hard faceing an aso

[Max Mulholland - Tetnum]

i have bean given a big peice of 1 inch O1 plate is there a reliveitively painless way to weld/solder it to the face of a hf 55# aso

Edited August 4, 2008 by tetnum

[Thomas Dean]

Why waste the O1? For what it would take, time and rod (assuming it can be done), you could have the $$ start for a better anvil. (read nonHF ASO) IIRC the HF ASO are cast iron anyway which only makes it more difficult for what you are wanting to do. I'm sure you will get varing degrees of answers tho....

[Frosty]

You can try brazing or silver soldering the plate to the anvil's body. I've been intending to give it a try for some time now and will when I get a chance.

I can't say whether it'll work or how well, the braze or silver solder will be more than strong enough to take anything you can do to it with hammers.

How to heat treat it is another matter though and O1 needs to be done right.

Everything going into my experiment were freebies except my time so I won't have lost anything but some time and wood for the fire. I like hanging out around a fire giving it the occasional poke, maybe roasting some new potatoes bite sized pieces of steak and sipping a brew. If I end up with a usable anvil from the deal it'll be 100% extra.

Good luck, keep notes and post progress pictures please.

Frosty

[metalliferous]

Frosty, brazing on a face sounds like a strong method, but I don't think it quite fits the "relatively painless" description tetnum was looking for. Tetnum, I don't think there is an easy way to attach a hardface (or at least I don't know of one). You may end up finding it's better to use the O1 for something else and start saving for a steel anvil. just my $.02

[Max Mulholland - Tetnum]

thanks frosty and silver solder is mostly painless so it might be worth a go

[Frosty]

Frosty, brazing on a face sounds like a strong method, but I don't think it quite fits the "relatively painless" description tetnum was looking for.

Well, it is relatively painless. Sure getting that close to that much really hot iron will hurt a little bit but as long as you don't touch it. . .

No matter how you go about it, steeling a cast iron anvil is going to be a lot of work. Hardfacing with rod or wire can be problematic on cast iron so there's a buildup pass, then the hardfacing, then a level of grinding you don't even want to think about.

Arc welding a steel on? Holy mackerel! It has to have 100% penetration which means scarfing the anvil body enough to competently weld. Then the heat effect zone is pretty much the whole thing. I don't even know where you'd go with heat treating it, you could probably SEE the grain by then.

Forge weld it? On cast iron? Yeah, right just as soon as Elvis gets back from the playing for the Grays on the Pleides.

No, there isn't an easy way I can think of. Brazing or Silver soldering is just the easiest I can think of. It'll still be a raft of hard HOT work but it's doable in a large camp fire with some prep.

You're absolutely right though, it's NOT going to be easy at all.

Frosty

[maddog]

This sounds like a difficult project to me and not worth the trouble for the results. Of course if you wanna do it for the sake of doing it thats something else. Working with CI is tricky and best left to experts. You cant just bond the edges. You will have to get a join across the entire surface of the face. To get a good braze you need to mate the two surfaces close enough that the brazing material flows by capillary action. You will then need to heat the whole anvil & plate up to brazing temp. Phosphor bronze is often used with CI. Even brazing can induce stresses in CI when it cools. In this case you have two different metals with different coefficients of expansion bonded together and that also might cause problems. Then when you start working on it and the metal wants to spread the CI may not be willing to follow.

Sounds like $1000 of work for a $10 payoff but if you are going to do it for fun it would be very interesting to hear how it turns out.