Lassen Forge

When we had our propane system installed for the house I had them install a wet tap on one of the tanks, so I fill the 20 gallon day tank I use off that. As long as we have fuel in the tank with the tap, I can refill my day tank. Eventually I want to run a 4th tank separately for the shop, but for now, what I'm doing seems to work fine.

Sometimes that is all you can do - one of my many hats is as a hazmat incident responder and trainer, and the one thing we repeat over and over and over is NEVER put yourself in harms way tp rescue a corpse, and when you rush in unprepared to a hazmat environment to save someone, now the next rescuers have two contaminated people to rescue. One of my favorite training videos is a cop responding to a leaking ammonia ag tank trailer, thinking it was a vehicle fire, and he saw a body lying on the ground next to the trailer (and in the cloud), and rushed in to save the corpse... and it dropped him as well. Were the FD not there within minutes, he would have been victim #2 - as it was, he ended up with horrendous scarring on his lungs. Just be careful with what you let get fuming and into your lungs... a lot of us work independently, and solo, and that call to save your life may be the UPS guy who shows up 6 hours later to drop off the package...

I was chasing 2 different Mouseholes, both over #150, and both beautiful condition... the hard part is Mouseholes are literally a collectors item, so when they show up as a working anvil, they almost go stratospheric. They ended up beyond what I could spend comfortably... but xxxx, they were pretty anvils.

I'm watching an auction locally... they have a 100# ASO thats right now around $3 a lb. It has me kind of disgusted, OTOH it's pushing me toward a new Peddinghaus.... because on one hand I'm watching working-condition anvils going for gold, and I keep thinking even tho it's a huge chunk of pecunium, if I get a forged German anvil new, then I KNOW what I have... Im just tired of chasing the elusive Hay Budden or Peter Wright that ends up having chipped edges and cracks for more than what I could get new for... am I nuts or ???

I like his new and improved anvil stone... and the all-natural hardy attachment? Perfect. Wonder how well it would work using my Incense Cedar tree stumps, tho... Going back to the OP, whats cool is that smithy has a pretty decent anvil stone, but he's also using what looks like a pinion gear shaft for detail work... Even tho he's working that steel pretty cold. I'm always fascinated by the craftsmanship that was (and still is) done with the barest of tools... watching these guys practice their craft always brings a sort of awe to me...

I have a 100# tank that I use a lot, and the best way I found to fill it is using a wet tap on our house propane tank. I can run it back and forth from the shop to the tank on a (large) hand truck. Of course, next step will be to plumb a line tapping directly into the big tanks... or heck, get my own 500 Ga. tank for the shop... Our propane dealer frequently has good recycled tanks for sale... Thinking about this... would 500 Ga. really be enough? This may end badly... for my wallet!

My suggestion would be to get your wife interested in pounding hot iron. You've saved the marriage (as Rich alluded to above) and I bet if done right she would go from antagonist to protagonist!