Graham Gates(Ionic Muffin) Posted March 22, 2014 Share Posted March 22, 2014 So I took the time to calculate the amount of size I would need to hold a lot of mass for an anvil and i came up with a 320 lb anvil that would be able to be put in a crucible that could have some manner of releasing the liquid metal out the bottom into which a mold would be underneath and could allow me to pour the anvil without using any lifting. I could even go heavier than that another time but ideally I can make all this and wind up making a nice anvil of steel, heat treat is another matter but it looks like i could do something like this once I need a bigger anvil than what I wind up scrounging for. What are you alls thoughts on this? You really need to read the pinned thread about this, ocated at the top of the section, before you go any further Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chinobi Posted March 22, 2014 Share Posted March 22, 2014 IMO even if it takes you over a year to find an anvil you will still be far ahead in terms of time and money spent and potentially lost limbs than trying to cast your own single anvil. by the time you sink enough capital into that project to buy or build the requisite furnace, crucible and investment media, not to mention the books and or classes on casting to be able to pull that off without killing yourself, you could probably have bought 5-10 brand new 240lb papa rhino anvils (only one I could think of off the top of my head). factor in as well cost to subcontract the heat treat (or more equipment/education time to DIY), and then time and materials to grind or mill the face and base square. not trying to torpedo your dreams, but unless you are already highly skilled with foundry work that is a HUGE undertaking, with no guarantee of success on the first attempt :( my thoughts would be to scrounge up your initial anvil (that's what 'once I need a bigger anvil than what I wind up scrounging for' reads like to me), train up on that, and start selling the stuff you make wherever you can. put some of the proceeds towards your consumables (fuel, abrasives, travel to buy more/other tooling, the tooling you just drove out to buy, etc) and shelve a certain percentage as an 'anvil fund'. keep your ear to the ground and craigslist for anything within easy striking distance, and check out the thread for TPAAAT to help refine your search efforts. if my interpretation of your question is totally wrong and you are massively proficient in casting then i's be interested in pitching in some starting capital in return for one of the anvils produced :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anachronist58 Posted March 22, 2014 Share Posted March 22, 2014 not trying to torpedo your dreams, but unless you are already highly skilled with foundry work that is a HUGE undertaking, with no guarantee of success on the first attempt :( if my interpretation of your question is totally wrong and you are massively proficient in casting then i's be interested in pitching in some starting capital in return for one of the anvils produced :) There you have it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThomasPowers Posted March 22, 2014 Share Posted March 22, 2014 Quite possible; it will cost *many* times the price of a good anvil even a top dollar brand new one; but you will have bragging rights! You can probably build a furnace for melting that much steel for under US$10,000 dollars if you have friends in the business and don't forget you will need the correct alloy and know how to keep it the same during melting---what you melt may not be what you pour if you don't know! You will need a crane and several thousand dollars in safety equipment too (not to mention massive amounts of propane...) How do you plan to do the heat treat? Clean-up? Mold making? Lots of pressure with that large a mold! And note if you don't get a good casting alloy you will have problems with excessively large sized grain which makes for a sub par anvil. An easier cheaper method is to make a positive and have it cast by a steel casting company. Still much more expensive than profiting from economies of scale and it can be hard to find a steel foundry that will make a 1 off. However is has been done Jymm did a low number series of colonial style anvils in H13. Think of it like building your own car starting steel bars and sheet much more expensive than buying premade parts. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Graham Gates(Ionic Muffin) Posted March 22, 2014 Author Share Posted March 22, 2014 I am no smith at all, I have no skill at it as of yet, let alone any casting experience. I plan to work up my casting skills, fuel wise I think that it will cost me little to nothing if I go the waste oil forge. And if I can make a waste oil smelting thing that can hold a large amount of metal for casting an anvil. My friend who had been working on an engineering degree told me that I wouldn't want anything to do with getting near the metal when its hot but instead have a valve that I could empty the entire crucible without taking it out of the forge at all. Then it would be a matter of making a mold that would be ideal for casting the anvil. