matt87

Assuming you want a wood-cutting axe ideally you will want a steel which can hold a razor edge but tough enough not to deform. Many will suffice -- 1095, O1, D2, 1045 etc. so long as they are correctly heat-treated. Firewelding a tool steel bit to a mild, medium carbon or soft iron body is an ancient way of reducing carbon steel use and reducing the importance of the correct heat treatment, but is unnecessary. Of course even mild steel will hold a better edge than a bronze axe...

The biggest limit I can see, besides the badly corroded surface is that there is almost no flat surface on the rail road steel. Of course there are a lot of creative ways to re-work the piece, but it seems more trouble then the final product would be worth.

If you mount it end-on, you get a flat surface sufficiently large enough for work over 2", plus convenient places to grind fullers, butchers etc. You also get a good amount of steel under the hammer so lb-for-lb it is probably more efficient than a London-pattern anvil.

What are the limits of a piece of railway iron, with its numerous curves and flats, that a square bar doesn't have?

I think the reason for the horn/face step is that the face was traditionally a piece of steel welded onto one or more soft iron pieces making up the body, horn(s) etc. It being a convenient place for cutting is another matter entirely. It can also be used in forging upsets, bending and straightening pieces.

I feel much safer now knowing that swords were not designed to cut trees. My old quarter staff just might be sword proof. Trees come in all sizes. Small green ones are particularaly easy to cut. It would be a poor piece of steel that wouldn't cut wood.

Great. I'll go fell a tree with a hex-nut then. Or my anvil. There is more to producing a good cutting edge than material selection.

Steel is really good at cutting wood. Thats why it took over from flint pointed spears.

It completely varies depending on region, social class and various other factors, but generally iron- and steel-pointed spears took over from copper- or bronze-pointed spears, which took over from stone-pointed spears. And to be pedantic, no weapon 'took over' from another, not only would this require animate activity from an inanimate object, but tool types typically follow a trend of use rather than the hard change-over point implied by your use of the phrase 'took over'.

It would be an advantage if a sword could withstand a blow on a iron helm.

Thus the spring temper and possibly a compromise grind.

A sword strong enough to the deform the helm and head underneath it.

It's nothing to do with strength, it's to do with energy. If you were to take a 4lb hammer and give a good swing at an iron helm, yes it might deform enough to deform the skull of any unfortunate inside it at the time. But a sword has a sharp edge so is more likely to skate off the helm, and has a different distribution of weight than a hammer.

Or strong enough to cleave a shield.

Again it's nothing to do with strength. Ever tried chopping a bit of seasoned hardwood with an axe which has been ground and honed appropriately -- both parallel to and across the grain? Now apply that to an awkward angle/direction of stroke, a possibly cross-laminated shield covered in rawhide, a weapon with a different weight distribution and a different grind. Oh, and getting the stroke in while your opponent tries to disembowel you with his spear or axe or sword.

Many years ago, Sheffield crucible steel was categorised into various 'tempers' (carbon contents), by breaking off the end of the ingot and looking at the structure. Accuracy was surprisingly high -- especially when you consider that it was all done with the naked eye and not being able to articulate what they were looking for!

An old textbook on Sheffield steel might be able to tell you what temper #10 is. I can probably find out but it might be a few days before I do.

Not all good anvils look like they should be dropped on a roadrunner, and not everything that looks like it should be dropped on a roadrunner makes for a good anvil. For millenia the standard general-purpose smithing anvil was a maximum 20-lb cube of soft iron. Additional tools (horn, hardy, fuller etc.) can be forged on the anvil and then mounted seperately -- on a stump, on a laminated wood stand, in a vice...

Look for a large piece of steel scrap with a flattish area on it. Even mild steel will be better than cast iron and it'll probably be very cheap. Try scrap yards, large engineering shops, industrial areas etc.

