Chinobi

You are welcome :) keep posting beautiful things!

The "L" shaped bracket was thought up long ago :) you can get away with fewer and smaller restraints as the stiffness of your backing board increases too. Either leave it open on top so you can slide stuff in and out and let gravity keep it in place, or make one or more restraint swivel out of the way to facilitate installation. Wander through the frame section of whatever store is closest to you, lots of inspiration there :)

Lookin good man! How bout a shot of the back so we can see how it will hold the glass, photo and backing? :) Really clean twists, wish mine came out that well....

Keep that mentality, it is very rewarding to make your own tools, and even more so to use them to make other things :) but don't forget to be practical about it. If you want to 'make' your own anvil, find yourself a big chunk of steel at a scrapyard and mount it up on a tripod base, voilla you just made your own anvil from something totally unrelated! Steve read my mind too, how can you state with any certainty what your needs will be in the future if you have yet to swing your first hammer? You might end up going the opposite direction and find yourself more drawn to small scale work or jewelry and sculpture, which is small anvil territory, rather than 300lb anvil territory. Find yourself a blacksmithing intro course and et your feet wet, then after you have started to get a feel for what you are doing you can start forming opinions about what you actually need, rather than what you think you want. I believe there are some good associations in your state that would be excellent starting grounds for you. (excuse the inevitable swapped words and autocorrections, I blame the phone >.>)

Hugely variably by location to start with, IDK how the Washington anvil economy is, YMMV Used anvil sufficient for beginner work, anywhere from 75-150 lbs: could be 100$ to 400$ or more or less if you find a loaner or a scrap yard jackpot vs getting hosed at an antique shop or bidding on eBay or whatever Brand new can be 4-500$ for smaller ones, some of the farrier patterns are around that price I thing (phone reply, can't google it out so I'm shooting from the hip to some extent) or if you want a big one save up 1000 or more and look at the nimba gladiator, jhm competitor, papa rhino, or Blu series. I don't even want to guess what properly casting your own would be, well north of several thousand in equipment. You will STILL need to buy as much (more actually, see Thomas's reply) raw steel of known good quality as you would find in a finished anvil. Equipment and consumables to grind and finish, whatever your heat treat cycle becomes. And on top of that the actual expenditure of your time to get there. If you don't consider your time as something you might not want to squander, compare also what you could have been doing with that time instead (opportunity cost if I remember economics correctly O.o) Or hit up a scrap yard and find a good solid chunk of steel at scrap rate. Or go to the hardware store and drop 30$ on a 10 lb sledge hammer. Re-read and if you meant 'i have cast' as in subcontract, I have no idea :) the above applies to 'I have cast myself'

your friend had better finish their degree before they start making recommendations that can get someone killed :) concept is good, but details are bad. I salute your ambition and I really hope you can get up to that level, but its going to be a long, hard, and expensive road. start taking classes (if they are still offered) and reading up on what is involved. make some small castings and work your way up into the larger range. this is not a field that will allow practitioners to survive jumping into the deep end before they learn to swim. if you cant find any industrial arts type classes that do casting check in the art, sculpture or jewelry departments, casting sterling is still casting, and you can learn the basic principles and safety there with relative ease in a classroom environment.

IMO even if it takes you over a year to find an anvil you will still be far ahead in terms of time and money spent and potentially lost limbs than trying to cast your own single anvil. by the time you sink enough capital into that project to buy or build the requisite furnace, crucible and investment media, not to mention the books and or classes on casting to be able to pull that off without killing yourself, you could probably have bought 5-10 brand new 240lb papa rhino anvils (only one I could think of off the top of my head). factor in as well cost to subcontract the heat treat (or more equipment/education time to DIY), and then time and materials to grind or mill the face and base square. not trying to torpedo your dreams, but unless you are already highly skilled with foundry work that is a HUGE undertaking, with no guarantee of success on the first attempt :( my thoughts would be to scrounge up your initial anvil (that's what 'once I need a bigger anvil than what I wind up scrounging for' reads like to me), train up on that, and start selling the stuff you make wherever you can. put some of the proceeds towards your consumables (fuel, abrasives, travel to buy more/other tooling, the tooling you just drove out to buy, etc) and shelve a certain percentage as an 'anvil fund'. keep your ear to the ground and craigslist for anything within easy striking distance, and check out the thread for TPAAAT to help refine your search efforts. if my interpretation of your question is totally wrong and you are massively proficient in casting then i's be interested in pitching in some starting capital in return for one of the anvils produced :)

Craft master series 'metalcasting' by C.W. Ammen. It was pretty reasonable from amazon. Really a shame that Lindsay went out of business, they had a lot of excellent material :(

Actually as far as blanket question threads go I'd say that's pretty light on the grumping :) that's why I tried to pump for more info right off the bat. I know i don't have the answers, but I know there wasn't enough in the OP to get anything but grump from those that do = I would love to spitball things but I just don't have the chops in the scale and materials in question to make it worthwhile, iv only read through about half of casting book I picked up so far :(

You will never get a meaningful answer without more specific questions. I have some ideas about travel, should I walk, drive, fly, boat? Same principle, this goes for all subjects :) The size and shape of your castings will dictate what method and materials will be the most applicable. If you want to eyeball a physical prototype of the cast prior to committing to anything serious consider working in styrafoam with a hot knife or hot wire(the fumes aren't fantastic...should avoid breathing them), or if the scale and complexity exceed what styrafoam can handle bump up to something stiffer like wood or something in between To your first question; I have cast sterling jewelry by lost wax in investment and by gravity with delft clay. Drop us some more information or maybe even some sketches and I'm sure you will get some more useful responses from the casting gurus :)

How city of me, thank you for the clarification.

it kinda looks like a form of small wall mounted flag base to me... which would probably be the cheapest form of sheet metal available if that is the case.

very cool, big thumbs up! :)

all the places I have asked so far gave me the same shtick about having a recycling contract and recommendations to take a hike :(

what size (inches and pounds) and material is the mandrel you said you made? if its metal (steel pref) and has a large enough cross section you could stand it on end and rivet on that as well.

