Has anyone here actually broken an anvil?

[George Geist]

3 minutes ago, ThomasPowers said:

George, we know exactly HOW that story got started!   Paw Paw Wilson came up with this as a guess when he was asked why so many southern anvils were damaged and he postulated the war was responsible for damaging them---(which it was in a way since it was the extreme poverty during reconstruction that prevented southern smiths from replacing anvils as they got damaged. ) Soon his guess was being repeated all over as truth without any proof. 

I just furnished a stack of books, many written before we all were born.

3 minutes ago, ThomasPowers said:

As mentioned: burning the shop would be a heck of a lot more effective and as mentioned by Shakespeare: "War Without Fire is as Useless as Sausages Without Mustard”- Henry V...

Please let this urban legend die!

How you figure that? I for one have never had a shop. I've done most of my work out of the back of some kind of a vehicle. I can't think of too many things I've done without using my anvil though. What makes everybody think the shop building is so necessary and essential? I'd be inclined to think wrecking the forge and anvil would shut a business down much more effectively that wrecking the rest of the smithy-which they did too.

[ThomasPowers]

George: How do you burn down the smithy and NOT damage all the equipment it contains---like the forge and anvil?   Can you burn down your house and then use the television that was in it? Wouldn't it be faster to burn down the building than to heat "the anvil, and with large chisels, cut around the base of the horn and then broke it off."

As you don't need a horn to make horseshoes; that would have been a great waste of time and effort. (BTW: Horseshoes predate the London pattern anvil by 1000 years or so).

[George Geist]

44 minutes ago, ThomasPowers said:

George: How do you burn down the smithy and NOT damage all the equipment it contains---like the forge and anvil?

You think Forge and Anvil are that easily hurt by fire? Let's see now I'm no expert on fire but to my limited knowledge a class A fire burns at about 800 degreesF.

Steel starts to turn red at about 1000F then gets brighter and brighter until eventually melting at between 2000 and 2500 F Depending upon what it's alloyed with. Not very hot when compared to a modern arc welder which operates at about 6000 F. These basic facts in and of themselves prove the 9/11 story to be bogus but I digress.

Absolutely plenty of stuff could have been salvaged from a destroyed shop which is precisely why the stuff was vandalized as much as possible before they started on the building Any kind of essential tools or machinery were primary targets.

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 Can you burn down your house and then use the television that was in it? Wouldn't it be faster to burn down the building than to heat "the anvil, and with large chisels, cut around the base of the horn and then broke it off." 

Oftentimes yes. Plenty of stuff can and often is salvaged from fires.

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As you don't need a horn to make horseshoes; that would have been a great waste of time and effort. (BTW: Horseshoes predate the London pattern anvil by 1000 years or so).

You think so? To a non smithing observer watching horses get shod they see the horn get used a lot. Maybe more than any other kind of smithing. Vandals aren't often noted for being overly bright. I'm sure it seemed logical to them.

 

One other thing I'd like to say about these oral histories. When I was a young fellow just entering the work force at the tender age of about 19. I met a man on a job I had that was well into his '60s at the time. The man was a WWII vet who served in the horse drawn field artillery and probably forgot more about horses and horsemanship than I'll ever learn.

This man's Grandfather was an Irish immigrant who served in the Civil War. During his service there was an election. It was understood that in the Army you had to vote for Lincoln. There was no secret ballot. Those voting for Lincoln got on one side of the room those voting for his opponent stood on the other side. Those who didn't vote for Lincoln didn't get their 3 day pass. For the rest of that man's life he never voted for another Republican again. Is there any documentation to this occurring? To my knowledge no. I see no reason for the man to have lied about something like that though so I believe it. With the whole Army voting for Lincoln he couldn't really lose right?

Reason I tell this is because stories like this should not be poo pooed because it doesn't come from Dan Blather or some college professor.

Personally if I want to know what's going on in Iraq or Afghanistan today, I'd be much more inclined to ask somebody who was there. Not the media. Not the politicians. Not those who write magazine articles but actual eyewitnesses.

Tales of Civil War destruction and carnage I trust the words of eyewitnesses also

[ThomasPowers]

Do you know how difficult it is to re-heat treat an anvil---just heating it up and dropping it in the lake DOESN'T work.  Anvil makers used special set ups to get the water at high enough pressure to get around the leidenfrost effect.  Yes stuff could be salvaged; of course the smith could reforge a horn from stock---they were just  wrought iron you know---and forge weld it back on the anvil too.  This then means that they didn't cut horns off; right?

I'm not going to continue this.

[JHCC]

32 minutes ago, George Geist said:

I trust the words of eyewitnesses also

Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, especially when repeated second- or third-hand. The repetition of someone else’s anecdote isn’t even that. 

And that’s why the original question of this thread is whether anyone here has actually broken an anvil. The answer so far — apart from ThomasPowers’s friend’s Vulcan — continues to be NO. 

[George Geist]

6 minutes ago, JHCC said:

 

And that’s why the original question of this thread is whether anyone here has actually broken an anvil. The answer so far — apart from ThomasPowers’s friend’s Vulcan — continues to be NO. 

I've never known anyone to have done it outside of chipping the edges and such. I'm thinking if it were even possible to break one in half it would require a lot of deliberate effort.

On the issue of Vulcans I know there are people out there that love them but I never was very impressed by them. They always looked like inferior quality so it comes as no surprise that somebody could break one.

[Exo313]

Sure, I'll jump in.  I semi-deliberately took the horn off an early mousehole-style anvil with a sledge. 

Forge welded composite anvils can develop issues. The bond between body and horn is going to be a natural weak point. Mine had developed a crack. So I whacked it and the crack opened up more until it came off. I suspect others with similar weak defects would do similarly under similar conditions. 

But I ain't Sherman.

PS My poor anvil's horn has since been reattached with the help of a magical blue box.