The way I figure it, anvil features such as horns, side shelves etc. are the 'integrated' approach to providing certain facilities, whereas providing separate tools is the 'non-integrated' approach to the same solution. Any need that arises can be dealt with by producing a tool and this applies whether you have a cube of steel or a Hofi anvil; integrated features are convenient in that they are there already and they are already mounted securely. They're great if you need them but can get in the way if you don't. A bladesmith forging Puukos could probably use a suitably dressed cube of steel all his life. An ornamental smith might be hard-pressed to get by one day without at least one horn and a whole bunch of swages, fullers etc. A nailmaker couldn't produce a nail without a bolster/header and a hardy.

I like my double-horn anvil. Each to their own though and I probably would've stuck with my vertical rail anvil if I could've built a decent mount for it at the time.

A few things I wish I'd realised earlier:
Solid fuel needs to be about the size of a hazel nut before it's useful
Don't skimp with the fuel, it just wastes more in the long run
Don't go overboard with the fuel, there is a law of diminishing returns
Be patient and wait for the heat you need, it'll save time and fuel in the long run
Don't spend too long trying to figure-out the absolute optimal solution; by the time you do you've wasted a whole load of time you could have been forging and getting results
Cross- and straight-pein hammers are improvised with a dip or twist of the wrist
Much commercial charcoal is expensive and poor quality
Think while the iron's in the fire, strike while the iron's hot

We call 'em ramsons round here. The campus is largely covered in 'em but nothing doing yet. Very tasty, though you do get the occasional odd look from the 'it's a plant and he's eating it, how dirty' brigade if they see. Not that I care.

I think that you need to carefully consider your target market here: are you making these for the sort of people who will appreciate a good knife and are willing to not abuse it, to maintain it, to look after it or are you making these for people who don't really know, appreciate or care about knife maintenance, who won't properly maintain a carbon blade, who will chuck it in the dishwasher with the washing-up and then store it unguarded in the drawer with the salad tongs, a barbecue fork and the eggbeater?

Carbon steel can make an excellent blade but needs some maintenance. One of my favourite kitchen knives is a 10" straight blade about 1/16" thick, forged from leaf-spring by a Sri Lankan smith in a backwoods jungle smithy. It's crude, pretty only in its simplicity and can't be left wet but that guy sure knows how to heat-treat! Stainless can also be make into a good blade but it's less straightforward than carbon steel; it's generally harder to heat-treat than carbon and often can't be hand-forged.

Are you looking for something mainly to draw stock or to strike tools?

Brad, most cartridge cases are, as you say, brass. Rimfire cases specifically are a brass alloy that allows a lot of drawing but that's not very relevant right now. Some low-cost manufacturers don't use brass but instead use mild steel or aluminium (aluminum) due to lower cost. 'Wolf' for instance is a popular and inexpensive manufacturer which commonly uses lacquered mild steel cases. It is not practicable to cast mild steel at home. Aluminium on the other hand is easier to cast than brass.

Congratulations! I hear anvils are hard to find down your way.

I'd hang fire on 'repairing' that unless you really know what you're doing an are sure you need a sharper edge. The attached photo is one I took in Sri Lanka about 7 months ago, where the pictured anvil has been used for so long that the face is gone. The smith who uses this is producing some very fine blades day after day after day, all forged down form leaf-spring.

Hi Joe!

It would help if we knew what materials, tools and skills you have.

Right Matt train rails. During the American Civil War the north would bend rail road rails around trees to disrupt the confederate rail system. The south was able to straighten them out so the north came up with these large horseshoe looking tools to twist the rails like a cork screw along the length of the rail making it impossible to return to service. They also did it cold which is even more fascinating.

Fascinating! Now I think about it, weren't ACW-era rails WI? That might explain it a bit!

It seems the offspring has exceeded the parent in this regard. Good work.

Welcome SJean,

If you're wanting to make your own mineral coal you're going to be waiting around a while. It's much easier to buy some ready-made if you haven't got a few million years to spare Charcoal on the other hand is an excellent smithing fuel and it can cost you nothing more than wood and time to make.

