eBay's effect on Anvils

[Nakedanvil - Grant Sarver]

I always love the "HUGE ANVIL, GREAT CONDITION" ones that turn out to be beat up 100 pounders.

[KYBOY]

I always love the "HUGE ANVIL, GREAT CONDITION" ones that turn out to be beat up 100 pounders.

Would you like to guess how many times Ive went to look at a "400-500" pound anvil it and turn out to be 100-200 pounds ... :lol:

[Timothy Miller]

A good anvil is well worth the money. I think it was more the large increase of people taking up the hobby of blacksmithing over the last 20 years that drove up the price. Many more buyers with disposable cash. It just seems expensive because it is part of your entertainment budget, not your I need this to eat/pay my mortgage budget.

[bajajoaquin]

A good anvil is well worth the money. I think it was more the large increase of people taking up the hobby of blacksmithing over the last 20 years that drove up the price. Many more buyers with disposable cash. It just seems expensive because it is part of your entertainment budget, not your I need this to eat/pay my mortgage budget.

I hadn't thought of the hobbyist angle, but you may be on to something. I suspect that it's a little like the cause of a traffic accident: it's never just one thing. Hobbyists, an increase in professional architectural smiths, nostalgia, collecting fads... there are probably lots of contributing factors.

But I definitely agree with the perception comment. I think I mentioned in another thread that if its something you're using for your livlihood, $400 or $600 (or even $1500) isn't too much to pay for a tool key to your production.

[MattBower]

I definitely wouldn't work so hard to do things on the cheap if smithing were my profession instead of my hobby.

[arftist]

I saw a 200 pound Fisher in good shape sell for two hundred bucks on e-bay last week.

[Timothy Miller]

I bet for every one professional user of an anvil there are ten hobbyists with anvils.

[kpotter]

Back in the day an anvil was nearly a years pay for a blacksmith and most didnt actually own the anvil it was owned by the shop owner. Maybe not a years pay but several months. With modern manuafacturing anvils are cheaper now than they have ever been I have a few and the one new one that i bought was 1650 dollars it is a 275lbs peddinghause. That is not too much to pay for something that you will have the rest of your life and that was not made by poor starving childern in a labor camp. I make silversmithing stakes and am amazed at what people will pay for beat up rusted cast iron stakes, when they can buy new ones from me or southshore smith for less money and they are much better quality. I think it is the old mystique. When I first started making tools I put some on ebay and let them bid on them and they went for about 50 dollars more than I was selling them for in a retail catalog, they thought they were antique because I didnt paint them I left them black from the forge and just polished the face.

[Thomas Dean]

Back in the day an anvil was nearly a years pay for a blacksmith and most didnt actually own the anvil it was owned by the shop owner. Maybe not a years pay but several months. With modern manuafacturing anvils are cheaper now than they have ever been I have a few and the one new one that i bought was 1650 dollars it is a 275lbs peddinghause. That is not too much to pay for something that you will have the rest of your life and that was not made by poor starving childern in a labor camp. I make silversmithing stakes and am amazed at what people will pay for beat up rusted cast iron stakes, when they can buy new ones from me or southshore smith for less money and they are much better quality. I think it is the old mystique. When I first started making tools I put some on ebay and let them bid on them and they went for about 50 dollars more than I was selling them for in a retail catalog, they thought they were antique because I didnt paint them I left them black from the forge and just polished the face.

Just curious...if you sale them for $50 MORE on eBay than why do a retail catalog?

I do agree with most of the above posts but still think eBay has been a contributing factor on the price of anvils that are NOT sold on eBay. MOO (my opinion only) I have enjoyed all the comments/reasons/or whatever thus far.

[Sask Mark]

Just one of my experiences here...someone was having a garage sale at their cottage about an hour away from where I live, and they had an anvil listed. I asked them for pictures before the sale and it looked like a mid 1800's English anvil, somewhere in the 100 pound range in 'not great but not bad' condition. I asked if they would consider selling before the garage sale and they said 'sure'. They came back with a price of $400 because they looked up the 'value' on ebay. I passed on it and wished them luck at the garage sale.

