Marc1

Check out you tube for a Alec Steele video titled "Triple burner gas forge build" his design is very much like your diagram up here.

Check around the base of the horn for cracks. Apparently this anvil's' horn was butt welded to the body and it can come off ... according to 'anvilfire'

http://anvils.co.za/category/used-anvils/ Anvils South Africa 083 775 0975

I remember when my (then) 12 yo daughter brought in a stray cat. Kitten really snow white and lovely but I was determined not to have any cats ... My verdict was, give her a bit of milk and off she goes. We were all around the cat watching her drink the milk when she turned around slowly and in a millisecond jumped behind the fridge and caught a mouse. Chomped on it to kill it and jumped again just in time to get a second one. The cat stayed at home for the next 15 years until she passed away in her sleep. Still miss her

To me it looks like an anvil that had some repairs done to it and the patches of weld on the face are cracking. Just a guess from what I can see in your photos. Clearly you have not done the cracks with the flap disk only uncovered them. As far as what to do ... nothing is probably the best suggestion. Nothing in as far as repairs of any sort, just use as normal. worst that can happen is that the previous repair pops out and you are left with the original hole. if it ever comes to that, try to join a group that has anvil repairs sessions and then you can get into the nitty gritty of a proper repair. Hopefully that will never happen.

i would avoid the place ... apparently there are some thieves around

Welding thin steel with an old transformer arc welder is the hardest thing to do. Welding thicker steel with thinner that is painted and rusty? Much harder. Will those handles come off? Probably not ... so, you have in a sense achieved your purpose. of course a rivet would have been more elegant but thought you nothing. Keep on welding, practice and ask a welder to show you the ropes. Good on you for trying.

Mm ... post a video of parts and don't post the assembled product ...

Could be a cobblers anvil of sorts.

Use bass or double bass strings.

Pye, yes, interesting. However he talks about the artist and his work. I was thinking more in the notion of what or rather why, something is regarded as art when something else may not. Is a Stradivarius violin art for a deaf person? Hardly since they do look rather ordinary. Paintings to a blind person? The assessment that something is art as opposed to something else who is allegedly not art, is purely subjective. Sure, there are generally accepted norms that conform with our beliefs in aesthetics and pleasant sounds, or taste. The definition of what is art or artistic or who is an artist, still is out there and can hardly be defined without using lots of words and achieving very little.

I have read a few attempts at pigeonholing what is art and what is craft and what is industrial and any shades in between, and consequently trying to place the artist, the craftsman, the artisan, the tradesman, the engineer etc in a hierarchy scale. Not easy and usually futile. As a way of example, I learned to make decorative stuff from a blacksmith who had broken away from the tradition of joining scrolls and bars with invisible rivets and used OA and later even an electric welder ... and who used jigs to make repeat scrolls all the same size. And I have heard people saying that this takes away from the artistic value of the piece. Why? if Michelangelo had made himself a stamp of sorts to start a face and assure proportions would that take away from his work? What about making a support for his hand rather than paint freehand? There is this notion that art is unique, that it has to be impossible to reproduce exactly the same and that in such uniqueness lays it's value. And there is truth in that. I play the piano and prefer to improvise. The music is not written, it is in my head somewhere and it comes out. Sometimes they ask me to play what I played last week and I can not do it. I may play something similar, but it is not the same. Does that make it more valuable? I doubt it. An industrial process in it's apparent dry and cold method requires a lot of individual input that is very much like the one of the artist painting, forging or writing. Especially the inventive side, the inspiration in creating a new a novel approach to solve a problem. A lot of art in that If I may use the expression. And the same can be applied to the artisan or craftsman and even the tradesman that each in their own way add from their own self to the final product to make it a unique product of their hands and intellect. The artistic value or the lack of it, lays in the amount of human input the object displays, and the way this human input resonates with those that see it, hear it, eat it or use it.The value is purely subjective as proven by artists who died paupers, unappreciated in their time only to be 'discovered' later. Anyway, that took longer that I though haha Poetic license I call it.

It looks like a brick splitter to me. Providing it is 6 to 10 " long. If it is bigger then it's a big something else ... Mattock?

Is that asbestos on the walls?

North Queensland holds the record for the Long Horn with the longest horns in the world between 2011 and 2014. Longhorns are not common but they have enthusiasts followers breeding them and they adapt well to the dry Queensland north. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-21/millie-the-longest-horn-cow/8038168

I wish the son of my old master had the same respect for his father. When he passed away, the son who was too good to set foot in the father's shop, sold the land to the local developer and the tools for junk

Interesting the comment about the type of sand to use in an anvil stand. I dismissed building a box with sand due to what I saw as inevitable that the anvil will shift and sink. Nothing I hate more than an anvil that moves. Was watching a youtube video of a power hammer and the anvil would bounce at each hammer stroke visibly easy 10 mm each time. Atrocious. Anyway, sand ... I can see that if instead of river sand we used brickie sand, a type of sand that comes from a quarry and has high content of clay, it would compact nicely. Now I am picturing a box full of sand, a steel platform to 'float' on top of the sand for the anvil to be bolted against. Mm ... nothing stopping the anvil from slowly leaning one way or another so ... I can weld a sort of keel under the base, one plate vertically down, 4 or 6" and two halves across forming a cross buried in the sand. This will keep the base horizontal and negate any potential for listing either way. Easy project. As for the old time tree stump, I think they probably used a real tree stump with roots and all and built the shed around it ... sort of like Odysseus did There was the bole of an olive tree with long leaves growing strongly in the courtyard, and it was thick, like a column. I laid down my chamber around this … Then I cut away the foliage of the long-leaved olive, and trimmed the trunk from the roots up, planning it with a brazen adze, well and expertly, and trued it straight to a chalkline, making a bedpost of it, and bored all hones with an auger. (23.190-288).

