Ted Ewert

I've been working on this after work all week. The concrete slab under the stand is not level which has caused a few headaches. Nevertheless, I managed to get thing pretty level. The top of the stand is 24" high. Thats a little lower than my other stand, but my knuckles are still below the anvil face. Knuckle height is a little too low for me. I started by bolting down a base and working up from there The base material is 1 1/2" X 1/4". The four outside rebars are 5/8", and the two in the middle are some 3/4" I found out behind my shed. These are all welded into some angle iron to support the top plate. I made the top plate from some 2 1/2" X 3/4" bar I salvaged from a dumpster. I welded three pieces together to make a size to fit the anvil. I used 4 1/4-20 screws to attach it. Keeping it flat through the welding was not easy. Had to redo 1 weld. I also made the form which is 12 X 9 inches inside. Here's how the anvil sits. I still have more to do. I want to put angle iron on the corners, and I'm using some threaded rod for rack supports. I'm hoping to pour this weekend. Ted

Sorry I missed this earlier. The swage (sp?) was used just to bend the leaf in half. If you need it deeper, once you've made the crease you can just pound the halves closer together.

MC... I'm just doing this as an experiment, and I'm using my little 70 lb anvil as the guinea pig. I'm only wasting $50.00 if it doesn't work, and I'm having fun designing and building it. If it works I'll build another one for the bigger anvil. BTW, the anvil will be mounted on a plate, which will be connected directly to rebar extending to another plate bolted to the floor. Steel will be baring most of the load and shock while the concrete will add mass and stiffness. Stay tuned...

Thanks for the vote of confidence Buzzkill. I went out and bought the materials today, so I should have something put together in the near future. I'll start another thread when I get it going.

We can speculate endlessly on this topic, and it is interesting, but there's nothing like putting it to the test. I'll build a concrete stand and see how well my theories hold up. If it falls apart, I'll be hunting some crow myself.

I don't want you to eat crow Frosty, I would rather we just had a more constructive dialog. I'll be the first to admit that I spend a lot of time out in left field, but I'm not trying to mislead anyone. Ted

See above photo. That's a pile driver in the background and those are concrete pilings. I've actually seen this done.

I suggest you do your homework before accusing me of misconceptions. Google is a good place to start.

Thanks guys for interjecting a little common sense into the discussion. I do tend to overthink things, but I find it interesting nonetheless. I live in my head a lot. LOL, I've watched a few of those myself and feel the same way. I like your idea of the cable holding the stand down. I realize that a lot of this is not highly relevant in the practical world, especially if you have one of those giant anvils that a small plane could land on. Nevertheless, overthinking has served me time and again in the past. It allows one to arrive at a better perspective on what is reasonable and what is overkill. It also stirs up new ideas. I really do appreciate the support and feedback this community has provided. Thank you all.

Metal stands are good and so are stumps. I have nothing against anything that works for you. I'm going to be spending a fair piece of change on a new anvil and I want to get the optimal performance it can provide. Getting a solid grasp on what enables that is my goal here. I have done numerous experiments with machines I have designed and built, and the biggest obstacle I had was overcoming parasitic oscillations. A ringing anvil is a good example of a parasitic oscillation. These oscillations rob energy from the system. I have never had any trouble with reinforced concrete oscillating. Contrary to many opinions, reinforced concrete has very good shock resistance when the load is distributed properly. Huge power hammers are set on concrete and you don't see the pad cracking to pieces. Concrete piers are driven by pile drivers deep into the ground without shattering. How many of the concrete floors under an anvil have crumbled due to the anvil usage? The base of the anvil disperses the shock load over a wide area, rendering the argument mute, especially if the anvil is bolted down to the concrete. My anvil is going to be set up as a semi permanent piece of equipment in the shop and will not be moved. I want the stand to be as heavy and stiff as I can make it. That doesn't work for everyone, but it does for me.

To fully understand what's happening here we need to get down to the atomic level. A good analogy is a round rock being dropped into a swimming pool. As the rock hits the water it sends out a pressure (shock) wave in a roughly conical shape. This displaces the water for a short distance until the friction of the water slows the rock down. The energy from the rock hitting the water is stored up in the displaced water, which then reverses direction, filles the hole and causes a splash. The splash is important because it illustrates the return path of the energy. When an anvil is struck with a hammer, the same thing happens. A conical shock wave radiates from the point of impact and displaces molecules of metal. These molecules then force the ones right behind them to move and on and on. Eventually the wave gets to the bottom of the anvil and displaces those molecules in the direction of the wave. This causes a bulge in the middle of the anvil which actually bends the ends of the anvil up. The distances are minute but significant. Once the shock wave passes, the ends of the anvil spring back and overshoot, which sets up an oscillation. This is the ringing you hear. We'll next look at a 50 ton block of hardened steel. We hit it with a hammer and all the same things happen except it doesn't distort. Nevertheless, molecules were displaced around the point of impact and almost immediately return to their original position and, having mass, overshoot. The pressure wave is now perfectly reversed and is focussed on the point of impact. The "splash' is a slight upwelling of the steel and the energy goes back into distorting the work as the hammer comes to a stop. This is why heavy anvils perform better than lighter anvils. They distort less and return more energy to the work. Bolting your anvil down to the stand makes it quieter, which means it isn't distorting as much and wasting energy. Bolting down your stand does the same thing. Wood is a good shock absorber, steel and concrete not as much. If I decide to build a concrete base, I will run thick rebar vertically from top to bottom to bare the shock load. The concrete will keep it from distorting.

