Anthony San Miguel

@01tundra, you did a good job. I've made small bowls, rectangles and other bottom swage shapes on both sides of the stump but a good large, precise dish like the one you made has been the hardest to do. I'm going to give your method a shot.

I would try to harden a smaller piece of the same rasp before you do a lot more work on it.

Maybe you'll get lucky but many Bellota farrier's rasps are case hardened.

Thanks for the dish making suggestions. The stump I have is still kind of green, hasn't hardened yet so I wonder if one of these would work. I would have to make a bunch of plunge cuts and then chisel out the rest.

O1 Tundra, how did you make the bowl shape in the stump? I'm making a stump swage now with various shapes but I can't come up with a good way to make big dishes like that.

These look really nice! I like them both. My Bday just passed this last week and my wife and daughter asked what I wanted. I told them a nice forging hammer. Can you PM me price on the diagonal peen if it isn't sold yet?

Same thing USUALLY works for me.

The last time I went to Fastenal, the drill rod they had in stock was O1.

Another vote for not "fixing" the edges.

Great score! I hope you do the poor old guy proud and use them for their intended purpose.

Based off of the shape of the horn and lack of dots between weight digits, I don't think it's a Mousehole. Some other English anvil.

Portable Hole?? I remember! It was invented by Calvin Q. Calculus and made famous by the Bugs Bunny episode called "The Hole Idea". Couldn't resist.

What kind of hammer did you test rebound with? I bought my first two anvils from the same guy. A Hay Budden and a Mousehole Forge. He had a lot of hammers laying around that he had personally rehandled with deer antlers so when I used one of his hammers to test rebound it wasn't great. I grabbed another one of his deer antler hammers and same thing. So I came back with a small ball peen and rebound on both anvils was great. The deer antler handles were absorbing a lot of the energy and making it seem like the anvils weren't as lively as the really were. Also, some hammers have soft faces, either intentionally (lead, brass, copper, some sledges) or because of poor quality. Use a hammer or ball bearing that you trust to test rebound.

You did good. Mousehole's are an anvil to be proud of. They have a rich history and were around for centuries. That's assuming that yours still has good rebound and wasn't in a barn fire or anything that would have drawn down the hardness.

Cut it off. Banging steel on I beam is one of the loudest, most irritating sounds you can make. If it was attached vertically it might be a LITTLE more quiet. I have a short, (about 15") heavy piece that I use very often for all kinds of things but never for forging. I put the car audio sound deadener on it because I have a lot of it and it quieted it significantly but I wouldn't want to forge on it and the piece you have is taller.