These aren't mine but I find them useful to illustrate some points:


Block anvil probably of mild steel, as one might find in a scrapyard or in the scrap bin of a heavy engineering firm for little or no money. Yes it has slumped after many years of daily use but it is still usable.


This anvil is probably over a century old and is missing most of its face but is still used daily to produce very fine work. Put that hardfacing rod away, grab a hammer and start smithing!


One of my inspirations, an anvil improvised frm what was available. The body seems to be form some large vehicle and the inset is a lump of bloomery (wrought) iron. Note the multiple punching/tooling holes around the edge and the convenient mounting options available at the bottom -- this has the potential to be an excellent anvil and something similar could be found in many scrapyards for pennies per pound!


A cheap and very practical silversmithing setup that can be scaled to ironsmithing proportions. Note that a block anvil and bickern were the 'default' equipment for thousands of years before the anvil with integrated horn became fashionable. For ironsmithing the hammerhead can be replaced with a larger one (20lb is not uncommon and people don't generally want them) and the bickern can be one of your first projects, as can a stump hardy.

I think I read something recently that said the hill furnaces worked by wind generated negative pressure at the top of the hill rather than wind driven positive pressure from the bottom. Either way, the times I've built a small scale version as a field forge it's worked wonderfully

Yup, that sounds like the Sri Lankan technology discovered and proved (mainly) by Dr Juleff. The furnaces were long, low affairs facing into the wind most of the way up the hillside. And let me tell you, that wind sure can blow hard even when it's not the wet monsoon season proper! The furnaces appear to have been used to mainly smelt bloomery iron but during experiments it was found that surprising amounts of a high quality 0.8%C steel was easily made too, possibly being a pre-Wootz source of the so-called 'Damascus steel'. There is documentary evidence supporting this. Dr Juleff is now planning to work in southern India intending to determine whether the technology was known there too.

Have you tried bending it over a piece of 1/4" thick stock, e.g. a piece of 1x1/4 mild steel? If you need dead crisp square right-angles you need to bump-up (upset) the stock at each corner, so as to provide enough stock to draw it square after you make the bend. Fiddly job though.

I'm a little confused... twist rails? Train rails? Sounds like hard work!

Welcome Elizabeth!

A suitable boulder makes for a usable anvil, and a smaller rock a crude hammer. At a guess I'd say a small-grained igneous rock would do well. Iron anvils were usually very small (under 20lb) until only a few centuries ago -- the iron was expensive, fuel consumption high (therefore expensive) and perhaps more importantly the infrastructure to forge them (strikers/triphammers, large anvils etc.) was largely non-existent.

I've never used S7, but I hear that it's hard stuff to move so unless you have one or more friends who can swing a sledge or a power-hammer you're looking at a long job. Furthermore I understand it isn't a very good blade steel but I'm not sure why.

S7 is a very good steel for tooling though, as it's both shock-resistant and somewhat hot-hard. See Frosty's suggestion; he's usually right (but don't tell him I said that)!

I use either a farriers rounding hammer or a cheese fuller and drive the stock, just behind the upset, onto the face of the anvil. This creates the offset and allows me to get in and do a little clean-up at the transition point.

Just as a side note, step 2 is not the full upset - I need to do a little more work before going to step 3.

Thanks for the clarification Mark, I wondered about something like that but thought you might have some clever angle to strike it or somesuch! :D

Wow, took me a second to realise it was a forge and not just a sculpture. I expect the head/mouth contains a bottom-blast fire-pot. Original and pretty but not much of a fuel reserve. I expect the body to be a simple frame welded up (6mm-ish rods or weld-mesh) and the scales and such are simply welded on.

Don't worry about your English, it's better than a lot of people whoa are supposed to have it as their mother tongue... and it's better than my Francais!