matt87

First question: how's your welding? What tools do you have/can you use? Do you know how to use them correctly and safely?

As well as looking at the threads on here take a look at the anvil-making articles on Anivlfire.com there's some very interesting ideas there.

Remember that heat-treating such a large piece of steel is no walk in the park. Not only do you need to be able to heat and quench it correctly but you need to be able to move it around -- not only do you have the weight to contend with but the sheer amount of heat radiated as IR will be... blistering...

Is this to be your first anvil? If so keep it simple. As in the rest of life when smithing there's not much that's essential (but a lot that's handy to have!). The 'standard' anvil through most of history and prehistory was a roughly 4" cube (20lb) of wrought iron. With a hammer, fire and stock a smith should be able to make everything else needed.

Hi John are the dates fixed for this yet?.

My copy of the latest Guild newsletter says 15th and 16th August from memory.

haha I can find coal.. just not the right type.. and only in big lumps, no one seems to have anything but anthracite in finer sizes and from what I've heard anthracite is no good for forging..

Did you try any? I've read/heard bad things about using anthracite too but also a few good ones. Thinking about it most of the complaints about anthracite (difficult to light, needs a constant blast to keep lit, doesn't coke up like bituminous coal) sound just like smithing/metallurgical coke so I wonder just how it really compares. I plan to try some at some point but that probably means buying a 25Kg sack.

the coal I did get doesn't the blue flame just goes whiteish I did get a forge weld with it last night after smashing it in to little pieces.

There you go then... when I used charcoal the only stuff I could get was the rubbish imported barbeque lumpwood and that came in all sorts of sizes up to fist sized. It's well worth your while spending that extra bit of time breaking it to a useful size.

I couldn't get welding heat in my side blast forge with charcoal, if you pumped it hard enough to get a yellow heat the charcoal just went flying out ahaha

How deep was your charcoal fire? You typically need around double the depth as with coal. That was one of my biggest stumbling blocks when I first started.

The 'cave' fire is, as far as I can tell, only possible with bituminous coal; as the tar melts out of the 'green' coal as it cokes the coal basically sticks together. Coal hasn't been sold in smithing grade in the UK for many years largely due to the various Clean Air Acts. 'House' coal (as one might find sold on garage forecourts and in all manner of shops half the year round) is bituminous but it's not guaranteed to be of a quality suitible for smithing, and is likely to be in so large pieces you need to break it up anyway. The standard solid fuel for British smiths is 'smithing coke' or 'coke beans' which comes in 'bean' size (between a hazel nut and a brazil nut).

I'm no expert on any kind of welding and certiainly not forge welding. However as I'm sure others here will tell you the 'cave' fire is not required or even neccesarily desireable for forge welding.

Out of interest where exactly in SW Wales are you from? My grandad and his family are from Llangenny near Crickhowell and Crug Hwyll so I've been around a lot of the little country that would be bigger than England if it were flattened out .

One last thing are you planning on coming to the Guild event at Westpoint next month? It'd be good to meet you.

Through heating: The idea that a bar can be hot on the outside and colder on the inside is a TOTAL MYTH! Even with my induction I can show you just how fast the heat conducts to the center. With fuel heating it is impossible! Carpenter Technology (Carpenter Tool Steel) studied it quite thoroughly. From their book

Working link: Image hosting, free photo sharing & video sharing at Photobucket

Sounds like cast iron to me. Does the anvil ring or thunk when tapped?

Don't teach the kittens metalworking; if they figure out how to open cans they'll do away with us as surplus to requirements and take over the world...

I am making some tools including a center punch, a chisel, and some hardy tools, so they have to be hardened.
I am forging at around cherry red and quenching as follows :
After forging to the desired shape I let the work cool down till it just about stops glowing. Then I plunge the part that I want to harden about two inches into water.
I repeatedly put it into and out of the water but I am careful NOT to plunge to exactly the same depth. I am trying to avoid a sharp line between the hardened portion and the softer portion. I continue this till the first two
inches are black. The I quickly scrape the first three inches so I can see the bare steel. I watch the tempering colors flow down toward the cool end and when the cool end gets to straw color quench the whole tool till it's cool enough to handle without gloves.