No problem Jeremy. Steve, perhaps it would be worth a pinned topic or a banner or something to alert people to that particular bug? shame to have such a useful subsection get largely overlooked because nobody realizes its there.

mine was showing the same, and I thought I had adjusted the filter correctly to catch 'all', but there are two fields that need to be set to 'all', not just the first one. I don't know why this one wasn't set that way by default, or how it got tweaked, but I have often wondered about where have all the tool threads gone too! on the plus side, now I/you/we just discovered another 60 threads of reading material :D edit: don't be like me and forget to check the 'remember filter' box, otherwise you will have to reset the filter again the next time you come back to the sub-forum.

lowes doesn't carry bigger than a 10, if you can source a 20 from wherever else you will not likely regret the extra mass, I just wouldn't buy one new because those are going to be $$$

9.50 each!? walk away dude, walk away :) head over to the lowes website and you can see the items before you even get to the store. item # 333830 is a Kobalt 10 pound sledge with a 36" handle for $32, cheaper than 4 of the plates alone. IDK if lowes sells just heads (I doubt it) but if you cut off the handle and just use the head now you just got a side order of 3(plus or minus depending on how long you cut them) brand new hammer handles for regular hand hammers, or top tools, or whatever might need a handle. edit: you will have to forgive the ignorance, I am uninvolved with armorsmithing, but isn't mail pretty much only dependent on wire cutters and round nose pliers? maybe some kind of mandrel to true things up or a rod to wind wire around? I understand riveted mail would require an anvil like object, but just about anything could work for that because you only need such a small face right?

that actually sounds very similar to my shop :) except I can lift my 100lb anvil myself (that one stays in the garage though) I just brought my 50 lb cast iron ASO inside to do some non-ferrous cold work a few weeks ago, no mount, just seated on the floor. were I to be looking for an impromptu anvil from lowes I would get one of their 10lb sledges with the 36" handle for 32$, which is probably not a lot more than you would pay for 4 of those plates (cant find them online to price out) plus you get 3 feet of handle stock to work with in the future! (the bolts you would need are not exactly cheap either) mount the head into a chunk of timber post or whatever you can get ahold of so it fits tightly but can still be rotated and flipped around. i believe you are also confusing dispersion with dissipation. the problem is not how the energy is spread across the workpiece from the anvil, but how much energy is lost due to the vibration and movement between the layers of the plate. all that energy (any buzz you hear or feel) is energy that could have been transmitted into the work but was instead wasted through the vibration of the plates. the quality of that weld steel is pretty bad too, you will be able to ding it with errant hammer strikes pretty easily. because a sledge head is octagonal you can readily grind in multiple diameters of fuller on each corner, giving you a lot of flexibility when you need to bend or notch projects. as Vaughn says a domed head can be very useful too, grind a dome on one side and leave the other flat so you can just flip it over and change your anvil face on the fly. don't forget that lowes also uses forklifts, so their manager might be able to direct you to whoever holds their maintenance contract.

for me there is a balance (and often back and forth) between CAD and hand, I can draw curves and concepts out much faster by hand than on the computer because I don't get hung up on eyeballing radii and getting curve proportions exactly right. on paper its much easier to just freehand it and let the curves fall where they may. but when I need to keep myself honest about dimensions and making sure that im not going to end up with conflicting elements I reach for the mouse :) I also have a bunch of reclaimed copper electrical wire at hand that I have used to mock things up when it helps to get a good sense of the volume of the object, without needing to put a lot of time into a detailed isometric drawing, or a 3d model on the computer and the size exceeds the lump of clay at hand! to me the most important thing is making sure that the drawing is as close to scale as possible. if your proportions are off on paper its going to result in a lot more on the spot compromises as you forge it out, unless the drawing was very conceptual and just used as a springboard. as dave says, scale drawings are also highly useful for figuring out dimensions that you didn't initially calculate without needing to do the math again, just grab your scale and measure it out.

I wont deign to claim any kind of mastery of anything, but preliminary design is usually brainstorming on the drive too or from work, from there a rough sketch, followed by a reduced scale sketch on graph paper and/or a CAD draft. because I am still learning the craft I often draw things out as a series of work flow steps to determine the best route to actual go about forging it and flush out any trouble spots on paper before I get to iron. at some point I might also break out a lump of fimo/sculpty type plasticene and mock forge through the steps to help visualize everything and approximate the final dimensions. sometimes everything looks good on paper but when you end up holding the finished product in your hand it feels like its totally off scale from what you expected :)

size it down for the mini-shoes and use them as Ivan suggests as cabinet/dresser hardware.

door knocker was the first thing that leapt to mind for me too. you could also utilize it as a base for just about anything that would benefit from a wide flat heavy base (handle holder, lamp etc) put it up on an angle and build it into a wine bottle holder work a hook into it somehow and make it a wall mount for the hook stick a mirror into it and mount it on a wall, or well/build in a handle and make it handheld.

Could you break the kettle down and treat it like raw sheet metal? You can raise or fold form (does that work in stainless?) or work it in some way to form a hollow form rather than a solid casting or ingot. Edit: any chance of getting a picture of the metal? Is it a complete object or the tattered remains?