I had my anvil face milled flat

[Trilliumforge]

Hey all,

I'm very lucky to have a friend with an industrial mill. My anvil is an old one from a junk yard that had been very badly treated, no makers marks but it's wrought iron with most of the top face ground down. The top face was actually convex which meant that any time I tried to use a punch the piece I was working on would spin around. I'll be refacing it with a 3/4" D2 plate, and if all goes well it should be good for another few hundred years

Brace yourselves, this may be the sexiest thing I've ever seen.

Cheers,

Sean

[Jobtiel1]

How do you plan to reface it?

[Daswulf]

Got a picture of what it was like before milling it down?

[Irondragon Forge ClayWorks]

How are you planing to get a full penetration weld on the D2 plate? There are several threads on doing that.

[ThomasPowers]

And how to do a build up face is covered in the Robb Gunther and Karl Schuler's Anvil Repair Process.  Trying to put a D2 plate on that and do the required heat treating will probably cost more than buying a new H-13 anvil!  Whatever you do---don't forget to round the edges!

I'm sorry but in my opinion; that's not sexy but an atrocity!  I has a friend who milled his anvil face down; then found it was too thin to use and ended up carrying it around for 20 years until we had an anvil repair day with an ABANA Affiliate.  Took about 6 hours for a professional welder/welding teacher/blacksmith with industrial equipment to build it back usable  using the Gunther/Schuler process.  It's a beautiful anvil now!  One of my students tried milling an anvil face flat and bolting a face onto it from below.  Didn't like the results and moved onto a different anvil fairly fast.  Who advised you to go that route?

[TWISTEDWILLOW]

What’s that thing Glenn says all the time about a thousand hrs? 

[Chelonian]

Personally I prefer a crowned (convex) face over a dead flat one. They were very often were manufactured crowned since it has some advantages.

[Trilliumforge]

Can you link me to the Gunther/Schuler process you mentioned? I'm planning on tack welding the d2 plate to the face, then heating the whole thing up before finishing the weld with a heavy duty stick welder (still deciding on what the best rod to use is).

[Chelonian]

Here is a link to the method:

https://www.anvilmag.com/smith/anvilres.htm
 

I used this method when I repaired the heel of my anvil, and had good results (although I avoided welding on the face as much as possible):

I don't think welding just around the perimeter will give you good results. There will always be a small air gap in between the plate and what's left of the anvil face. I think building up the face is a much better option, although it will be a lot of work and the rods are quite pricey.

[JHCC]

The only times I've seen anvils successfully ground flat (that is, without weakening the top plate or otherwise compromising the structural integrity or performance) were when the anvil was solid steel to start with.

[ThomasPowers]

What we generally see is folks making major modifications to their anvils when they have little background in smithing and so don't know what is an improvement and what isn't.

For instance a lot of folks think their anvil's edges should be sharp for some reason;  here's a quote from a Professional Smith: "Practical Blacksmithing"; Volume 1, published in 1889; page 110: "For my own part I am satisfied not only that the sharp edges are useless, but that they are also destructive of good work. I cannot account for their existence except as a relic of a time  when the principles of forging were but little understood. I want both edges of my anvil rounded, not simply for a part of their length, but for their whole length."

Now if you need a sharp edge for a particular process; it's a lot easier making a piece of hardy hole tooling that has a sharp edge on it---make it square out of 1" plate and you can put a different radius edge on each side.

To add a new face plate: they used to forge weld the new one on just like old ones were forge welded on---tricky! It was done at a Quad-State once as a demo by a group that had several centuries of forging experience if you added it up and iirc it still took them four tries to do it.  To arc weld one on; you need to do a full penetration weld---no spot between the plate and the old face is not welded. Generally this is done by spacing the plate off of the face with something like a piece of 1/2" square down the middle and weld up the slot from the bottom up, then turn it over and grind out the 1/2" piece and weld up the slot on that side.  Tricky and time consuming; especially as you will need to preheat and slow cool the result and as I recall D2 has some very strict heat treat requirements and do that with an anvil sized chunk is going to be very difficult as well!

[Charles R. Stevens]

TJ Watts welded the bottom flange off of a piece of train rail. The tapers profile slowed him to reach in to the middle and full thickness weld it. The high C manganese steel heat treat easily (or as easily as a hundred pound hunk of steel is to heat treat)

mother wise the Gunther method will save your anvil

[Trilliumforge]

To be clear, the anvil I had milled had lost nearly all of its face and was down to the wrought iron, which is why I didn't go with welding on hard facing initially. Also this project isn't about getting sharp corners, it's about have a working surface on the anvil in the first place.

 

I'm going to continue with this method of replacing the face as it was explained to me, with the d2 plate welded around the sides with very flat surfaces in contact. I'll post updates as I go, so at least if this is a complete bust I can give a clear description of why it didn't work.

 

Thanks for the input!

[ThomasPowers]

Can you tell us a bit about your smithing background so we can evaluate your report?  (We had one person call the ring of their cast iron anvil as "very good"  turned out that they had never experienced the ring of a forged or cast steel anvil and so had no basis of comparison.)

Also please remember that while the OP was yours; the replies go out to the entire world and so what may seem "not applicable" to your particular situation; may be directed at keeping others from making a mistake before they know any better.  I have seen at least 3 anvils that I would have advised milling the face on; of course in 40+ years I've run across dozens that were milled when they should not have been. Including several where they didn't realize that the old anvils were "free-handed" under steam hammers and so the face and base may not be parallel.  When they were milled; they actually cut through the face and into the wrought iron at one end!  An easy fix would be to flip the anvil upside down and mill the base parallel to the face as few care about a bit of the base being milled off. Then flip it right side up and just kiss the face with the mill.   (See good info that may not have applied to your case at all!)

