Foundryman

Fair enough, elm burl is one of my favourite timbers and it's fairly common and relatively cheap (I guess we have Dutch elm disease to thank for that).

Beautiful blade though its almost a shame to have covered the figured elm with the leather wrap!

Thank you. A number of the skills are being carried on in one way or another but sadly I doubt they'll be passed on to a future generation. Simon.

It's quite sad as the company can trace itself back to at least 1570, it's a lot of history to lose.

Couples classes? Cool idea, sounds like a great experience!

This week I'll be attending two weddings and the brides at both have always been supportive and encouraging of my bladesmithing, one of them having commissioned a pair of damascus kitchen knives as a gift to her son so I figured I'd forge them a knife each as wedding presents. The blades are 240 layers 15n20 and Uddeholme 20C, the handles are bog oak and (I think) Afzelia, though I'm not 100% sure as this timber has been laying around for at least 75 years and was marked as Azelia which as far as I'm aware is a bush and not a tree. Whatever the timber is, it's incredibly hard and dense with a beautiful iridescence to the grain that I think compliments the patterns in the blades. Simon.

This copper bucket followed me home from work on Friday, it belonged to my 70 year old employer's grandmother so it's not unreasonable to assume it's 100 years old. It's now going to retire beside my fire place storing kindling. Sadly this didn't follow me home, but it did follow a blacksmith colleague of mine home, it's 3.5" square wrought iron stock, the longest bar in this photo is over 6 feet. It was bought by our company a great many years ago (it was there when colleagues with 40 years with the company joined and was old then) and has never been used. Most of our forgings are done in pure iron these days but the wrought has always been saved for special jobs, however now the company is closing down and it needed a new home.

I'm guessing a Peter Wright by the feet and 450-500 lbs. I think that it is indeed a Soho pattern anvil, my main anvil is very similar though it has a step and is a shade shorter, it weighs in at 450lbs.

I would recommend selling them (at a profit) and using the proceeds to buy some known steel to make your tools from.

We have a guy in at work this week engraving a new inscription onto an old church bell. He's doing all his work with hammer and chisels. Talking to him today he said that he apprenticed at a college to learn the craft but there's very little work out there for him these days. His day job is making machine tool dies for the production of sheet metal packaging (think tobacco tins and the like).

I make green sand moulds professionally and think nothing of leaving moulds over the weekend. I have 3 boxes on the floor at the moment containing 15 components each that I moulded yesterday (Friday) and won't cast until Monday.

I dunno why but I saw those, read cut/bend/twist and thought industrial chainmail for a (very heavy) wall hanging or similar.

Now that's an anvil, and in such good condition too! Seriously impressive! Also I can't help but notice there seems to be a slight cosmetic crack in wall of the building those guys are standing in front of in the last photo.

if this anvil is only 15 minutes away then that's worth taking into consideration as you'll have the cost of fuel or shipping to think about with other anvils.

Put simply, if you need a swage block, its a good deal, if you don't, depending on the size of the anvil there's probably a better deal to be found, though that one looks serviceable if you can get it for £200. Anvils in the UK are relatively cheap and plentiful, my first was a 450lb London pattern for £180 and that kind of price is by no means uncommon.

It's not necessarily cast, it could well be die forged, it's only 71 lbs after all.

Welcome to the forum! That's a beautiful anvil and you got it at a great price, congrats! That could be a saw doctors anvil but some anvils were just made without horns if the client requested one. You can't fix those edges, they're not broken. Put the anvil to work before making any modifications and then only change things that have a direct impact on the quality of the work you produce.

Very interesting, it's good to know others have survived also! It's funny where bells end up, I know bells from our foundry have made it to the USA, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, India, Pakistan, Thailand, Eritrea, Kenya... the list goes on.

I know there's at least one Russian bell in the UK that was "liberated" during the Crimean war. A lot of foundries have experimented with adding different metals to bell metal, as well as altering the tin content. A couple of years ago we had an old Irish bell come back for scrap, when we tried breaking the bell up with a sledgehammer to go in the furnace it actually folded instead of breaking because the high quantity of lead in the metal! I'm not sure if silver would add anything to sound or not, but clearly that recipe has been working for them for 400 years so why change things now?

If its a cast steel books, and it's only a guess that it is, it wouldn't be too much trouble for a skilled sand moulder to cut out an inch or two of the waist when making the mould, though I have no idea why you would want to. The colour difference could be throwing my eye but I something looks off to me. That being said, as long as the rebound is good there's no reason it cant be a perfectly good anvil. The fact it has a short waist just means you'd need a taller stand, you could argue there's less mass under the sweet spot but at 200kgs that's not an issue. Also, if it is marked as 200kg on the side in raised letters that's a pretty good indication it is a brooks.

If could just be me but the proportions don't look right, the to half looks almost too big for the bottom half to my eye. I'd expect the waist to be an inch or two taller. With the relatively thick heel that anvil could be a brooks cast steel, but it could be any number of other makers too.

When casting gunmetal it will either be green sand or petrobond (oil bonded sand) depending on the component being cast.

The gunmetal (a leaded bronze I think) we occasionally use at work smells of rotten fish immediately after casting.

So I finished up the handle for this knife yesterday, made from bog oak with two brass spacers, this is the first handle of this type I've made before and it fairly challenging to file out the slot in the brass (bolster?) to fit the tang but I got there in the end. Overall length is dead on 13 inches and it balances about an inch forwards of the handle making it quite comfortable in the hand. Hope you guys like it, Simon.

That looks to be a nice anvil, I'd say it's probably an older ones as it appears to be of forged wrought iron construction and later Brooks are solid cast steel. However I do not know what date they switched from forging to casting or whether it was a graduated change depending on the style/weight of the anvil in question, either way though that's a great find, congratulations!