Yup there's your problem, your HT process is missing a few steps. After forging you want to normalise or preferably anneal the tool. Then heat it past the eutectic point (roughly when it become non-magnetic, a red colour) and quench it. The tool is then 'dead hard' (as hard as it can ever be). You then temper it from cold to the colour you need.

Do you know what type of steel you're using? Tempering to a somewhat specific hardness in an unknown material by oxide colour is a shot in the dark.

There is a blueprint which goes into a lot of detail on heat-treating and several threads and 'sticky' threads which are a bit more 'beginner friendly'.

Hot-work tools like hot-cutters don't really need to be hardened; they are harder then hot iron even annealed and lose temper too easily anyway. Normalising is usually sufficient, and of course safer than an incorrectly tempered tool.

We have one smith here in Portland who looks like Xena the Warrior Princess - except with lots of tattoos.

Does she have a phone number?

With the beard I suppose I look somewhat blacksmithish but the skinniness kinda ruins the effect, as does watching me try to forge anything :D

Is the anvil in question cast iron or cast steel? If the latter watch yourself as I can't imagine they'd pay to have a 100lb lump of 'scrap' heat-treated.

Avadon are you planning on forging sloyd knives, ulus, katanas, mediaeval broadswords, rapiers, axes, bayonets, arrowheads, pocketknives, Bowie knives... size matters. Similarly are you planning on forging them from appropriate materials or display pieces from mild steel, stainless steel, aluminium, titanium etc.

Pictures are worth a thousand words and may show something you think inconsequential that may give a useful clue.

Forgive me for asking if it seems I'm teaching my grandmother to such eggs, but are you giving the iron adequate soak time? It may be that the outside of the bar is moving faster than the inside because it's significantly hotter.

What stock do you want to make them from -- circle, oval, triangle, square, diamond, rectangle? If rectangular section, do you want to bend them around the narrow or wide dimension? If the wide dimension I suggest you watch Mark Aspery's YouTube video where he teaches 'shop math' on how to calculate the length of steel for such an endeavor.

I'd say forge as well as you can freehand, weld, then true over a cone mandrel. Of course for me step 1 would be 'make a cone mandrel'... You may have luck truing by eye on the anvil.

You may consider it cheating, but do you have a suitable piece of pipe and a saw? Many rings of any thickness you want there! :D

Dick, could you please explain to us your entire heat-treating routine? It may be that you're not being explicit but it seems like you're missing several key steps. Exactly what effect are you trying to achieve? What item/object are you trying to make? More detail will help us generate a more pertinent response. Remember that used springs could will have existing but invisibly small cracks in the steel and the shock of quenching may make them expand.

I've never used one but depending on the design I understand they are versatile tools. As well as swaging of course they can be used as a second pair of hands, e.g. to hold round stock without it rolling away, or square stock on edge. I imagine this would be useful when punching or chiseling. Some designs have through-holes in them and they can be used to help when upsetting, punching, drifting or when forming tenons. Some designs have depressions in them intended to help when forging concave objects such as spoons or shovels.

There has been at least one in-depth discussion on this topic, which I suspect is why there have been few responses to this thread.

If you've ever accidentally melted a housebrick.

Most forging (say 80%+) can be done using the face and edges of a block anvil. Bickerns can be used in place of horn(s) integrated with the anvil. Tooling as one might place in a hardy hole can be held in the vice or in a stake plate, mounted on a bench or post. Alternatively fullers, hardy cutters etc. can be forged with a tapering tang and mounted on a log/stump. Such a setup (hornless anvil with separate bickern) was common in Europe until roughly the 18th century, and later in other parts of the world.

I've been reading your posts on your new anvil with interest Mr Broach. Looks like a handy tool!

Break it to the size of walnuts to give good balance between fuel longevity and heat intensity.

So a barrel is mild steel? Why can one shoot accuratly w/ mild?
really interested????

Accuracy with a gun is dependent on four main factors (in roughly ascending order of importance): the mechanical accuracy of the gun, the makeup and consistency of the ammunition, the environmental conditions (wind etc.) and the abilities of the shooter. In a rifled gun the rifling on the bore of the barrel should wear so slowly that it doesn't affect accuracy for at least several thousand rounds (shots).