And; if particular people really annoy you; you can set it up where their posts don't show up for you.

[Goods]

Do you have any S7 plate available? One option that has been discussed, but not proven is to mill the face smooth, and silver solder an S7 face on at the hardening temp for S7. I’m not sure how well this will work, but an considering this method for an anvil that has a “new” face perimeter welder on. I can tell you that the previous owner that did the perimeter welding ended up with an anvil with only a 35% return with a ball bearing at the sweet spot. Trust everyone, you want the face fully bonded.

D2 is air hardening (as I remember), so it make work for this method, but the tempering could be much more problematic. Not to mention that S7 is much more impact friendly.

Go the direction you choose, it’s your anvil. Just be safe about it, and make sure to get a good temper on the D2. I don’t want you getting injured from flying chips from the new face.

Either way, let us No how it works out!

David

[Charles R. Stevens]

Check with your rod suppler for recommendations for welding wrought iron, the slag that is an intricate part of the material makes electric welding tricky. One may have to lay down a bed of one rod, then proceed to weld the top plate. I would still recommend welding a peice of 3/8-1/2” round down the middle of the plate, and then reach in from alternating sides to weld the plate full thickness. Parimutuel welding will not creat a satisfactory repair

[anvil]

Altho I agree completely with not milling the face of a two part anvil, you can weld on a new face out of anything you choose. However, a perimeter weld is not a good solution. The reason is that no matter the material you use, with use, it will draw out. Perhaps not much, but it will. When it does, you begin to lose efficiency to vibration and your perimeter weld is put under lots of stress. You need a full weld between your new face plate and the anvil itself. A plug weld is the answer to this. No matter how you weld it, perimeter or plug, you will have to heat treat the new plate. Since time and material between any of the three methods, Gunther, plug, perimeter, are pretty similar, I'd go for the Gunther method hands down. Lol, it's never too late til you start the process.

 

Altho I'm in 100% agreement with Thomas on repairing an anvil face, not so with rounding the anvil edges. I treasure "Practical Blacksmithing" as a source, but I do recognize that many of the "posts" must be taken with a grain of salt. Most likely, if I looked up this man's reason for rounding all edges, I would find a number of contrary responses. It's the nature of "social media", then or now. I radius my edges, both sides, from the step to about where the heel begins. I leave the rest sharp. I have any number of functions that I use these sharp edges for. I could do as Thomas suggests and make a hardy tool for these tasks, or not. Why make a tool when I can do it on just my anvil. I don't have to put it in or take it out, I just use my anvil. I do have a hardy tool out of 1" square, both for my anvil and my treadle hammer. However, I use this tool for other things than how I use the sharp edges on the heel.

[arftist]

D2 is awful expensive to throw away on a useless project. 

Your idea of a perimeter weld is a joke...forget it. Total waste of time and money.

Silver solder; weak (40-70K) and NOT impact resistant. Not even vibration resistant. 

D2 otherwise is a good choice for a top plate; air hardened (just like S7, H13 and A2

D2 is harder than S7 and highly abrasion resistant and resistant to softening at high temps.

Form a long narrow H from 1/2" square bar set on the diamond.The center of the H should be 4" shorter than the face.

The cross pieces should be a inch shorter than the width of the anvil. 

Assemble the H on the face plate in the flat position and weld the heck out of it.

Do not quench in water or even a moving stream of air as produced by a fan.

Preheat to 350 F and weld to the top of the anvil. 

I would use either innersheild (preferred) or 8018 1/8" diameter. 

Either way you want a big power source (at least 250 amps for the wire feed or 275 for the stick.

If you happen to have 500 amps then 1/16 solid wire would be great, and fast. Otherwise use 0.45. 

For best results bring the finished work to a heat treater with a vacuum furnace.

Frosty greatly contributed to the development of this method.

[Frazer]

I just noticed that someone already arc welded the heel back onto that anvil. You can see one bead on the side and a seam running across the face. Not sure that really matters at this point, more of an observation.

[JHCC]

I only see the crack on the near side of the face, and it doesn't look like the vertical bead has penetrated very far. That would certainly be a candidate for cutting a deep V into the crack and welding it back out before doing anything about adding a new face.

[ThomasPowers]

Common location for a heel crack, I wonder if it penetrated to the hardy hole and if it did; if that was welded up too.

Before it was milled did it show any trace of being a multi-piece face?  If a plate seam and the heel forge weld line up they tend to be a bit more prone to cracking.  My 1828 William Foster lost it's heel there; but so much of the face is missing that I can't see if it had that alignment.  My Powell lost it's heel there and it does show traces of that alignment---but the rest of face is flat and hard!  I use that one for students who hammer like lightening...

[Trilliumforge]

Update, I have the anvil back and I'm very happy with my decision to have the face milled. From what he said, I was right that there was virtually no steel on the anvil face, apart from just before the horn. I cleaned and polished the face, then etched it with ferric chloride to show the structure of the face. The wrought iron in the body has a lot of slag and it's grain structure is huge. I also see a crack near the horn and the extent of the crack in the heel. I've known for a long time this anvil was in bad shape, but I'm happy to learn what I've learned through the process. I'm still working out how I will reface it, but I'll post when I do.

[George N. M.]

Just to throw in my two small monetary units:  I think, as suggested by others that the best way to reface this anvil is building up a face of hard welding beads and then remilling the beads to get a flat face.  Just welding on a plate would not be the optimum solution since only the perimeter would be attached to the body of the anvil.

Your tool and your decision but that is what I would do.  Good luck.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

[Trilliumforge]

I'm also considering leaving it as is. The average rebound is 50-60% (no real change from before milling), and it's about the same as a mousehole I have that is still a great anvil. For how I use it having the face flat was more important to me than how hard the face is, worst case scenario I save it for detail work instead of heavy forging.