Excellent idea and very well made ... reminds me of "fingers" from the Addams family ... Could have a "cousin it" made from a mop at the entrance

They must sell all the good stuff to you guys. I had a pile of Dewalt and Makita brand disk. After going through half a dozen I got tired and dumped them all in the rubbish.

Hi Zack ... all very valid points above, however your own perception/experience is what counts most of the time. I suggest you find a piece of rail, any size will do for this experiment. Ear plugs essential. Put it on a stand of sorts, secure it with screws nails clamps etc. grab a hammer and a flat bar and give it a workout as best as you can on it. Next have the same rail vertical and secure it the best you can, for example against a post, a bench leg, a door frame something that allows to work on the end of the rail without it falling on your toes. Then take the same piece of steel and mash it on that rail end as best as you can. You will surely be able to tell the difference between having a bit more mass under your hammer vertical then horizontal. Then you could try a bigger rail and a bigger hammer. If you decide you want to forge something, go to a scrap yard, toss the rail on the pile and find the biggest meanest piece of round stock you can find, secure it vertical on top of a stump and get cracking. Yes, a forklift tine (arm) works too and an anvil is better and a bigger anvil is even better, and the size of the anvil is proportional to the hammer you need to use according to the job etc. But get started with whatever you can find and work yourself up from there. It is all about the journey not the destination.

Glenn ... I admire you patience in the analysis of the above exchange, but I am afraid there is only one conclusion from it. The first sentence in the first reply was out of line and rude. The rest is only a consequence of that single sentence. A provocative reply is no excuse for poor behaviour, agreed. But a provocative reply uncalled for from a long standing member has also no excuse. Considering this is not the first time I see this happening and considering the little time I spend here, the chances of me seeing this happening more than once should be zero. I believe that those that have experience and knowledge to share, and are generous enough to answer, take into consideration in their replies that 1) We do not know the poster and assumptions are the mother of all stuff ups. 2) Courtesy does not cost much and is not a sign of weakness. Nuff said. M

What's the question Jackhammer? You want to know if PW is a good anvil, the answer is yes. As for being popular ... not sure what that really means. Popular as in there are lots of them, yes! popular as in everyone likes them ... I don't know. I suppose there are not many reason to dislike them. Like I said before PW are softer then comparable German or Swedish anvils. I have seen PW squashed like plasticine by long time abuse. From what I have read, they used to advertise using pure wrought iron in their production so their zeal was probably the reason for the softer product. In later production they started to make the face convex to compensate for depression of the face. Other manufacturers would use a mixture of steel and by pot luck incorporate some with more carbon that made the anvil harder. German or Swedish do get chipped edges, yet never seen one with big depressions on the face. If you are after 'the best possible anvil' you are in difficult territory where everyone has different opinions. Nimba, Refflinghaus, Peddinghaus, Kohlswa to name a few that still make new anvils are tops and you pay top dollar for them. Yet not as high as some people believe and it pays to know the good anvils new prices, since a lot of people pay more than new in the false believe that old is better than new.

Thank you Scrambler, you have unscrambled the info. Great to know tha such low price for a noise suppressing device exist. Will order mine asap. Presbyopia or the sight of the presbyter, from the greek old man, has no relation with the cornea but with the lense. Two different parts in the eye. Yes the lense becomes less flexible and the ciliary muscles weaker. Cataract is the opacification of the lense not the cornea due to precipitation of the protein inside, accelerated by environmental factors like UV and also intense heat like forging. The cataract operation replaces the lense with an artificial lense that is held in position by different methods depending from the model used. The lense is of course fixed, for now anyway, and can include correction if required. Changing the shape of the cornea to replace glasses was done way before laser existed simply by making radius cut in the cornea so that the scarring tissue changes the shape and produces the desired correction. Laser makes the cut more precise. Damage to the cornea if it is permanent can only be corrected with cornea replacement from a donor. Cataract operations were done hundreds of years ago without surgical instruments particularly in India. The "guru" would put the blind patients in a line and walk the line chanting and making noises. Then he would place index and thumb over the poor patient's eye and pressing together, dislocate the hardened lense, breaking the iris and making it fall into the vitreous humor inside the eye. If the retina of the patient was still working he would miraculously recover the eye sight by the waving of the guru's hand

I don't even own a straight peen hammer. It's all cross peen for me. I think that a diagonal peen may be nice, but then all it takes is to turn the stock a tad ...