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chinobi Posted March 22, 2014 Share Posted March 22, 2014 your friend had better finish their degree before they start making recommendations that can get someone killed :) concept is good, but details are bad. I salute your ambition and I really hope you can get up to that level, but its going to be a long, hard, and expensive road. start taking classes (if they are still offered) and reading up on what is involved. make some small castings and work your way up into the larger range. this is not a field that will allow practitioners to survive jumping into the deep end before they learn to swim. if you cant find any industrial arts type classes that do casting check in the art, sculpture or jewelry departments, casting sterling is still casting, and you can learn the basic principles and safety there with relative ease in a classroom environment. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Graham Gates(Ionic Muffin) Posted March 22, 2014 Author Share Posted March 22, 2014 Yeah, I know he should finish before making suggestions but he said that if i do plan on doing it i dont want to be anywhere near the business end of the metal pouring. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Graham Gates(Ionic Muffin) Posted March 22, 2014 Author Share Posted March 22, 2014 my plan initially is to cast small things first and as a said to work up to it. Once I get to a bigger scale then i would want to practice with maybe small anvils and such till i am able to cast nice large chunks, I realize that I wont be able to cast one until I have the material and such, but I was thinking, wouldn't I be able to cast the anvil out of a big scrap piece that i find a junk yard that seems to have good rebound and is of the right size and weight and is maybe medium steel? Im probably missing a huge amount of info and thats where i need to find out whats missing and read up. Are there suggestions or insights into what else is wrong with my idea(im aware of safety and lack of skill and maybe cost, although i think i can skirt around that issue.) are there posts or articles on the web that i can start reading to point me in the right direction. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anachronist58 Posted March 22, 2014 Share Posted March 22, 2014 Click on "Forums" (at the top of this thread). Look under the Section "Blacksmithing". Click on "Foundry and Casting". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThomasPowers Posted March 22, 2014 Share Posted March 22, 2014 Huge learning curve here; for one thing melting is NOT smelting. Smelting is taking ore and making metal from it NOT WHAT YOU WANT TO DO. How much carbon is going to burn out of your metal before it's ready to pour? What alloying elements are needed to prevent large grain weak steel from forming? You know that you will need to melt a lot more than will fit in the mold to get proper pressure and to serve as a supply as the metal cools and contracts right? Most people start with Al and then transition to Brass then maybe to cast iron (which is a heap cheaper and easier to do as a cupola is fairly simple.) Steel is about 4-5 orders of magnitude harder than "low temp" materials. For one thing you can sometimes get away with "make do" safety equipment casting Al; with steel that can get you blinded, maimed or dead. Also what works for a 1 pound pour is insufficient on larger ones! You do know that spilling molten steel on concrete will result in an explosion sending several thousand degree metal flying long distances, right? I'm not going to tell you *NOT* to do it I will tell you to DO IT RIGHT and expect that it may be 10 years or more and thousands of dollars before you are ready to pour steel with the experience and knowledge and equipment to do it safely. I have several friends with MatSci degrees specializing in Metallurgy including several professors at different universities and they tend to have their melting and pouring done by professionals at steel mills even for specialty stuff---vacuum induction melting, high alloys or weird ones, etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Graham Gates(Ionic Muffin) Posted March 22, 2014 Author Share Posted March 22, 2014 So what would an anvil i have cast going to cost vs just buying one? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
njanvilman Posted March 22, 2014 Share Posted March 22, 2014 I do not think you can get steel to melt with a "waste oil furnace". Even if you could, you would have to control the atmosphere or all of the steel will oxidize. It takes special clays to hold their shape when pouring metals in excess of 2800 d Fahrenheit. If you want an anvil, buy a good anvil. Learning about foundry work is great, but what you want to do is impractical and very dangerous. Molten steel is very dangerous. Any molten metals have unique characteristics that present many problems. If you could actually pour the anvil, what about grinding, finishing, and heat treating? Do you have the equipment and skills to do that? There are other ways to create an anvil from scratch. But the time and expense involved would be better spend on hammers, tongs, a forge, a good post vise, and more time actually hammering. And you might live a long life instead of trying something that is very dangerous and could lead to severe injury or death. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chinobi Posted March 22, 2014 Share Posted March 22, 2014 Hugely variably by location to start with, IDK how the Washington anvil economy is, YMMV Used anvil sufficient for beginner work, anywhere from 75-150 lbs: could be 100$ to 400$ or more or less if you find a loaner or a scrap yard jackpot vs getting hosed at an antique shop or bidding on eBay or whatever Brand new can be 4-500$ for smaller ones, some of the farrier patterns are around that price I thing (phone reply, can't google it out so I'm shooting from the hip to some extent) or if you want a big one save up 1000 or more and look at the nimba gladiator, jhm competitor, papa rhino, or Blu series. I don't even want to guess what properly casting your own would be, well north of several thousand in equipment. You will STILL need to buy as much (more actually, see Thomas's reply) raw steel of known good quality as you would find in a finished anvil. Equipment and consumables to grind and finish, whatever your heat treat cycle becomes. And on top of that the actual expenditure of your time to get there. If you don't consider your time as something you might not want to squander, compare also what you could have been doing with that time instead (opportunity cost if I remember economics correctly O.o) Or hit up a scrap yard and find a good solid chunk of steel at scrap rate. Or go to the hardware store and drop 30$ on a 10 lb sledge hammer. Re-read and if you meant 'i have cast' as in subcontract, I have no idea :) the above applies to 'I have cast myself' Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
K. Bryan Morgan Posted March 23, 2014 Share Posted March 23, 2014 Find a large piece of square or round steel. About 4" across will do, about 2' long. Then get a five gallon bucket and place the piece of steel upright in the bucket. Fill with concrete. Done. No muss no fuss and you will have a post anvil that many a blacksmith has used for hundreds if not thousands of years. Minus the concrete part of course. You could also inlet it into a large stump. There are much easier ways to get an anvil made than pouring 400 lbs of molten steel into a mold by yourself. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Graham Gates(Ionic Muffin) Posted March 23, 2014 Author Share Posted March 23, 2014 so maybe instead of casting the metal It would be more practical to heat it enough to beat it into shape even if it takes longer and is very hard work. It would take a lot of the safety problems(not all) but most would be reduced since there would not be molten metal. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Graham Gates(Ionic Muffin) Posted March 23, 2014 Author Share Posted March 23, 2014 Find a large piece of square or round steel. About 4" across will do, about 2' long. Then get a five gallon bucket and place the piece of steel upright in the bucket. Fill with concrete. Done. No muss no fuss and you will have a post anvil that many a blacksmith has used for hundreds if not thousands of years. Minus the concrete part of course. You could also inlet it into a large stump. There are much easier ways to get an anvil made than pouring 400 lbs of molten steel into a mold by yourself. I've considered something like this, but eventually I want to have a very large anvil and I would like to avoid spending a ton on the anvil, If i were to forge it I would need a huge pit for the forge and a large air supply but that is more feasible than casting i guess. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
njanvilman Posted March 23, 2014 Share Posted March 23, 2014 so maybe instead of casting the metal It would be more practical to heat it enough to beat it into shape even if it takes longer and is very hard work. It would take a lot of the safety problems(not all) but most would be reduced since there would not be molten metal. You do not need a traditional anvil shape object to forge on. Historically, the shape we see today has only been around for a couple of hundred years. Before that, anything that was harder than the metal could be used. Have you ever forged anything bigger than 1"? Heavy forging is not easy. Anvilmaking used big drop hammers, trip hammers, or steam driven hammers. Go out and find an old anvil, heavy truck axle or other heavy piece of steel and use that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chuck_Steak Posted March 23, 2014 Share Posted March 23, 2014 I did alot of reading about making and casting anvils when I first started smithing. Find an anvil your budget allows for. Hammer on it until you feel you need a bigger anvil. Save your money from the get go and get the anvil you want at some point in the future. I saved my pennies for a couple years and bought a south german pattern anvil that is about 140 kg, made in the 1880s. It was my dream anvil. I'm nearly in love with it. Was worth every penny. For the same money, I may have been able to cobble together an Anvil shaped object. BUT if you do cast one, be sure to post, because that would be cool to see. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
njanvilman Posted March 23, 2014 Share Posted March 23, 2014 I've considered something like this, but eventually I want to have a very large anvil and I would like to avoid spending a ton on the anvil, If i were to forge it I would need a huge pit for the forge and a large air supply but that is more feasible than casting i guess. How are you going to handle 400 lbs of 2100 degree steel? And what are you going to shape it on? And how are you going to hammer it? And heat treat the result? All your rational for not spending money to buy an anvil is going to cost you way more in the long run, and you will probably not succeed. If anvil making was easy, we would all be doing it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Graham Gates(Ionic Muffin) Posted March 23, 2014 Author Share Posted March 23, 2014 If it were easy then they would be cheap and I would buy one, I may have to buy one instead of making one. I suppose if I really wanted to make one I would want to do so with several experienced smiths in a nice shop better geared for such a thing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