Well, the weather was awful that weekend and the garage sale was a bust. They emailed me on the Sunday and told me to 'make them an offer' as they didn't want to haul the anvil back home. I looked it over and it was only a 68 pounder. I couldn't make out the maker since it was quite dark out. I hesitantly offered them $130 for it ($2/pound was pushing it IMO) and they accepted. I got it home and cleaned it up and found it was a Norrisez anvil-quite a rare make.

Who knows, it might have been worth $400 to someone considering the maker...IF it got listed on ebay.

[Timothy Miller]

Sorry Insomnia post here,
Many of these over priced anvils are not selling on Ebay or Craigs list. Select a few anvils and watch them you will be surprised. Pay attention to what they are selling for not what they are asking. I'm not talking about the super good and rare anvils, that belong in collection but the run of the mill ok condition Peter Wrights Hay Buddens, Mouseholes and such. I sell things on ebay from time to time when the clutter gets to be too much around the shop. I have sold 20 or so anvils over the past 7 or so years. I buy a lot of old tools often people have a large batch of stuff and I only want one or two items but its a package deal. So I end up with a lot of extra stuff. I pride my self on being able to pay a fair price to the seller because I am able to resell the extra for a fair profit on Ebay. Plus I like doing the deals and meeting new people. Ebay is no way get rich quick after fees from ebay and pay pal they take about 25%. The people selling anvils over and over again on ebay are buying them from someone else and they have to be making a profit on them or it would not be worth it for them. So this is proof that there are deals out there to be had. They are taking the time to find, clean, photograph, research and describe the item. Matchless antiques has a whol room devoted to displaying blacksmith tools than can't be cheap for him. I remember how people used to complain about Bill Gitchner's prices and he never used ebay. Many people buying these things really don't know much about what they are buying. I am truly surprised by the ignorance of many of my ebay customers. I have spoken to quite a few buyers over the years many of them don't really know how to use the tool they are buying or how to even talk about it intelligently . So they are counting on you to present the item accurately and honestly. They don't have the knowledge, confidence or motivation to go out and find an anvil for themselves. I remember tiring to find my first anvil back in 1992 before craigs list and ebay. It took me a year of searching, I did it by word of mouth, I met a lot of people who had anvils that dident want to sell. I got an ok 109 HB for 75 bucks today that anvil would fetch about 250 300 on ebay but It took me a year. How much of that time could have spent practicing forging that was going to be chosen profession? Towards the end I would have paid 3 bucks a pound if there was usable for sale I could have bought. Now thanks to the internet I find anvils locally 3/4 times a year at reasonable prices. To me a reasonable price for an anvil is one I can resell on ebay if I need to for a modest profit usually enough to cover my gas and time.

As for selling new silversmithing stakes on ebay I find they sell for 40 to 50% less than catalog if I can even sell them, I don't really understand it. I think people may think they are selling seconds or you are unprofessional. But if it is an older stake with a nice polish you can do well. But doing the polishing can be a lot of work and may not be worth your time.

My question to you reading this thread is.

How much should an anvil cost?
Why should it cost that much?

[basher]

luckily the Uk market is not so silly. more anvils less smiths I guess.
there has been a rash of Americans buying up everything but not recently.
when I started a good 2 1/2 anvil cost £100 ish and now you can get a good one for £200 to 250 often much cheaper . not so rediculous over 16 years.
and considering the cost of new anvils.............
Ebay is about watching and waiting ...and waiting...and waiting ,,,and waiting.

sit by the side of the river for long enough and the heads of all your enemies will come floating past.......

[Timothy Miller]

luckily the Uk market is not so silly. more anvils less smiths I guess.
there has been a rash of Americans buying up everything but not recently.
when I started a good 2 1/2 anvil cost £100 ish and now you can get a good one for £200 to 250 often much cheaper . not so rediculous over 16 years.
and considering the cost of new anvils.............
Ebay is about watching and waiting ...and waiting...and waiting ,,,and waiting.

sit by the side of the river for long enough and the heads of all your enemies will come floating past.......

