Hey everyone! So I can not take all the credit for this awesomeness, I just "supervised" and reminded the guys to wear their PPEs, but here are some pictures from over the weekend. A few guys from PABA got together to forge weld a 20# 1" piece of o1 on to a 150# wrought iron anvil missing it's face plate (possibly mouse hole but unknown make).  I will say, it was SUPER HOT!  Still need to cleaned up and heat treat still.  I apologize I do not have the finished pictures, only ones from during the process.  I will try to get finished pictures from the others! Videos to follow at some point (I need to edit them still).

Enjoy!

Lovely, thanks for the pictures!  I have an 1828 William Foster than needs a new faceplate and want to try that method someday.  

Postman suggested I weld the slab to a piece of wrought iron plate and then weld the wrought iron to wrought iron as William Foster used a rather coarse wrought iron for their anvils.

How much propane did they run through?

I can't say exactly but 100lbs or more, I can find out for you! 

Thanks, and I'd appreciate the weight of the anvil accepting the new face too.

I will find that out as well, but I am also interested to see how much burned off during the process, there was SO MUCH SCALE!

That is aweing. Just the fact someone was willing to try that is inspiring, but to have the skill required to execute it? That is even more inspiring. I wonder if how many people have done this in the last 30 years or even since the last WI/steel faced anvils were manufactured?  

Well they did it as the Friday Night program at Quad-State a couple of years ago. I know of a couple others, one was facing an anvil the owner had forged and another was a failure (used to be under Cajun Blackened Anvil---Hmm I note I posted about that one in 2001)

Im not sure how many times it has been successfully done not in a manufacturing setting , but it isn't that many I don't think.  It was an awesome project to get to be a part of, crazy Ivan was directing , with help from a couple other guys from PABA. Even wearing welding gloves , welding jackets and aprons , etc we all walked away with blisters and burns, the amount of heat was incredible. Took a good 2 hours to get to welding heat.  We had a little delamination drifting the hardy to size after the 3rd heat , because we got it stuck , was way to short. But it was fluxed and re welded and it was fully welded by the end of the day. Welds were set with a hammer head attached to a long wraughy iron handle while it was still in the forge. The rest of the heats were 4 strikers and a gigantic flatter modded from a sledge hammer.  The next one will be way easier and a water hardening steel will be the choice. 

Going to have to bump up "Go to Quad-State" on my priority list a few notches....

you and me both haha

 

If I can get their from New Mexico...Rich used to attend from the US Virgin Islands...

So has it been heat treated yet?

Not yet , the plate was wide than the anvil , so it needs to be trimmed to final size and ground before heat treat.

Here is a pic of it after the welding .

That's pretty amazing. Very cool (well, hot).

Very cool project!

Now thats how to repair an anvil....

Saw a couple vids on FB. Thats awesome, and I can only imagine the radiant heat off that sucker.

Cool! Can't wait to hear how the heat treat is being done.

1 hour ago, Daswulf said:

Saw a couple vids on FB. Thats awesome, and I can only imagine the radiant heat off that sucker.

Marcy is editing a longer video of whAt we got filmed , better video than what went up on FB. 

Wow! An impressive feat!

Thanks for posting.

Thank you Marcy, I am really impressed and I look forward to the video

Very cool we need more info on how it turned out.

Very nice, making an anvil great .... again.  

We were discussing all the different kinds of welding in school one time, forge welding never even got within radar range, much less forge welding anvil faces.