stress crack in the steel before you forge it. i have made a few knives out of some type of spring clips that come off the track or maybe the car, not totally sure, but it was some piece of steel from the rail way.

Good lookin stands Mr Hoffman, that's a pretty awesome and scary bullet extractor!

i dont have much thick plate around my shop and little money for it, no square tubing eather. but i did have some one inch square and half by one and lots of one by quarter and just a little for inch angle, so i thought this together was modeled off many stands i sall here on IFI. I still need to fasten the anvil down, but its a pretty darn tight fit so it dose not move anyway. ill probably add a little more to this stand, (expanded metal under the bottom that fits inside the braces on the legs). this is my first metal stand and im pretty happy with it so far.

did you do much shaping with a band sander? or on a grinder? did you do any of this after you had quenched and hardened it, if you did this after you quenched it you could have headed it to much just sanding it and softened it

so i see your anvil is on ebay already, tryin to make a fast buck i guess, cant really blame you, there doesn't seem to be enough money around anywhere these days. is there not a person in your guild or a friend that's trying to get into smithing that you could sell it to for cheep. so many people get anvils and just run the price up terribly, it makes it vary hard for some people to get them that are interested in smithing and cant seem to find one that appropriately priced. a long time ago when i first got into smithing and did not know any better, i looked and looked and finally found someone dealing anvils so just bought one, was not till way down the road that i found out i have been ripped off pretty good on a high price

wow must have been a pretty dry stump! iver herd of stranger things, also see a fellow that did not use his anvil for o maybe 4 or 5 months went out to it, took one large hammer blow and the wood stump just crumpled, terns out termites had a little fun with it while he was gone

The American College of the Building Arts

This school has a 2 or 4 year program in Blacksmithing/forging.
wonderful classes that start with all the basic hand forging then move into all the joining, all the way to modern tools in your last years, IE power hammer, arc welders.
This school also has classes in drafting, drawing, construction history, and all your core class's, math, English, ext

The American College of the Building Arts

if you have a house built buy a common contractor its almost a sure thing that your waster and dryer have 220 outlets, if there in your garage then your all set, im in college now so am always moving house to house, i simply make many different outlet plugs that fit all the different 220 outlets and have the same female my welder has, so i just go to any new house and unplug the dryer and start welding away. but i dont use a mig, i carry the little miller diynesty with me, wonderful tig welder, great stick, only about 50lbs so not huge but not so small that it would limit my welding. i have a old millermatic 175 but have never used it other than the 5 minuets at my buddy's shop just to see if it worked when i bought it from him. have used smaller millermatic at old job when we were on the road, was desent but took a fair amount of skill to get a good bead, had a few millermatic 200's and a 300 at the workshop, there absolutly wonderful, some of them were pushing 15 years old and they all welded like champs, the millermatic mig welders have always been great welders in my opinion.

I have also gone the route of welding up heavy plate and blocks to make an anvil, near 200lb, if i were on the clock it would have been well over a few thousand to make it. but i did it in free time over about a year, few hours here few there and so on, all the parts i believe there were 20 in total were beveled to a point for full penetration, and as said before, a huge pain in the butt, lots of chipping lots welding, i dont have a needle scaller, wish i did, would have saved lots of time, and i only had a little 220 stick welder at the time, so i was only useing little 1/8 inch rods, if you have a good size mig welder this will save lots of time, or a big stick welder where you can fun 1/4 inch rods, but this is pretty intense . in the end i came out with an anvil thats decently nice, but could be better, if i was to go it again i would have used a different hard facing rod. the rods will set you back an easy 300 or more to cover a face thats something like 4inch by 18inch. seem to be best in layers to, medium hardness then heavy hardness on top. have not worked on the thing in a while, why it can be called done and used just fine as is, i still plan to grind down the face and dress the hardy hole more. this process is very very slow and makes a great deal of noise, and huge amounts of dust.
ovcorse this is just how it all worked out for me, many people will do it different ways, different results, but no matter how you do it, if done right it will be a great deal of work.

if you find my gallery on this site you can see some of the steps to making my anvil, sorry not totaly in order
just my thoughs

o yess and about the time i finished making this beast, i found a 500lb with broken hardy hole for 500$ but otherwise the rest of the anvil was in great condition, so i bought it and now i hardly use the anvil i made at all, funny huu.

i know its a far jump but my grandfather has had a pacemaker implanted and also he was told absolutely not welding, so he actually has to run out of the shop when ever u start working. but he still welds himself, he has a old Oxy Act set that he uses. no electricity, GOOD. with a good bit of practice, most any metal can be welded with a gas set up, yes it is much slower than any arc welder, but it wont send the computer in your chest crazy

ive seen some great welding with this little torch, i have one myself, there a little odd to get use to, but after just a few minets of use, i love the thing. you may find it named, the Henrob, Dillon, or cobra.
Henrob 2000 Welding and Cutting Torch - $379 everyday! - FREE shipping

while it will support a great deal of weight i dont believe its there so much to hold the thing up as it is to keep the leg from burying into what ever it rest in. the above post sounds like a good solution.

well they made big tools, a large post vice i have is stamped IRON CITY, sorry i cant help you more than this

thats a pretty intense chunk of I Beam, how thick are the top and bottom plate, look to be around 2" i had no clue they were made that big!

before taking it and having it ground down, or welded how about posting some pictures of it. many folks seem to "FIX" there anvil because it dose not have perfectly sharp flat edges. if your actually going to use the anvil vary rarely will you ever want sharp edges on it, a nice rounded corner is your friend