Donal Harris

It may have been your hammer that I saw. Sometimes I get the two of you mixed up in my mind.

He disassembles practically every part of the blower, but does not remove that gear. Very good video series though, as all of his videos are.

I can attest that Chris is actually a real person and just as nice as he appears to be on the Forum. He forged a handle he plans to weld onto a rather interesting and non-typical monkey wrench to use as a twisting tool. I made this, or more specifically swung the hammer while Korney held the punch and drift, from a railroad fishplate bolt. Once I carve a handle for it, it will be a dishing hammer of sorts. I got the idea from one of Jennifer’s videos. I wish I could find the specific video again to see how different mine is. Hers looked more like a hammer. Mine just looks an awful lot like a bolt with a hole punched in it. Chris, I have several pieces of scrap you could probably use to make a hammer. 3 or 4 car axles, two four foot sections of some sort of 2” carbon “mystery steel” round stock, and a very largish piece of mystery steel from the front suspension of a Ford truck. I will post a picture tomorrow. You are welcome to any of it. I even have at least 10-12 jackhammer bits of various thicknesses. Some small enough to hand forge into drifts. Others a bit larger than anyone would find enjoyable to hand forge into anything. And you burning yourself last week is nothing. Try putting a dent in the edge of Korney’s anvil when you miss the drift completely. I felt like a turd. He was pretty cool about it though. Your memories of picking up hot steel will fade. Mine will not. I will see the bloody dent every time I walk into his shop.

Yes. Using my phone. It is pretty easy on a PC. On my phone, not so much. I couldn’t see the URL. Although it now occurs to me this was probably because I was in the YouTube app. Wow. That was easy.

There is a cool YouTube video of guys making them in Nepal. I would link it if I knew how. Sledgehammer anvil. Two strikers. Looks easy enough.

It wasn’t Cline’s or the Twilight Bungalow place. It was the place in the middle. Blue and white building. It was started by Marvin Jessen and Al Lawrence. Al was my dad’s FFA teacher. When they started the company they made steel camper shells. Then when the oil embargo hit they switched over to making auxiliary gas tanks. At the time my father-in-law bought it that was their primary product, that and headache racks and pickup truck rails. They didn’t make bumpers. Clines had that market locked down in the area. At the time I started there fuel tanks had begun to peter out and they began making utility trailers and oil field truck beds. They make nothing now. My father-in-law essentially retired over a decade ago. He couldn’t sell it because of taxes, so he put one of his sons in charge and kept a few of the hands who had done him right over the years and just basically let it run on auto-pilot until it was costing him more than he received as a tax break. Now that the company is busted, he will sell the real estate and equipment. No one really wants to buy a shop in Rush Springs. Competent employees are hard to find plus freight for steel is stupid high.

I have only been there a few times, but I have hung around for a few minutes after Korney loaded up my barrels. I’ve only seen a couple of people forging while I have been there. Maybe all the forging happens later in the evening. Korney asked me once if I wanted to give one of the power hammers a go, but I said not without a lot of watching and training first, because they look like they could kill you PDQ if you don’t know what you are doing. I worked at Rush Springs MFG each day after school and all day during the Summer when I was a kid. I developed a healthy respect for the machinery there. Helped along a little by the piece of metal some joker had framed and put in the owner’s office. It was engraved “The last thing my thumb ever touched.” I don’t think he was ever able to go a single week without hurting himself when he would go out into the shop. I imagine that is why he would usually stay up front loading trailers or installing truck beds. I should know Bill. I was at at least one meeting he attended. It was in Fletcher. But I am not good with names at all.

They are working on anvils to sell, just like the SFC cone mandrills and swage blocks. Perhaps for that? I asked once why anyone would need something as large as a small house in their shop. I forget the answer now. You have me curious. I will have to drop by there Thursday evening if only to see just who in the heck you are IRL.

You must be referring to Byron (Korney). I agree. Great guy. He was our club president for a very long time. What did you think of that thing that takes up most of the front 1/4 of his very large shop?

I finally purchased a gallon of the stuff. It is just as good as advertised. It is non-toxic, but it will dry your skin. Use rubber gloves. I wish I had taken a before pic as the OP did, but didn’t. I used it on my great granddad’s draw knife. It was thick with rust. The handles were frozen in a closed position. I soaked it for two days and it was totally rust free and the wing nuts holding the handles in place were freely movable. Amazing stuff. Vinegar would have worked just as well, but I would have had a stinky mess left behind in the pan.

Very nice. One could spend hours just looking at all the cool and interesting pieces you made him from. Nice looking dog too.

You are a professional and I assume you are surprised when a weld doesn’t take, even though occasionally as you said above it doesn’t. Are you surprised when it doesn’t and how many welds did you have to do before you were sure a weld was going to work before you put the pieces in the fire? I am always shocked when it works, and each successful weld is cause for celebration.

No. The hit (NPI) was to your answer here on IFI in 2016. We’ll not your answer exactly. Yours was not the first answer, but the first useful one.

