Marc1

Thinking in milling the face of an old anvil, is like wanting to "restore" an old painting with a rag soaked in turpentine.

Was that actually intended as a serious suggestion? On the anvil side, I like the "Airhead Anvil" or AA for short ... if it wasn't already taken that is I would turn the AA anvil into a book stand and place a bible on it, then sell it to a marriage celebrant.

I have a few hammers with rubber handles. Can't say the bother me much at all, but if they did ... all you need is to wrap over the rubber with a cotton bandage. I like fingerless gloves too. Hard to find good ones. There was a guy selling them for wheelchair users in ebay UK. As for the patronising lessons in life ... what can you do? No point getting upset. Sometimes I picture them declaming in front of a mirror haranguing imaginary crowds and taking selfies ....

Nice Chris. I never used one of those Japanese hammers. How does it feel? I have the idea that it should be somewhat wobbly as you strike because of the offset handle.

That is what real blacksmithing is all about Tom ... fabricate, improvise, repair, make what is not available with what you have at hand. Well done!

How did I get started in blacksmithing ... that was so easy! I needed a job and there was an opening for a 15 yo apprentice. no need to buy anything at all.

Interesting that knife maker in Finland. He is by no means a tall person but he leans over the anvil in a way that makes my back hurt just from watching.

When not in the best shape, that is a real anvil, not an ASO by any stretch of the imagination. Clean it up with a wire wheel and use it as it is, a better one will come along soon enough if you really want one. Don't get discouraged by patronising answers, it is just the unfortunate nature of some places on the internet. A lot of people can only dream about an anvil that size. I would try to dig. some more history if at all possible. Buried in the sand in Louisiana sounds real interesting. I bought a bunch of tongs at a flea market, fished out of the Manly harbour by a diver. They all have those deep pits like your anvil, but work well despite them. Keep in touch and show us what you can do. Most people here never show their handy work work, only grammatical prowess.

150 different countries participating here ... I have seen that quote many times and have to smile every time. This is an American forum visited by 99% American people, All measurements and prices quoted and discussed are in imperial measurements and US dollars, rules and regulations discussed relate to the USA, materials discussed refer to what is available over there, and if someone asks can I as a teenager sell knives, it is rather obvious that the question refers to the US. If Cas037 asks me, i would reply. Sorry ... i don't know. Must consult with a legal expert, business accountant or similar person in your local area. Simple and direct. I believe Glenn answered that way. As for the skewed or direct gaze that may or may not offend. Yep, funny but irrelevant. Law and culture are distinctively different.

You need solid rubber tyres like this one. Industrial type. Do a google search with "La casa delle ruote" Of course the right tool is a mini tractor like this Toro or Dingo with a grappler, but they don't come cheap.

You can buy Refflinghaus 56a at 110# or 165# ... a bit under and a bit over your budget. Refflinghaus 56 at 165# The distributor is in Nebraska

i like the Hay Budden. Sure you can buy new anvils that are good quality. Problem is that the comparable prices are light farrier anvils and that will limit you in what you can do on them. People will tell you they forged a boat anchor on a railroad track, but the facts are a tad different. What else have you found? Unfortunately, everything seems to be overpriced. Whoever quotes the date of manufacture instead of the weight and condition, is trying to pretend "antiquity" has some sort of value.

Dewalt is a good brand, 4.5" is a decent size and that model has two safety features, non locking paddle switch or dead man switch ,and a brake (according to their website). Bigger is not necessarily better when it comes to grinders, and I find they should be used more according to the circumference of your forearm than your aspirations Get acquinted with that one, take it easy and let it do the work, never take the guard off even if your cousin, neighbour, friend and aunty tell you they do so regularly.

The Anvil Chorus: Gypsy men and women: See how the clouds melt away from the face of the sky when the sun shines, its brightness beaming; just as a widow, discarding her black robes, shows all her beauty in brilliance gleaming. So, to work now! Lift up your hammers! Who turns the Gypsy's day from gloom to brightest sunshine? His lovely Gypsy maid! Men: Fill up the goblets! New strength and courage flow from lusty wine to soul and body. All: See how the rays of the sun play and sparkle and give to our wine gay new splendor. So, to work now! Who turns the Gypsy's day from gloom to brightest sunshine? His lovely Gypsy maid! The plot of the opera il trovatore is dark and sinister as they all usually are, and the main characters are women. The blacksmith role however is just background and male.