There is a long history of the British shipping anvils to America.

[bajajoaquin]

Sorry Insomnia post here....


My question to you reading this thread is.

How much should an anvil cost?
Why should it cost that much?

I've been thinking about this question and I don't think I'm making any more progress on the answer, so I'll just post my thoughts.

I tend to think of things in terms of threshold matters. I.e. what is the threshold above/below which something matters? So for an anvil, I think that would be the cost of the raw material. That should be the threshold below which a lower price would make sense for the anvil to be scrapped, or otherwise not used as an anvil.

I can get odd remnants at $0.25 per pound, and I bought 240lb of blocks at the same price, but that's not reliable. Big off-cuts are $0.60 or $1.00 per pound for mild steel. I don't know the price of tool steel (as for a face), but let's just say $3.00 a pound for the sake of argument.

After that, you have labor costs, on both sides of the equation: on the manufacturing side, there's the labor and fixed costs of production. Given the prices of new anvils, that seems to be around $5-7 per pound for a high-grade anvil. In order to turn my steel blocks and hard-facing wire into a low-grade anvil, let's say it's 50 hours. If I value my time at a hobbyists rate of $15/hr. that would be $950 for a "new" 250-pound anvil, or $3 per pound.

That would say you're looking at somewhere around $1 per pound plus the condition of the anvil as it approaches new. As you get farther from "newness" it would take more labor to return it to the new, fully-usable condition, therefore dropping price.

How do you figure the smoking deals? Look at the labor on the disposal side of the equation. How far is the nearest scrap yard? Do you know where to look for scrap metal prices? Do you have a truck, or other way of moving the anvil? How much time have you spent answering questions and showing it to prospective buyers. All these things (and more) can influence the motivation of the seller to reduce the price.

This is all a long way of saying that I think anvils should cost somewhere between $0.75 and $4.00 per pound on the used market!

[maddog]

Baja, if I understand you, you are trying to identify the break point at which it becomes cheaper to roll your own rather than buy. Seems like a useful way to look at it. Since you estimate the time at hobbiest rates I assume you are not making this calculation for pro shops. 50hrs @ $15/hr seems reasonable.

I'm a bit confused whether you are considering a construction with a tool steel plate or rather, laying down hardfacing. I would guess the hardfacing to make a brand new face would be pretty expensive. I think the costs of the non HF welding rod, the grinding materials and the electricity to run all that welding, should be included.

It's not only a matter of money. There seems to be a strong psychological factor in the mix. A lot of hobbiests have all the resources to build their own, some are even expert welders, yet very few do.

In my case, I have all the steel, including tool steel plate, necessary to build several large anvils. I also have several hundred pound of welding rod that I got very cheap and a 300A arc welder. I am not satisfied with my 345# HB. I dont care for the London pattern and the anvil has some defects which bother me. I could build the anvil of my dreams and sell the HB which would easily fetch $800 in my area. I do dream about it, but have never done anything about it. Why not? I could have my ideal anvil for the cost of just the labor plus a chunk of cash for selling my current one.

You might say I am lazy. I guess I am. I should be out in the shop instead of typing this . But not many other people are building their own anvils either.

Coming at the question from a different angle: New anvils go for about $6/lb. For a used tool in serviceable condition, 50% of the new price, $3/lb, seems quite reasonable.

[bajajoaquin]

Baja, if I understand you, you are trying to identify the break point at which it becomes cheaper to roll your own rather than buy. Seems like a useful way to look at it. Since you estimate the time at hobbiest rates I assume you are not making this calculation for pro shops. 50hrs @ $15/hr seems reasonable.

I'm a bit confused whether you are considering a construction with a tool steel plate or rather, laying down hardfacing. I would guess the hardfacing to make a brand new face would be pretty expensive. I think the costs of the non HF welding rod, the grinding materials and the electricity to run all that welding, should be included.

....

Coming at the question from a different angle: New anvils go for about $6/lb. For a used tool in serviceable condition, 50% of the new price, $3/lb, seems quite reasonable.

