Anyone Cast an Anvil?

[Woodlife]

Now a days it seems that ASOs are the way to go if you don't smith for a career or on a budget.
Has anyone here tried casting their own Anvil?
I'd feel a sense of pride into making my own cast anvil, but wouldn't attempt it if those before me had major issues in it. But then I think of the old 15th century Blacksmiths that had them and got to figure with this day and age it couldn't be THAT difficult could it? Don't get me wrong, I'm not underminding this feat which would take some work.

I tried searching on the forums but haven't come across one, just welding tips on some pretty ASOs. Still my sense of curiosity lingers.

What makes the Anvil a hard thing to make the old fashion way? Any failed attempts? Successes?

[Glenn]

Jymm Hoffman has his anvils cast to his specs.

DYI would mean heating 200-300 pounds of metal to liquid, then moving and pouring that liquid into a mold. Not something I would suggest to the newbie.Then there is the heat treating. This is for a one piece anvil. For a anvil with a steel face the process gets a little more involved.

[njanvilman]

I think most anvils pre-1800 were forged, using large, water powered trip hammers. It took a large forge, and several people who know what they were doing to forge weld the billet from scrap and shape it into an anvil shape. Also an amazing feet forge welding a top plate onto the mass.

Someday I hope to build a large trip hammer, of the medieval type. Not sure what I will make, but it should be interesting....

[Nakedanvil - Grant Sarver]

You do know that anvil were traditionally forged right?

[CurlyGeorge]

Amazing pics, Grant. Very interesting. Thanks for sharing them. :)

[MattBower]

What makes the Anvil a hard thing to make the old fashion way? Any failed attempts? Successes?

Per Grant and others, the "old fashion way" was forging. (Forge welding in a lot of cases, but I assume you could forge from a single piece of steel with the right tools and a big enough hammer.) If you have the capacity to forge and heat treat a couple hundred pounds of steel, rock on!

As far as the ASO idea, melting and casting that much cast iron would be a serious undertaking, even with lots of experience. You can buy ASOs for less than what it'd cost you to do it yourself, unless you're already set up for it. So unless big iron pours are something you do routinely, I don't think you'd come out ahead doing it your way.

[JNewman]

About 7 years ago I built a pattern and had 2 300lb anvils cast out of 4340 steel. Shortly after I had them machined and before I had a chance to get them heat treated, the company I was working for downsized and I lost my job. I have been busy getting my business established since and getting them heat treated has not been a priority.

The problem is that the cost of a quality North American raw alloy steel casting is about the same as the import steel anvils are. The raw casting then has to be machined, heat treated, and then for a business a profit has to be made.

[OddDuck]

Not the easiest first casting by a long stretch. The biggest problem I see with it is that the easiest material to cast one out of would be cast iron, and for a host of reasons it doesn't make good anvils. Casting one out of steel of any size is beyond the scope of most (read 99.9%) backyard setups. Steel isn't easy to cast, from everything I've read and seen, and has a very narrow temperature window for casting. You just couldn't do it for the price of a good used anvil. The most efficient way to melt that much iron at once would be to use a cupola.

[dablacksmith]

also form a cost standpoint even if you spent 1000 dollars for a good anvil it would be cheaper than figureing out how to cast or forge your own ! you have to remember that in the 1500s they used a large pool of people to replace machines so get half a dozen guys with slege hammers a big lump of iron and start forgeing ! way cheaper to buy one ...the cost of a good anvil is cheap compared to the work it takes to make it...

[rustyshackleford]

Is the Fisher process still in patent? I'm planning on casting one this spring at a uni that has a cupola. Something stump anvil-sized. I was going to use something similar to this; I love the design; he could have that thing done commercially.
* Working surface: 12 X 15 cm (5.9" x 4.72")
* Height: 24 cm (9.5")
* Horn length: 18 cm (7")
* Weight: 27 kg (60 pounds)
* Surface hardness: 58-60 HRC

[basher]

if you are going to cast an anvil from a cupola using cast iron you will be making a brittle and very dangerous anvil.

[ThomasPowers]

Several Points:

First you make a statement that I disagree with totally: That if you can't get a good anvil you must go with an ASO. I would rephrase this as "If you can't buy a new car you have to ride a bicycle" There are tons of ways to make/use "improvised" anvils from steel and calling them "not real anvils" really goes against most of the cultures and even Western European historical anvils which were not London pattern anvils. For example the famed Katanas were forged on simple rectangular block anvils and viking swords were forged on quite small heelless and sometimes hornless anvils.

Next the Fisher process is a LOT more involved than just pouring cast iron on top of a steel plate. If you read up on it; a lot of time and expense was spent experimenting on how hot to heat the steel plate and how to use the wash of the cast iron to clean off oxide from it and make a good bond. I would hazard a guess that you would spend several times the cost of buying a modern cast steel anvil trying to get this down correctly!

Finally a solely cast iron ASO would still probably be more expensive/trouble than using a chunk of scrap steel and the scrap anvil would be a lot better as an anvil!

Propagating ideas like this is going to force me to leave the "real" anvils at home and demo/teach only on improvised ones! (I will be taking a "block" stake anvil that would not be out of place anytime from Roman times through the French and Indian War when I go to a medieval even in Feb...)

[bajajoaquin]

... You can buy ASOs for less than what it'd cost you to do it yourself, unless you're already set up for it....

You can probably buy a Nimba for less than it would cost you to do it yourself, even if you're all ready set up for it.