You are likely right. I know I never would have heard of it if I hadn’t read about it here. Although it would be pretty hard to not learn of it if you were to Google “anvil identification”. The first hit is to a Facebook page that cites it. The second hit is an IFI posting you made in response to someone looking to ID his unmarked anvil here in 2016. Mr. Postman should give Glenn a cut if he doesn’t already.

Odd. I was searching for a Hay Budden catalog last week and missed the link to the PDF. All I could see were the non-working images. So I Googled “Hay Budden catalog” and found what is the same exact PDF someone saved here after putting the individual page scans into a single PDF on the Blacksmiths Association of Missouri site. It may have been the same person uploading the PDF to both sites and creating PDFs is easy enough, plus modern blacksmiths seem to be keen to share things relating to the craft, so it wouldn’t necessarily be a problem even if someone had taken a file from here and posted it to another blacksmithing site, especially if they had noted where it came from. But sometimes we go a little too far. The most obvious example I can think of off the top of my head is “Anvils in America”. Perhaps this is just something only seen in old posts, but one poster consulting AIA to answer another poster’s question about an anvil they have had always seemed to me the same as stealing from Mr. Postman. The person with the question will likely never buy his book. Were it an out of print book it would be a different matter. Plus it really isn’t all that expensive.

Some people bolt together 4x4s so a pine stump would work. Frosty and Thomas would have said something if it wouldn’t. My current stump is red oak. Oak is said to be less than ideal because it is easy to split, but it was the easiest for me to mount an anvil on at the time because it was just the right height and was heavy enough I didn’t feel I would need to bury the end in the ground. I wanted it to be movable. If it splits I will use one of the 3 large elm stumps I picked up at the same time I acquired the oak stump. Elm is said to be better because it is less prone to splitting. I could band the oak stump, but that is more work than I want to do. All the stumps came from the city maintenance yard. When they have to take a tree down, they chop it up and bring the logs in to the yard for people to take for free if they want them.

No. I got distracted when I searched for Leetonia. It is astonishing how quickly sites will return back to a wild state once they are no longer maintained. I thought it cool the town voted to make it a park. Then I became interested in the town itself and saw the town seemed to have an unusually high percentage of white people and the per capita income looked low at $14,620, so I compared it to my hometown of Rush Springs and found Leetonia is rather flush in comparison. Then I looked at the same for Purcell, Lexington, and a few others. I learned something I never knew about the town of Marlow which is just south of Rush Springs. Marlow was a sundown town. I knew of others that had been such, but never knew one was just nine miles away from my hometown. Then I got lost in researching sundown towns, red lining, the Tulsa race riots, Route 66, Green Book, and other such. I lost about half my day all because of a hammer.

Ever keep in mind here at Leetonia it is our earnest desire to serve you to earn and retain your Good Will. Something many companies today don’t seem to practice. “Open hearth carbon steel” is what exactly?

Doh!!! I just read here that Hay Budden’s are American and not English made. The weight marking would be the actual weight. It seems to be priced reasonably with a little room for dickering. I really need to buy a copy of that book. I need/want an anvil that weighs around 170 pounds. I already have one that is just shy of a hundred pounds. 127 isn’t all that much larger than the one I have. I had decided I was going to tell the seller I thought he was reading the weight wrong. It would have been perfectly OK for me to have not done so, but not for me. I like fair deals. Had it actually weighed 176 instead of 127, I would have felt as if I wasn’t being fair to him.

If someone is listing an anvil as being 127 lbs. but they obviously don’t know about the hundred weight system used for old English anvils, should I tell them they have seriously under priced the thing before I buy it?

Here in Central Oklahoma it would likely sell for $650 to $750, but most are listed for about $1000 to $1200. The edges on yours are not all that bad. Certainly better than mine. You can always forge a Hardy tool if you need something with a better edge.

I prefer coal. It is easier to heat just a small section of what you are working on. But the main reasons I prefer it are the same reasons I am going to be making a gas forge. It is dirty and smelly. I love the smell, but my wife and neighbors do not.

If you are not already a member you should consider joining. You are in the Saltfork Craftsmens’ NE Region. Their next meeting is at Josh Perkins’ shop in Chelsea on May 4. It is just an open forge day, so no trade item is needed. You would want to bring your own tools. Unless you wanted to just talk to the guys/gals. You being in the NE Region is not of great significance. There is only one club. The regions are just to make it easier for folk to find meetings near them. The next SFC meeting in April is at Rory Kirk’s shop in Elk City on April 27. Elk City is in the NW Region. The trade item is a dinner bell, preferably stamped with your maker’s mark. Elk City is pretty far from me, but assuming my wife doesn’t notice me sneaking out of the house that morning I plan to be there. I drew one of Rory’s chains as a trade item at a meeting last year. Talented smith. I am looking forward to seeing his shop. Almost forgot. Meetings are free for anyone to attend. Membership is not required. But you would want to bring a few bucks for the jar to pay for the food you eat at the meetings.

I found this on eBay. They seem to be pretty spendy, but I am not sure why. It looks like it would be easy to make one.

That is a beautiful thing. Outstanding work.