clinker breaker

I don't know a lot about this, and I don't mean any disrespect to Mr. Miller, who obviously knows more about smithing than I do, but I don't think there ever was a time when anvils were just set aside when they'd done their due. I remember when I first got my (reprint) copy of Richardson's blacksmithing book and read about the lengths that smiths went to in order to replace broken horns and feet and such. They'd spend a day putting a horn back on, and this was when a day was 12 hours or so of labor. Now it's available free on google: http://books.google.com/books?id=zT5DAAAAIAAJ&dq=editions%3AjxM9l1QvAlYC&pg=PA114#v=onepage&q=horn&f=false I think anvils are probably as readily available today as ever. I don't use a cell phone, but everyone else in my world does, and I bet if my friends added up what they spent on cell phones in the past five years (much less the monthly bills) they could all buy brand spankin' new anvils that would last for generations and hold their value, unlilke cell phones. This is turning into a rant. Sorry. .

Everyone needs to remember that Sevierville is right by the Great Smokey Mountains...one of the most visited national parks in America. There are a lot of folks there on vacation trying to reconnect with their humble beginnings, and they bring their plump wallets with them. My family is from that neck of the woods (my mom & dad & my wife), and when I first looked into blacksmithing 20 years ago, run of the mill anvils were fetching $3 a pound at junk stores near the smokeys. I couldn't believe it. Some Big Orange Volunteer with a law degree or MD will go home to visit his kin, and he won't blink at the price...it's just bragging rights to him. What's worse is he won't pay $10 a pound...he'll just wave a wad of cash under the guy's nose and pay $6 or 7 a pound, and we'll all hate him for it.

I've made pokers and such, but this is my first heavy tool...a bick made out of a drag-link from an old tractor. I cut the ball joint off with a hardy (after about 10 heats), rammed the swell for the tie-rod (?) into the hardy hole and tried to fuller it, pointed it (another ten heats or more) bent it & rasped it. It fits well under blows from three directions (down, front & back) but I really should have upset it more for more stability. I'm not sure of the best way to attach images. I hope this works.

One of the best smiths I've ever seen (son of an Italian immigrant whose father earned a living smithing in Williamsburg, Virginia) appeared to do this, but when I watched him carefully, he was basically just setting his hammer down on an anvil with an incredible rebound, which made it look like a strike. I'm not saying everybody with extra blows is doing this, but I watched his arm pretty carefully and his muscles seemed very relaxed, like a pro dribbling a basket ball. The muscular energy went into moving metal.

I've played with smithing for years, but now that I have a 9-year-old son, I have someone to entertain with it. We mostly make sharp things (marshmallow sticks, nails, spikes) or melt soft metals in the forge and make ingots that end up cluttering our house. Probably my greatest smithing achievement was getting five kids and their parents in the backyard and teaching them all to point round stock, which we then used to roast marshmallows over a campfire. (This included a 10-year-old girl and two moms.) I figure every experience I create for my son and his friends where they interact with real materials is a huge deal since they spend most of their time looking at screens. We play a lot with fire. I let them watch some stuff burn (wood, leaves, garbage) and other stuff melt (solder, scrap aluminum or glass). They learn about real matter in a way that most kids don't, so even if our hooks are skewed and our handles are lopsided, I think it's a good thing (if not the safest.) Personally, I want to get more controlled with my smithing. I only have a handful of successful forgewelds under my belt, and thirty times as many failed welds. And I often lose heats before I manage to get the right grip with my tongs and move any metal the way I intended to. I don't have a shop, just a back yard setup, but I've decided to leave it set up and risk rust/theft in order to have it at the ready so I can forge on short notice when I have a bit of time rather than making a huge production of it just a few times a year. Now we're forging every couple of weekends, and I'm getting decidedly better. I'm not coordinated or strong to begin with, so repetition helps. It's late and I'm rambling. Thanks for hosting this forum. I hope to learn a lot from everyone.

My reaction is decidedly mixed. I finally joined this group so I could look at the pictures (not these in particular) but I've been reading posts for a couple of years, and it seems every other day somebody posts pictures (which I couldn't see) of an anvil they just bought and they're often asking questions related to it's value as a collector's item rather than its value as a tool, so some of these posts seem a tad hypocritical. That said, I'm married to a woman with OCD out the wazoo, and we don't make nearly enough money to buy a warehouse to hold the stuff she collects/drags home: we just wallow in it unless I can sneak some of it out the back door. What money I do earn I stockpile in cash and blue chip stocks. That cash doesn't do anybody anygood, and loot is a tool just like an anvil. (Takes money to make money.) I think the bottom line is that almost every human on the planet lived hand-to-mouth until a few generations ago, but now the urge to gather and save (which served us well prior to electricity and supermarkets) can look like an illness unless you're loaded, in which case it just looks like greed. This feller has millions to invest and he chose anvils rather than gold or stocks. That's his right. Still, it seems kind of sick, especially to a guy who lives with a less-affluent woman with the same collecting bug. My first post...How's that for a howdy do?