If you're confused, it's probably because I didn't have a clear idea of what I was trying to achieve. It wasn't so much build vs. buy, but to look at several different ways of valuing an object. And by the way, for anyone who cares to look at it in such a way, you could say that I hit on one element of Marxist theory: the value of an object comes from the labor put into it.

I was definitely confusing in the part about tool steel. I didn't know where I was going with it, other than to acknowledge that anvils aren't made of mild steel.

Mostly, I was thinking about how to value that object in a way other than as emotional objects of desire. An anvil is a tool that produces work with value. There is some artistry, or collector value, but most of the inherent value of it should be related to its utility. (Think of your basic window versus a historic stained glass window.) If collectors are driving the prices up beyond the value inherent to the utility, we should be seeing that reflected when we do that kind of analysis (however informal). But we don't. Or at least I don't.

I'll submit this to the group, and to Southshoresmith's question in particular: If you think about it, anvils should cost about what they do cost. The main issue is that it's different from what we wantthem to cost.

[BIGGUNDOCTOR]

In the end the only thing that matters is what are YOU willing to pay.

I go by $1 a pound, and I have found 6 for around that - 3 in the past 2 years. I am a hobbyist, a very frugal hobbyist, so that is my limit. Someone who is a businessman may be willing to pay $6 a pound because he needs it to operate his business now, and it is a business expense. So, what is an anvil worth to you, may be very different than what it is worth to me. On Ebay the prices reflect the various buyers pain level in regards to price. It would be interesting to find out something about the buyers; are they hobbyists, collectors, resellers, speculators, businessmen,etc.

As to making an anvil.
At the local junior college back home in the late 80's we could buy 2" scrap steel plate that was donated by Kaiser Steel for 10 cents a pound. Put it on the CNC burner, then innershield the plates into an anvil that was topped by some dozer blade. The only expense past the course fees ($15 a unit then) was the scrap. In the end you had an anvil that was 150+ pounds for $15, and got credit, as well as skill development while making it. Not a bad way to do things. If I was looking to fab an anvil today, I would be looking for welding classes at the local JC since they have the big welders,and other equipment needed to make the job easier. The extra hands help too.

As to the earlier comment about me not liking our freedom, far from it. I love the freedom that I/we have here in the USA, and feel that many of them are under fire currently. Wouldn't want to live anywhere else. I guess one way to look at my comments earlier would be like the civil rights, and other movements. At some point if we collectively said that's it I'm not paying that much no matter what, prices might possibly be affected. How much so, who knows. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. Are there enough hobbyists to do this? Probably not. I currently have enough anvils, but if I find one for $1 a pound I will probably buy it anyway. If it is more than that I'll let ya'll know. Viva capitalism! B)

[Bentiron1946]

I don't know that eBay is any worse than Antiques Roadshow about raising prices, maybe all either one is doing is raising awareness of the value of what one has. The price of a new anvil is around $6 to $7 a pound for a decent one and if you find a really nice used one that maybe better than some of the new ones what's so wrong about paying $3, $4 or even $6 a pound for a really fine quality old anvil? It's your money and if you can get a really fine old anvil for a $1 a pound more power to you. It's all like Biggundoctor says "In the end the only thing that matters is what are YOU willing to pay." ain't that right? :blink:

[Timothy Miller]

In the end the only thing that matters is what are YOU willing to pay...

As to the earlier comment about me not liking our freedom, far from it. I love the freedom that I/we have here in the USA, and feel that many of them are under fire currently. Wouldn't want to live anywhere else. I guess one way to look at my comments earlier would be like the civil rights, and other movements. At some point if we collectively said that's it I'm not paying that much no matter what, prices might possibly be affected. How much so, who knows. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. Are there enough hobbyists to do this? Probably not. I currently have enough anvils, but if I find one for $1 a pound I will probably buy it anyway. If it is more than that I'll let ya'll know. Viva capitalism!

