MattBower

If you click "Enlarge" and look at the seventh picture from the top, you can see what appear to be the remains of a scarf where the front foot under the horn was welded on. The eleventh pic also give you a decent view. So it's pretty clearly not cast iron. It also seems to be fairly soft on the face, judging from all the wear and the mushrooming along the edges. That's why I'm saying I think it's wrought. I suppose it could be mild steel, but that would strike me as far more mysterious and unlikely.

Ach! I have a feeling the bidding on this is going to exceed my rather low spending limit. Well, I knew that might happen when I posted the link!

It looks quite similar to this old French anvil, and also fairly similar to these "tall primitive" anvils of unknown provenance. If the date on the French one is to be believed, you might call it late Renaissance.

You'd be vastly better-off with something like this:

Cast iron. No better than your Harbor Freight anvil. I don't exactly know your price range, but I remember being sixteen. Any new anvil in what I would guess to be your price range is pretty much certain to be cast iron junk. You'd be far better off scrounging a heavy piece of mild steel to serve as your anvil, or finding a used anvil for a fair price. (Which is still likely to be $1 per pound, more if you're impatient. When I was sixteen, I was impatient.)

Yeah, dude, wish you would've asked about that. We would've warned you. I posted a thread about ASOs a few days ago. This was exactly the sort of thing I had in mind.

What does it look like to you, Thomas? Something more recent? Colonial? Do you agree that it looks like wrought iron, anyway?

I stumbled across this guy while following links from the "New benchmark in ridiculous" thread. What do you think? Pretty cool if you ask me, and to my badly untrained eye it looks like the real deal. It's also within easy driving distance of me. I'm not sure what I'd do with it -- it looks to me like the face is probably plain wrought iron, it's pretty beat up, and I wouldn't feel right cleaning it up for real work since it's so old -- but it's still kind of tempting. http://tinyurl.com/29cp4q2

I'm thinking I'll try to make it up there on Saturday. (Of course I've said that about the Stagmers' Fire & Brimstone three years running, and yet somehow that's never come together -- so who the hell knows what'll actually happen.) I've never been to one of these deals before. What goes on? Mostly watching demos? Who's running the iron smelt? And as far as Mr. Larson's hammers, are they available to actually try out? Even for us idiots who've never used one before?

Then your ITC is thicker than the ITC I've seen! The T-Rex is supposed to reach welding heat in 350 cubic inches or less. You're at around 285. Just give it a try. I bet you'll be fine.

Latex paint, paraffin or wood glue will work, too. It's uneven evaporation out the ends that causes the trouble, so that's where the paint needs to go. If you rough it to shape green, then seal the ends and cure it, it'll go much faster.

I'd use them for tempering, but I'm sure Phil is right.

I can't find a copy online, but I can't help suspecting that the author may be slightly confused, metallurgy-wise. If you could possibly scan it and email it to me, I'd really like to read it. If that's too much trouble, I understand.

What do you want to know? Darren's a nice guy and very helpful. I've ordered from him two or three times with no problems.

True, though wood is pretty much free. :)

Exactly how big will this mini-forge be? Venturi burners are sensitive to back pressure, so they're not exactly one size fits all. I have a T-Rex. I found that it didn't run very well in an approx. 4" diameter by 12" tall vertical welding forge until I opened up more room for exhaust. It ran, but it ran rich (wastes fuel, potentially dangerous due to CO) and didn't get as hot as it should have. Burners are simple to build, especially if you aren't trying to weld with them. Why not build a small burner for your small forge and save the T-Rex for the bigger stuff?

Sure, that's one way. The knock against welding around the edge has always seemed to be that it's likely to leave a tiny gap in there between the CI and the steel face, which would hurt rebound and wouldn't be as strong as a bond across the entire face. (It doesn't sound like that been a problem with yours.) The thing about brazing is that ideally it'd allow a bond across the entire area of both surfaces, with no gaps.

I don't own a cast iron ASO, and I never will. But occasionally some poor guy comes along who didn't know any better, and wants to know if there's any way to make his ASO functional. And for a while know I've been wondering: is there some reason you couldn't furnace brace a steel face onto one of those things? You'd have to leave it unhardened, I think (though I wonder if you could get away with flame hardening it), but it'd still be a big improvement. I know...lipstick on a pig.

Admiral Steel. Used to be that their minimum order for 5160 was twenty feet.

Awalker, it's just that your questions suggest that you're basically clueless about heat treating, and a leaf spring for this application seems a heck of a place to start learning. Besides that, when I think about what it would take for me to do this -- building a temporary forge that'd allow me to evenly austenitize something the size of a leaf spring, coming up with a sufficiently large quench tank full of oil, figuring out how to temper it in controlled fashion -- and see the way you're sort of breezily shrugging it off, it suggests to me that either you don't really understand the problem, or else you're comfortable with a kind of "call it good" approach that would make me nervous. Maybe you already have furnaces and ovens and quench baths big enough to handle this sort of stuff, but in that case I'd expect you to know a little more about heat treating off the top of your head. 1200 is way too cool. At 1200 you're not making any austenite. The Heat Treater's Guide says to austenitize 5160 at 1525 F and quench in oil or polymer. The Heat Treater's Guide also suggests that 46-52 HRC is a good spring temper for 5160. That's roughly 430-515 Brinell. Going from the hardness vs. tempering temp table in the HTG, if you fully harden it, tempering at 800 F should give you a Brinell hardness of a bit over 450. Tempering at 700 should give you a Brinell of a little over 500. So that 700-800 F range is about where you want to temper. Tempilaq works well. Tempilstiks are a little harder to use. Or go with the greasy stick method (for tempering -- you'll need something else for austenitizng).

Well, he already told us it's soft:

I'll be interested to see if you can find a local heat treater who wants to try this. What article are you talking about, exactly?

You're taking springs with tensile strength probably in excess of 200,000 psi and welding them with...what? Filler metal with a tensile strength of 60,000-70,000 psi?

Before I started researching, I wondered if some of the flanges might have been brazed onto the sockets as individual units, though it'd take some planning to do that. I kind of pictured each individual flange as a separate piece, with a couple lugs projecting from the side that'll lie next to the eye, and matching perforations in a sheet of wrought. Insert lugs into holes, pein from the back side, roll up the sheet, then braze the flange joints for extra strength. The ends of the sheet that forms the socket could be welded (before the brazing) or brazed themselves. The riveted lugs would hold everything in place during brazing, as well as providing extra strength. That was my just idea; I have no evidence that it was ever used "back in the day." It's probably not very efficient, in terms of time.

I admit I'm lazy about annealing. I usually do stock removal with the steel in a normalized state, then when I'm ready for HT I come back and do the triple normalize and quench routine. It seems to work well enough, though I know stock removal might be slightly easier (and slightly easier on my tools) if I went ahead and annealed.