Ha ha. Verdi wrote the opera "Il Trovatore" in 1853. The blacksmith in the play is a man, a Gypsy that is in love with a Gypsy girl. Verdi did not have blacksmiths and their gender role in mind, only a love story for the audience to enjoy. The play clearly portrays a man blacksmith. Did the gypsy girl also have hammer skills? Verdi did not include such possiblity in his libretto. but at that point in time in the opera, the singer is the blacksmith, one lonely man singing to his love as he beats the anvil. I suppose that next time they remake the movie Braveheart they will change the role to a female actor? ... Joan of Arc played by a man? possible, perhaps will draw more audience too

Nice anvil. I like double horn anvils and prefer them to the London pattern. My suggestion is to strip the paint from the sides. A brush and some lacquer thinner will get rid of old paint quick smart. you can then finish it off with a wire brush, eliminating all rust, and coat with automatic transmission fluid applied with a rug. You are likely to find a lot of chisel and punch marks on the sides the result of a blacksmith's bad habit of testing the temper of the tools he makes on the anvil. Grinding the sides to eliminate this is as bad an idea, as it was to make those marks. Now you need a stand, a few hammers and tongs, a forge ... and ideas of what to forge next. PS Since you already bought the anvil, a rebound test is academic at best before purchase. After purchase ... well, in my opinion is a waste of time and will not change what you already have. Find a forge, heat up some steel and give your hammer skills a go.

Funny indeed, however if you want to talk music that incorporates the blacksmith beating the anvil, you can not go past Verdi and his aria "La Gitanella" or the little gipsy girl. The Gipsy is the blacksmith who sings "Who makes the Gipsy's days better? The Gipsy girl! " In the below rendition the anvil beating musician is not a comedian but can fortunately keep his tempo. The choice of a lady playing the part of the male blacksmith is very PC

You need to make a "french drain" around your shed, so the water finds it's way around it and not in it. Thomas described a primitive way to do it, a faster and cheaper way is to dig a trench all around the walls on the outside, say 1' x1' or 1.5' x 1.5' depending on your level of energy. lay a couple of inches of aggregate, recycled concrete, pebbles, stones, whatever you call it about 20mm in diameter or 3/4". Then buy slotted plastic pipe,lay it inside the trench and backfill with pebbles. the water will sink through pebbles and in the pipe and away wherever you direct your drain. PS Just saw Frosty's post. Yes Geofabric is good to prevent silt to go in the pipe, but in clay soil it blocks fairly soon and defeats the purpose. Same with the sock they supply to put over the slotted pipe. Whatever solids that find their way through the stones, will go through the slots and down the pipe.

in the 90ties, when I wa running those personal development seminars, I also used to ask the audience ... what do you think is fair for a person to earn. I used the word fair purposely even when fair has nothing to do with it. The answers never ceased to amaze me and are at the core of the very low 5% success at personal level when it comes to money. To begin the answers did not come at all and needed encouragement. "So tell me what is fair? Is $50k a year fair?" Mind you I never said what the hypothetical person did or what he was paid for. It was the nineties. $50k a year would draw quiet nods of approval, and murmurs of sure, thats fair. $100k would produce a bit more head movement but still approval, although that approval took more time. $200k, started to draw exclamations of surprise and qualifications ... depends what the does, and the word "greed" surfaced here and there. But I kept on going, $400k? made them loud and restless and $800k drew out rude exclamations and other irreproducible concepts. When I started to go into the millions, I lost them altogether. Why? Basically and to keep this post short, this is at the core of the "anti values" principle. Our values, adopted early in life, make us who we are. Some of those values help us forward and others pull us back. Note that I don't say right or wrong. I say they help you or they hinder you ... let's say like the oil in a gearbox. Too thin and you destroy the gears, too thick and you slow them down. in a nutshell, 95% of people believe, deep down that it is wrong to be prosperous, that rich people are so at the expense of the poor, that you have to be content with what you have and ambitions are bad, fuelled by greed. With that in mind, most people will glide through life attempting to keep apparences, held moral principles, avoid like the plague talking about money, complain about others who with their greed make them short of a quid, and some even state that their average condition is due to keeping to their moral obligation ... "I am poor but I am honest" is a classic expression that implies that you can not prosper unless you are dishonest ins some way. The above, certain to ruffle a few feathers, is not necessarily clear in most people mind, more a subconscious concept. However it does lead most people decisions away from prosperity. In the corporate world this is just as apparent, and the bad boss is bad because he is not only incompetent but also greedy cashing in those millions, etc etc. It is a fascinating subject and one that most people avoid talking about or react with ire when confronted with. Your post describing what you consider good or basic is courageous and refreshing. Good for you. Your prosperity is valuable and is a good thing not only for yourself. Congratulations.

