AmericanLocomotive

Thanks for the information!

I'm in RI. I joined 3 years ago, and hardly posted, so I never bothered to set my profile up. But yeah, I really don't know either. The anvil bounces better than the railroad track we had before (which from what I understand generally bounces better than cheap cast iron anvils). We've beat on it with an 8-pound sledge, and the face doesn't seem too bothered by it. I've seen that the cast iron HF ASOs tend to get deep dents with even a small hammer. The casting is pretty nice with no real visible imperfections or weird casting voids. I'm guessing its Taiwanese.

So a few years ago we picked up this 155 pound anvil for around $80. It's performed well for us. It doesn't really seem to ring like some forged anvils I've seen on YouTube, but it doesn't have a dull sound when you hit it with a hammer. Hitting with a hammer results in a pretty good rebound, too. So I'm thinking it may be cast steel, or maybe cast iron with a forge-welded steel plate? The only marking it has at all, is a "70" cast into the side. 155 pounds converts almost perfectly to 70 KG, so I'm assuming that's what the 70 stands for. I'm guessing it's possibly Taiwanese or European? I have no complaints regardless of it's origin. It's done us very well, and the face isn't coming apart/chipping despite a lot of edge and corner work.

Well somewhere during the heat treating process of the very first knife I've successfully forged, it acquired a slight side-to-side bend. I'm not sure where in the process it occurred, but it was flat after forging, and I didn't notice the slight bend until I pulled it out of the toaster oven once tempering was done. It's slight enough that a few good hammer blows cold should straighten it, but is this wise to do on a blade that's just been hardened? Should I heat it back up to forging temperatures then straighten it? If so, how do I go about heat-treating it again, wouldn't quenching it again make it too brittle? If any more information helps, it was forged in a coke-fired forge, and for hardening it was heated in an electric heat treating oven.

Remaking it with a truck drum/rotor and a big sheet of plate really isn't in the budget at the moment. All of the stuff we've built this thing out of, including the fuel was free. Based on how the blower feeds in air, I really can't eliminate the plate without rebuilding the entire thing - but I'll see what I can do. I've ditched the holes in favor of a great made out of a super long bolt I find around - I'm not sure if the spacing between them is wide enough, but it's trivial to change. After discussing it with a few friends I forge with, I decided to also cut off half of the drum - I'm undecided on the other half however. Also, one thing that makes "cleaning" while running the forge difficult, is that the coke dies extremely quickly (<30 seconds) if you remove it from the air. We had originally burned coal, but I don't remember if it had the same issue or not. Thanks for all the input though! I'll see how the latest iteration works out, and if it still has issues I guess I'll get to dismantling the whole thing and starting over.

Maybe it'll help if I post a picture of what I'm working with: There is a significant chamber underneath the plate where ash falls, a long with a large air supply pipe that has an ash trap on the bottom - and it does fill and collect with ash that does fall through the holes. We plan to cut around 4-5" heightwise off the drum, and maybe fashsion some kind of table around it as well. Just need to get more cutting discs! So, should I could out the drilled holes all together and just make a grate out of 1/4" stock, or should I make a grate that elevates the coal above the drilled holes? Or do both, and just have a grate above a big opening?

I have a DIY forge made from a semi-truck brake drum (about 16" diameter) and other various pieces of scrap and a blower scavenged from a clothes dryer. There is a large baseplate placed inside that the coal sits on that's removable for service/cleaning. It has approximately 15 ~3/8" holes drilled in it. We primarily fuel it with coal and coke, but lately it's been mostly coke since I got about a half ton of it for free. It has no problem making even heat, and it easily gets up to welding temperatures (and well beyond) if we need it. The problem we're having is after about ~2 hours of use, the forge starts to load up with lots of ash and/or bits of coke that just no longer burn. Once that starts to happen, the forge has a hard time keeping sufficient air moving over the coke to keep it burning. Eventually the burn starts to get uneven with hot spots until it can't maintain heat at all. So I'm looking for some tips on how to manage the ash build it up that keeps occuring, of if its just something that happens with solid fuel forges?