So, it just becomes a question of how well you can attach your anvil to mother earth.

That's an interesting thought, and one worthy of discussion. If I weld a 200 lb anvil to a 500 lb block of steel, instead of just resting it on top, will that change the characteristics of the anvil? If so, then at what point do they essentially become one mass? My point of reference on this question is whether all the pieces resonate at the same frequency. An anvil will ring because it is free to do so. The shock of the hammer deforms the anvil slightly, which then continues to deform at its resonant frequency until the energy is used up in heat. That energy was not used to deform the work. How can we recover that energy? Attachment is the crux of the matter here. An anvil which is firmly attached to a solid base has different characteristics than one which is simply resting on the base. The base also improves once it is attached to the ground. With everything bolted down, bouncing, flexing and lateral movement are significantly reduced. The energy of the hammer blow then goes more into moving the work. Cheers, Ted

Thanks Al, I appreciate the encouragement.

Nice scroll work and vines 58er! Looks like a lot of work. I built a V swedge today to fold leaves into. Its a piece of angle iron between two pipes to make the transition between flat and bent a little more gradual. I ground the edges of the angle iron so there was a smooth transition between it and the pipes. Here is my first attempt at a larger leaf with the bend in the center. The stem transition got messed up so it took on the look of a Calla Lily without the stamin. I hope the next one will be a little more leaf like.

Good advice Glen, thanks. The concrete would be right under the Anvil, and I would put reinforcement in it. The compression rating for reinforced concrete is way beyond anything I could exert with a hammer on an anvil with large footprint. I guess it wouldn't hurt to put a steel plate under it for a wider load dispersion.

Thanks for your thoughtful response Glen. I was thinking that the anvil would rest right on the concrete, and be anchored in to the concrete. I would pour a column slightly larger than the footprint of the anvil. I would use the 4X4's as an outer form and pour the concrete right where the anvil will live, then level the top. This gives the concret very wide and solid contact with the slab. Then I would bolt the concrete to the slab. As you mentioned above, it all becomes one mass in terms of resisting the shock and force of a hammer blow (BTW, my garage slab sits on bedrock). Wood, although it seems very stiff, still has some give, or spring to it. We pay good money to get an anvil which has a large mass and a very hard and unyielding surface, then mount it on wood (often with silicon in between). Doesn't make a lot of sense to me other than it may not really matter all that much anyway. Ted

I'm going to get a new anvil sometime in the near future, somewhere in the 200+ Lb range, and I've been thinking about the stand. A bunch of 4X4's all strapped together, like many guys have built, first came to mind. Then I started thinking about the stand as an extension of the anvil mass. To make a long thought process short, I was thinking of casting a column of reinforced concrete as the core element, surrounded by 4X4's. I'm thinking that this would would transfer the shock to the slab better than wood. Do you guys think that this idea is worth the trouble?

Fixed it

I'm almost finished with the oven. I'm experimenting with a latch, roughly based on the window latch principal. It works, but then it occurred to me that I should probably make it operable from the front. I'm thinking of wrapping the whole thing in a layer of wool since there are some small air gaps between the bricks. The latch arm might get in the way in the present configuration. I built the door out of 2" angle iron and inserted a piece of oversized wool to provide a nice seal since the brick face is not perfectly flat.

Or, "no good deed goes unpunished". I've noticed how my shop output has gradually turned into her gift list. Tooling is the only safe bet, so I built this bending fork yesterday.

I've built a few putter heads which worked moderately well. You can make them too heavy if you're not careful. Nevertheless, you can also get very creative. ..

My son wanted an opener to stick on the side of his fridge. I made a hook and glued a small neodymium magnet on the back. It works pretty good.

I found punching straight down first then working out towards the edge helps with accuracy (if you are using a round tool ).

Thanks, I made two different tools to do the punch work and broke both. Poor design and improper heat treatment were the culprits. Third time's a charm.