All of us suffer from anvil envy, but look at these guys. They have a very nice (large-ish) anvil, but have decided to go with the smaller round block of steel to do almost all of there forging (well, at least in this video). The anvil that all the guys were striking on looked to be almost the equivalent of a sledge hammer head. Now, what's stopping you from forging? if its that you don't have a "adequate" anvil? well, I bet you do! now get hammering!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2a1pLVF8kk

                                                                                                                                          Littleblacksmith

You should see the video of those guys In Nepal making kukris. Amazing work, and it's all done using actual sledge hammer heads at floor level for the anvil. It's not what you make in on. It's what you make.

Also a good display of  traditional smithing process:  You don't have *1* guy smithing you have *5*!

You can really see the gentle blows to set the weld and the increase in force afterwards. 

Maybe mentally the hammer accuracy improves quicker when you have a smaller target?

Hmmm... I generally aim for the piece that i'm forging, not the anvil.

Yes and if you cant see the anvil all around the target area you focus on the target without being distracted. Alot of eye hand coordination is training the eyes. In autosports you never look where you dont want to go only where you do. 

I've seen a lot of those types of videos.  In the third-world, labor is cheap and supplies are expensive, so they'll figure a way around things.  That anvil might have been the end of a long shaft, the majority of which is buried.  Saw one vid where I'd swear they were using a round from a 155 howitzer as the anvil.  The ogive of the chunk of steel sure looked bullet-like, and there was some kind of groove that looked like a cannelure.  

Shoot a lot of folks are using the penetrator tips of ballistic missiles as cone mandrels after that fellow brought a flat bed of them to Quad-State one year.  I have one myself...

Thomas, I would love to see pics of that mandrel in action!

Thomas,

I wonder if somebody at the NSA read that post and decided to open an investigation into cone mandrel ownership.

Probably be a couple of weeks before I'm up at my shop, it looks like a nice cone, a couple of feet tall.  Much nicer steel than the cast iron cones more typical of a smithy

I really wish I had bought several of them now.  I'd like one at each shop...

The fellow worked with their manufacturer and said that these had failed Q/A (I don't know how they look great!) He had a nice load on a flatbed.  They are just about perfect for the trivets I forge.

I found this interesting, sort of sad for me anyway. Reminds me when my master passed away and his smithy was sold to a developer and all his gear sold for scrap. 

On November 1, 2016 at 11:07 PM, C-1ToolSteel said:

Hmmm... I generally aim for the piece that i'm forging, not the anvil.

Why am I just getting this advice now?

you never stop learning.........

And an OSA (Object Shaped Anvil) can work just fine .

Anvil questions aside, this is some nice footage (especially the closeup starting around 3:17) of a bellows setup very similar to the Indonesian one that Alexander Weygers describes in The Complete Modern Blacksmith.