The useful lifetime of a rifled barrel is largely affected by two factors: the rate at which it is worn away and the acceptable tolerances for accuracy. In the case of a ridiculously accurate bench-rest rifle chambered in 6PPC that could be a life of just a few thousand rounds. A .30-06 deer rifle many tens if not a couple hundreds of thousands of rounds. A .22LR hunting/plinking rifle somewhere in the low millions of rounds. A national or international-level target competitor may require a fraction-minute-of-angle accuracy from their gun in order to even get anywhere near qualifying. On the other hand your typical medium-to-large deer will have an optimal kill zone centred about the heart about 4 inches square. From 100 yards, that's a whole 4 minutes of angle. (Note here I used the defacto civilian standard interpretation of MOA of 1 inch at 100 yards.)

Wear in a gun barrel is largely due to the enormous pressure and heat from the powder burning. When we changed the propellant of the .303 British round from a compressed black powder charge to (smokeless) cordite in the late 19th century we found that the rifling of our Magazine Lee-Metford and Martini-Metford rifles were wearing far too quickly because cordite burns so hot and so changed to the Magazine Lee-Enfield (and Martini-Enfields as reserve arms), which was basically the same but with a different barrel.

Today a decent rifle barrel will probably be made from 4140 or similar (EN19 or whatever we're supposed to call it nowadays is popular in Europe and the UK; it's 4130). It's tough, has some abrasion resistance and doesn't get brittle. However mild steel will of course still work, though it may be more limited in terms of what you can do in regard to pencil-thin barrels, fluting etc. Of course, I am not a gunsmith, neither do I portray one on TV or the internet.

Any idea on what sorts of guns these barrels are intended for? A .22LR Lorcin pistol is a very different proposition to a .30-30 rifle, which is very different to a flintlock shotgun, which is different to a 40mm autocannon.

It's quite a common style over here. The dry tue/tuyere is apparently quite short-lived without due care when burning coke. Vaughn's sells new-production ones still.

Thanks for the sarcasm. I wasn't questioning the word but why you think it applies here. Obviously if it had the flange out the hammers could not sit where they are. Notice the hammer heads are almost touching the base of the anvil so it is not a distortion from perspective. I'll have to find out from Brian because guessing (like your doing) isn't good enough for me.

I believe the face of the anvil is hiding most of the flages due to foreshortening. The anvil is something like 12" high and the camera probably less than that above the anvil. Notice that the flanges appear to be visible beyond the second tool (the narrower fuller), where the full width of the anvil at that point occurs several inches closer to the flanges (further down). I can also just about detect a slight 'lip' below the 'lower' edge of the anvil which appears to be part of this flange also.

The anvil in the above picture is different to the one shown here EDIT: as now confirmed by Brian; notice the order and nature of the tools.
Therefore direct comparison of the photos to determine flange length would be misleading.

What do you mean by "foreshortening"? hiding the dimensions of the angle iron.

Let me google that for you ;)

I believe I have that anvil's little brother; looks almost exactly the same but it's 55lb and has a 5/8 inch hardy hole and 1/2 inch pritchel hole but neither has a clear, straight line through. Top plate seems to be one piece and as I recall 3/4 inch or thicker. Both holes appear to be punched so I'd agree with Thomas that it's early-to-mid 19th century. I'll try and get some pics when I get my camera working again.

That may be one way to mount it but if you look at the top down photo you can see the hammer racks. So there is no angle iron sticking outwards. I'm still under the belief he created something akin to a bottomless box for the anvil to sit in.

I would suggest that foreshortening is hiding the 'ears' or 'flanges'.

Here you go DM:

Let me google that for you

Matt 87 if you want to buy a hand cranked blower in Europe there is always Vaughans (Hope Works) Check out their on line catalogue. The prices are scary but they will discount them fairly heavily.

Thanks Phillip. I've seen their catalogue of course but got a bad case of 'sticker shock'. Thanks for the tip, perhaps I'll see what I can get the to knock off...

Browse your local illegal dumps?