[bajajoaquin]

Not the easiest first casting by a long stretch. The biggest problem I see with it is that the easiest material to cast one out of would be cast iron, and for a host of reasons it doesn't make good anvils. Casting one out of steel of any size is beyond the scope of most (read 99.9%) backyard setups. Steel isn't easy to cast, from everything I've read and seen, and has a very narrow temperature window for casting. You just couldn't do it for the price of a good used anvil. The most efficient way to melt that much iron at once would be to use a cupola.

The only exception I'd take to this is that it's out of the reach of much closer to 100% of backyard setups. The capacity to melt, handle, and control 300+ lb of steel, plus the equipment sized to do it is almost certainly a professional setup.

Probably the only way to make this a "backyard" setup is to make the patterns at home to take to a proper foundry to make into molds.

Really neat idea, but the impediments I can see are just too great for a hobbyist. And I'm sure I can't even imagine all the impediments!

[rustyshackleford]

I've got the typical 'USA' aso, a PW, and a Fisher; this is a 'life enrichment' exercise for me. I am a proponent of block anvils and such, particularly the forklift anvils that seem to be increasing in quality of finish and design. I specifically asked if the Fisher info was still in patent because I didn't know where to look for it. If it was still in patent, that would give me a start. Thomas, you seem to know more than I about it; where can I find the info?

The cost of this project is simply the time it would take me to bust cast iron to fill the crucible, and whatever a steel face would be if I paid for one. The rest is covered.

[MattBower]

Patents only last 20 years in the U.S. Whatever patents Fisher may have had expired years ago. However, if the company did have any patents, they should be available for review on Google Patents.

Note that not all good ideas are patented, and patents aren't necessarily how-to guides. :)

[Nakedanvil - Grant Sarver]

While the F&N process was patented, the details of how to make it work were a closely guarded secret. "The devil is in the details"!

[MattBower]

I wasn't able to find it in Google Patents. Sorry about that. So I went to the USPTO site. The original Fisher patent should be one of these. (I can't view the images for some reason, but I'm hoping that's just because of my sorry computer, and that the rest of you can see 'em just fine.)

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=0&p=1&f=S&l=50&Query=isd%2F10%2F16%2F1847&d=PALL

[MattBower]

You can probably buy a Nimba for less than it would cost you to do it yourself, even if you're all ready set up for it.

Ya think? If you already have a cupola, and enough good casting sand, and a bunch of cast iron, and plenty of coal....? Nimbas are pretty spendy.

[Nakedanvil - Grant Sarver]

Ya think? If you already have a cupola, and enough good casting sand, and a bunch of cast iron, and plenty of coal....? Nimbas are pretty spendy.

Foundry work is a bit like blacksmithing - looks easy, but takes a lot of experience to do well. Learning how to make a proper pattern, molding and coring, melting and casting, machining, heat treating. You're comparing the Nimba to cast iron? How many tries before you get the welding down? And just when you think you have it down and finish an anvil, bout then the plate separates in heat treat! I'd sooner machine a london pattern from solid. And I still wouldn't beat buying a Nimba.

[bajajoaquin]

Ya think? If you already have a cupola, and enough good casting sand, and a bunch of cast iron, and plenty of coal....? Nimbas are pretty spendy.

Just a guess, but yeah. You'd need to have the right alloy, or be able to make it. Which would take experimentation. Melting 300 pounds of steel would require pretty large facilities. Also, those items you listed aren't free, and you would be buying them in relatively small quantities.

You'd probably get it wrong the first time or two, so you'd be paying for your learning curve.

[MattBower]

No, Grant, I'm not comparing Nimbas to cast iron!! This has become a theoretical discussion, and pretty silly, really, but in the interest of clarity, the question was whether someone who's "already set up for it" could produce a cheap cast iron ASO for less than the cost of a Nimba. The conversation went like this:

OP: I want to cast my own ASO.
Me: Unless you're already set up with all you'd need to cast an ASO**, it'd be cheaper to buy one.
baja: Even if you're already set up with everything you'd need to cast an ASO, actually doing so would cost more than buying a Nimba.
me: Really think so? Nimbas are pretty expensive!
baja: Yeah.

At no point did I even suggest that the product of all this would be a good anvil. The OP said cast iron ASO, so I'm running with that -- we're going to produce junk. That's a given. Why you'd want to do it, I dunno. I was just speculating about whether you could. The Fisher discussion came later, and that wasn't even on my radar. My real point to the OP was that if you want a junky cast iron ASO -- for whatever mysterious, inexplicable reason -- it really makes more sense to buy it, unless you happen to be one of a very small minority that already has the knowledge and equipment to do something like that.

**And by "set up with all you'd need to cast an ASO," I meant, roughly, that you already own a cupola capable of melting ~300 pounds of cast iron in one shot, you have all you need to get all that iron into your mold in pretty short order, you already have enough green or oil sand to make a mold that size, you know something about pattern making, etc., etc.

[ThomasPowers]

Note that large castings have much more trouble with mould floating, Degassing, shrinkage---hot cap anyone? However if you want to do it go ahead! Just be safe please. There seems to be a crying need for ASO's to replace real anvils in gardens and by fireplaces

As for the Patents; As I recall a number of them are listed in Anvils In America, Richard Postman.

[Nakedanvil - Grant Sarver]

My take on the OP was that he could only find ASO's and wanted to cast a "real one".By "old fashion way" I assumed he meant a quality item, not an ASO.

[yaktelcom]

This site does not talk about casting an anvil. But it does have estimate in cost.

Easy Anvil Making

What about casting a smaller anvil? Maybe 50 lb. and Why cast iron?