That is because your turn what I call the purpose of business to exist, into what you call a "moral obligation". Moral is the concern with the principles of right and wrong, nowhere near the reasons for a business to be. I used to held personal development courses and to my dismay, people actually paid a fee to listen to me. Go figure! i used a series of questions for people to answer and set the mood for discussion. One such question was ... " What is the purpose of your business". Most attendees were management or business owners. The answers invariably took off, high into the stratosphere of philosophical mumbo jumbo. Not even owners of business could sincerely confess that, after the dust settles, the purpose, the only one, is to turn a profit. The rest is "carton pintado" like the Spanish like to say ...( just for show). And so if the purpose of business is such low and unattractive mundane reason, that needs to be hidden and camouflaged with alleged high social or moral purposes, on the surface, lobbying for a better more effective way to achieve said moral concepts should be very popular and have many followers and adherent. But we all know this is not so, simply because of human nature reluctance to change what appears to work. So , the realisation that to survive you have to roll with the punches rather than make yourself a target, is far from nihilistic, and just one tool to adapt to a changing environment. Everyone will be using his own set of values to draw the proverbial line in the sand of how far they are prepared to adapt. And your observations of business politics and the others horror stories are but a picture of what we have to contend with.

Sure, I can see the logic and the reasons behind a call to a better approach to relationship between employer and employee. And I can understand perfectly that if such relationship improves, the outcome might result in a lift in profitability. Unfortunately to express such thoughts, is to tell the employer how to conduct their business, and most will not take well to that. The owner or their appointed manager, has that position because they know better than you, how to conduct their business. Rightly or wrongly. The conflict between owner and worker has been going on since the beginning of times and such conflict is even described in the bible. And so many tried to change it, regulate it, constrain it into some fabricated political / social / moral code ... with little or no success. Heads of state get appointed according to how they talk about it and pretend to understand it. Fairness and civility are ill defined concepts that if not set in law mean very little beyond the appeal to some ethereal moral code that will be in place only when everything else is satisfied. I thought I made my case when I first answered with one sentence ... The fallacy of leadership is, that it exists. We live in an era of abysmal lack of real leadership, in all aspects of life. Starting with parents, then teachers, pastors, bosses, politicians, religious leaders, heads of state, world organisations, countries unions, every single leader has the moral authority of a wet noodle, and the worse part of this situation is that it does not matter much at all. I love intellectual exercises. They are fun and polish one's use of the language and grammar, have some effect on a few who like to think, and can lead to someone writing a book about it and surely may even show in one's eulogy and epithaph. I just don't see their practical value to survive in our peculiar world.

I use them all the time, but I only buy rat tail, soft start, paddle switch ( dead man switch) 5", for metal work. Always use face shield over safety goggles despite some friends and colleagues calling it "overkill". Nothing like peer pressure to drop your guard on safety. It's like those who tailgate you whilst you drive to get you to go faster. Flip your rear vision mirror up and ignore them. Personal protection is personal and you are the only one that will suffer from the lack of it. HAA ... what did you soak in soap water? Your grinder?

The fact that many use cheap or expensive, straight or twist wire brushes, on angle grinders that go 10k rpm or more, for a year or 50, does not make it good practice. Wire brushes disintegrate ( lose strength or cohesion and gradually fail.) due to the excessive speed of this tools, and the bristles become dangerous missiles. Best practice is using a good quality cup twist wire wheel, on a D handle 6" polisher that does 3 to 5k rpm, and has a variable speed to match. The brush will last a bit longer but most importantly will not spew bristles at high speed. 6 or 7" polishers are cheap and the job is done safer and better at about the same speed. Angle grinders are just about the most abused and misused tools in the shed, due to their rock bottom price and vast practical uses. A friend of mine used a 4" grinder with a 4" circular saw attached and no guard to prune bushes. Did this for years too, until the inevitable ... 3 fingers lost, but kept his face after extensive surgery. Things we do.

Use a polisher not a grinder for steel brushing. The speed is too high and the brush disintegrates.

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