Why is it you guys from the west never get sarcasm. Perhaps if you passed up those 1$ per lb anvils prices would go down. ;)

[ThomasPowers]

MadDog, I know a fellow with over 500 anvils about an hour and a half away from me here in Anvil poor NM.

I'm not in hard search mode anymore; but I still snapped up that lovely 112# PW that was in the Albuquerque CL list last year for US$1.34 a pound so I would have another class anvil that wasn't so heavy to drag around when I teach at the University. Found a bridge anvil locally and was given a mint swedish cast steel anvil by a retired rancher in my church. (Both of those were donated to the Fine Arts Metals class at NM Tech CC.)

I think e-bay has raised prices: I used to live in central OH, rather the happy hunting grounds for smithing stuff, and would average a name brand anvil in excellent shape for under US$1/pound every year and none of them were from auctions or the net! I noticed that folks were starting to price them up and telling me that they sold for that on e-bay. I asked why they didn't sell them on e-bay---too much hassle. So they wanted the extra price but were not willing to take on the extra work.

Also I missed Q-S in 2009 and when I went back in 2010 I noticed that postvises had shot up in price. Last day of Q-S in 2008 I counted over a dozen decent postvises for under $45. In 2010 $75 was more like it. (I still beat that by luck and work: $20 for a 3" vise and $50 for a 6" vise) I'm glad that I'm pretty well "vised up" at this point too. I usually would pick up a vise and sell it on out here to help cover the costs of Q-S; but I hung on to those 2 since it looked like I wouldn't be seeing many more deals like that.

I also notice many people talking about how cheap something is at auction when they are only looking at the starting bid NOT the selling bid. Seen a lot of stuff with what I thought was a reasonable bid on it not make the seller's minimum. Remember that you have to factor in shipping costs in such auctions too, they will often add another dollar a pound to an anvil! (Why I've switched to CL and "local" pickup!)

Like most things "you can spend time; or you can spend money" I usually put the costs of "searching" as part of my entertainment budget and have been lucky enough these last 20 years to have jobs where I can show up late on fleamarket days and then work late to make it up.

BTW on those "poses": early cameras often required the sitter to sit absolutely still for several minutes to make the shot. Having the hand in the pocket can help keep the body from moving. Some very early studios actually had clamps to keep the person still enough not to blur the shot!

[firebug]

I believe that E-Bay is driving the price of anvils as well as other smithing stuff up. But at least you don't have to pay it if you don't want to. There is a 601 pounder on there right now that is up to 3500.00 and has not met the reserve price. It will be interesting to see what the ending bid it. I am going to put it on my watch list. For me it is already over priced. I could buy a new 500 pounder with plenty left over. That is just me, some want the bragging rights, some may even need an anvil that big.

One of the biggest problems is the mentality that I WILL NOT LOSE this anvil. Not only does emotion get involved but so does the need to WIN at all cost. This helps to drive the prices up also. People who conduct auctions count on this to help get higher prices for their goods. Not to mention the fake bids that artifically drive the auction price up.

[PaulF]

I've got 3 anvils, a Kohlshwa 100, Paid $75 with a 4"post vice in 1975, a 180 Fischer $80 at a garage sale in 92, both good anvils.
But the big one is a Russel Jaqua 475 Gladiator bought in 1996 for $1800. Yes it was expensive, yes I saved for a year to buy it.

However, It is one of the finest tools I own and is a pleasure to use every time I use it. I don't think of the cost when I use it, just how well it returns the energy from each impact.

A good tool is a pleasure to use every tine, the cost only hurts once.

It just depends what your vices are!
PaulF

[DevilWorx]

You guys just made me feel pretty good about my anvil and I used ebay to help. I paid 450.00ish for my 100kg advetrised weighte[actually comes in at 97kg] I looked on ebay found someone selling new anvils and the seller said he buys direct from foundry in mining town so I rang a few different foundries and found the one making the anvils. I still didn't pay his price with transport quite a few hundred Km's away. I put this on an Ozzie forum I only entered at post 16 so hereis a link to that post and photos next page. http://www.laventrix.com/showpost.php?p=18914&postcount=16