I started shaping my first rail anvil last year out of opportunity (I landed a couple free chunks), and curiosity. How hard can it be? (Pun hopefully acceptable.) I did gain assistance from a local machinist to flatten the top, who graciously donated his services to my cause, thank you Terry! I drilled the pritchel, and the hardy was roughed in as well. This leaves me where I am at presently, I have a buttery soft rail, with an unfinished hardy hole. I might be up to the hardening, but square cutting the hardy has to come first. I am not above paying someone to cut it professionally, and so I am contemplating my next move. I just thought I'ld share. Any and all comments, critiques, criticisms welcome. Poor old rail, never saw it coming... 

Your doing a great job on it!

Why not square it up with a cape chisel and a bunch of filing?  That way you will not only keep the budget aspect of the tool, you can say you made it yourself. 

The difficulty with hardening anvils is their mass.  It is not just heating the whole thing up to the correct temperature for quenching, but having enough cold fluid to harden it quickly enough (think rivers, waterfalls and fire hydrants - though I did see a YouTube of someone quenching an anvil in a kiddie swimming pool...).  Of course then you have to temper it.  From a short search it appears that rail may be in the 1080 family, so heat treatment shouldn't be that hard, but the capability to get it up to temperature and safely handle it at 1450 deg. F is not as easy.  Please be safe.

The real issue as far as efficiency goes is that you have limited anvil mass directly under where you will be working.  This means to forge any sizable stock you will be working a whole lot harder to move the metal than you would otherwise.

I suggest you take the longest of the remaining of your other free chunks and stand it vertically from a massive stand if possible.  Clean up the top end of that and use it for your basic forging.  Then you can use this anvil for straightening, bends, hardy work (once you get the hole finished) as well as finishing up things like bottle openers.  The time you put into setting this up will likely serve you better than hardening, but I haven't tried to harden rail to date, so take that for what it is worth.

Good Luck

You milled off the hard face, rail steel is extremely hard on the top. No idea what your rail is, but here in Australia standard rail straight out of the Whyalla steel mill is rated at 900 mpa, or special top hardened 1200mpa on the top / running surface. Special heat treatment process, you wont duplicate it / reinstate it after it is lost.

You may be luck enough you still have some thickness left.

 

So if you go to your local library and ask to ILL "The Complete Modern Blacksmith" You will find an entire chapter on how to modify a piece of rail into a more london patternish anvil, including how to heat treat.  Rather than having us type in a subset of that why don't you go read the entire thing?  Folks outside of the USA who may not have access to an ILL system may have to look into purchasing a copy of it.

11 hours ago, ThomasPowers said:

So if you go to your local library and ask to ILL "The Complete Modern Blacksmith" You will find an entire chapter on how to modify a piece of rail into a more london patternish anvil, including how to heat treat.  Rather than having us type in a subset of that why don't you go read the entire thing?  Folks outside of the USA who may not have access to an ILL system may have to look into purchasing a copy of it.

I like reading ... sometimes. I will prolly just buy a copy. Thanks for the tip! 

 

18 hours ago, Jackdawg said:

You milled off the hard face, rail steel is extremely hard on the top. No idea what your rail is, but here in Australia standard rail straight out of the Whyalla steel mill is rated at 900 mpa, or special top hardened 1200mpa on the top / running surface. Special heat treatment process, you wont duplicate it / reinstate it after it is lost.

You may be luck enough you still have some thickness left.

I still have another chunk. 

J Morse, thank you. I'll try not to let you down!

Latticino, that is kind of what I had a mind to try, IF i can get my hands on a good chisel. 

8 hours ago, tanglediver said:

I still have another chunk. 

 

Looking up the paper I had been reading on Australian rail steel, if yours is of similar design over there, you wouldn't have an issues, the hardened zone is near fully the depth of the top part of the rail

Nice! We only took off enough to get the top flat and more parallel to the bottom, it still has much of the original side radius.

Unfortunately I already know the hardness has gone away. It gave about a 30% rebound the other day with a 1" ball bearing. I only hope to make it harder than it is now if and when I get to that point. Thanks for having a look!

So, the corners of the hardy are slow going, I got some files together and tried out a few until I had one that made a bit of headway in defining them.

I made some gussets in the mean time.

They are 3/8" thick, left over bits. Half way through welding it was hovering at 400 degrees F., so I gave it a little time to cool in between before finishing.

The contact surface of rail is typically induction hardened to a depth of a few thousandths for wear and friction reduction. However you can harden rail like any other 1085 +/- low alloy steel. The really tricky part is drawing the temper back. As hardened rail will shatter like a ceramic coffee mug when hit with a hammer. I stopped messing with heat treating rail a long time ago, been there, had fun, moved on.

Frosty The Lucky.

Isothermal Transformation Diagrams are hard to pin down for even a known steel. I found one for 1095.

Even if I had an exact correct diagram, to match times and temperatures accurately would be difficult. I am resigned to accept my best S.W.A.G. (scientific wild axe guess), and just be happy with it. I may have to have a BBQ picnic down by the river when that day comes.

I heated mine to non magnetic and quenched it in water by moving it up and down. I did not temper at all. Rebound is great and it hasn't broken yet.

 That's awesome! I am pretty close to finished with shaping and sanding.

Hand filing the inside corners has gotten the hole into more or less a square shape, enough so that a spike fits into it kind of loosely.

 

I gave it a shot today and took it up to bright orange after 2 or 3 hours in a wood fed fire. I really hope it WAS hot enough, it is harder now, but it needs to be cleaned and polished again. It also shed lots of scale and blistered at the surface. I hope it cleans up well, and hopefully I can go over it this weekend.Thanks for looking!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmV2V4FhIMs&feature=youtu.be

reckon rebound will improve even more when you clean it up.