njanvilman Posted March 23, 2014 Share Posted March 23, 2014 If it were easy then they would be cheap and I would buy one, I may have to buy one instead of making one. I suppose if I really wanted to make one I would want to do so with several experienced smiths in a nice shop better geared for such a thing. If one considers what it takes to create a modern anvil, they are relatively cheap. Production lines and modern equipment has greatly reduced the costs. Remember too that a good anvil is an investment. Buy a good anvil, take care of it, and when done with it, sell it for as much or more than you originally paid for it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Anachronist58 Posted March 23, 2014 Share Posted March 23, 2014 I am no smith at all, I have no skill at it as of yet, let alone any casting experience. I plan to work up my casting skills, fuel wise I think that it will cost me little to nothing if I go the waste oil forge. And if I can make a waste oil smelting thing that can hold a large amount of metal for casting an anvil. My friend who had been working on an engineering degree told me that I wouldn't want anything to do with getting near the metal when its hot but instead have a valve that I could empty the entire crucible without taking it out of the forge at all. Then it would be a matter of making a mold that would be ideal for casting the anvil. iconicmuffin - Your command of American English leads me to believe that you have completely understood every post laid down thus far. I think it is clear to you from the preceding posts that casting, or now forging your own anvil is nothing more than pie in the sky, and you are simply having fun toying with (me). As you have stated, you have absolutely no experience, and yet you are able to make "calculations" on the feasibility of your grand Quixotic aspirations. I am feeling somewhat dizzy from my several turns around the Mulberry Bush. In the event that I have misread and misinterpreted your intent, I apologize heartfeltedly (sic) to you and all who read this. After all you might well be a Genius Savant, in which case, I bow to you. Robert Taylor Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Graham Gates(Ionic Muffin) Posted March 23, 2014 Author Share Posted March 23, 2014 I guess you have a point there. I dont have to like it but I can accept it if it is so unreasonable. So then, If i were to have that kind of think made specific to my needs(depending on what I decided I wanted after many months/years of blacksmithing.) Then would it be cost effective to have it made or is 2700 $ just not going to cut it when getting an anvil made to your specifications? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Graham Gates(Ionic Muffin) Posted March 23, 2014 Author Share Posted March 23, 2014 iconicmuffin - Your command of American English leads me to believe that you have completely understood every post laid down thus far. I think it is clear to you from the preceding posts that casting, or now forging your own anvil is nothing more than pie in the sky, and you are simply having fun toying with (me). As you have stated, you have absolutely no experience, and yet you are able to make "calculations" on the feasibility of your grand Quixotic aspirations. I am feeling somewhat dizzy from my several turns around the Mulberry Bush. In the event that I have misread and misinterpreted your intent, I apologize heartfeltedly (sic) to you and all who read this. After all you might well be a Genius Savant, in which case, I bow to you. Robert Taylor Sorry for all this, I was figuring that It would be worth the time and effort, but thus far that's not what I have heard. I am really not trying to toy with anybody, I merely am having or thought I was having a discussion as to getting an anvil that would serve the needs that I plan to have in the future, granted I don't know if i will get to that point, but I sure hope so. The calculations made were referring to weight and volume necessary to house the steel when being melted, I however have not made any calculations as to if it is possible and how much money or fuel it would take and I have not considered time in that either. I apologize for my irrationality, I am rather determined when it comes to wanting to do things myself, I really do prefer to do them if at all possible, but as it seems, unless I come into the proper equipment for such a project then having it forged or just buying one would be a better choice. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Sells Posted March 23, 2014 Share Posted March 23, 2014 an Anvil is a lump of heavy stuff we lay hot metal on so we can beat on it with a smaller lump and change its shape. Having a few curves on that lump makes it easier for making curves, but if you actually ready anything about anvils, know the horn is a modern invention, most old anvils were just a block. If we also aquire a swege block, we have covered of the rest of the shapes we may want. Why custom make anything, you are telling us: I wanna custom car, I dont drive yet, but I decided I need a custom design for one, even tho I dont know how to use what we have already , its not good enough for me ??? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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