Equipment availability: area to area..

[KYBOY]

You Ive noticed as I traveled over the country that many areas are more prone to have estate sales and blacksmithing equipment for sale...Here in eastern,Ky estate sales are non existant as Im sure jayco can attest to as well..Land and tools are most often passed down and never sold..Much of our families land has been in the family for three or more generations..Precious old tools are almost always passed down..Its considered bad form to sale them. Much the same as old family property..One will often be known as "the boy that sold his familiys place " when they sale out and leave..Still a very clannish area. I have seen exactly two anvils for sale in the last 3-5 years :confused: Both were "wallered" to death as we say I just got an email from a friend working in ILL who told me estate sales where everywhere and most had smithing equipment...Then the appalachian mountains where never densely populated to start with which means they were not many smiths here to start with either...

[highlander]

I have a very hard time finding blacksmithing equipment where I live, so when I do find it, I buy it up so I have it incase I need it.

[HWooldridge]

As you pointed out, you are more likely to find the equipment in rural areas but quite often, those are the folks who are less likely to sell. "I'll build a shop one day and use it", "That belonged to Grandpa", "Oh, these are rare antiques and you can't find them anymore" - are all things I have heard over the years. Still, you can find things now and again; you just have to keep looking. I have run ads in local papers and done pretty well; you get some losers but some winners too. I had a guy call and want to trade his old broken homemade forge for a tandem axle trailer - or $1800 (I politely turned that one down) but a lady also called to ask if I could haul off the old coal that was cluttering up her garage (turned out to be six 55 gallon barrels full of high quality smithing coal).

[jayco]

Here in Greenup Co, we've always had a 'farm' culture.
Even the guys who have worked at the steel mills or the railroad 'car shops' also farmed.
So, we have lots of ........pickup trucks....tractors........cows.......barns....etc, but blacksmithing tools are as scarce as 'hen's teeth'

I'm 20 miles from southern Ohio, 30 miles from W Va.
Those places have more of an industrial culture....
I plan to save up some time and money and go to those places to look for tools.

I think a lot of smiths around the world experience the same shortages of smithing supplies that we do. That's why I wind up making a lot of my own tools.....sheer necessity.

[Bentiron1946]

Last year I found an estate sale where a sculptor's widow had died and his daughters were finally selling off and clearing out their folks collection of antiques and their father's studio. I bought some things and helped a budding smith select enough tools to get a good start plus a 65# anvil. I can usually find about one blacksmith tool every two months of garage/estate shopping. Here in Arizona our population was not that large during the hay day of blacksmithing. When I was a young lad I met an older fellow who was a working smith at one time but he was in his 80's and living with his granddaughter. Where his shop had been was a high rise and he had sold all of his tools during WWII for scrap because there wasn't much need anymore for his trade among the farmers. There is still one old time smith shop still active in Scottsdale, AZ from the old days but they do more welding then forging. A friend of mine bought the blacksmith shop from one of the copper mines when they closed it but all of that is absolutely huge in size. Most of the stuff you find out here is in antique shops.

[orgtwister]

I live by the jersey shore and its hard to find good stuff around here in estate sales or yard sales the fleamarkets you can find stuff there mostly i find handled hot cuts top swages put they all have been used for hammers and spliting mals and are in bad shape cause they didn't know what it was for or didn't care but with them if there not to bad you can fixem then its about a buck or two last week a peter wright 120 pound so he claimed it weght not to badly beat up and he only wanted 150 for it but it was more than i had as for any tongs i have found there always rare antiques so they want usally 20 and up and there the ones who are there every week with the same things for sale so i'm thinking i need to fleemarket over in pa to try to find more stuff

[rustyshackleford]

western nc/blue ridge/ "high country"/whatever. the place has been stripped of what little history it ever had, and what you are fortunate enough to find is over priced, due to the tourist market. in an adjacent county there is a man that used to sell anvils, but on a recent trip, he had but two, complaining of the high prices ($3/lb+) that he was having to pay for them. a ~250 lb vulcan was for sale for $750. he also had some sledges, one of which was a cross pien (the others double or straight railroad types). I have yet to make a trip down to Kayne and son for their monthly meetings, and would love to talk to all smiths who live in NC

[Rob Browne]

Over here most of the "good" stuff is in the antique shops or on eBay for ridiculous prices so its a case of make your own very often. However, the hardest thing we can't make ourselves is to get good coal.

[Max Mulholland - Tetnum]

i have just found the jackpot of all smithging supplys in my area but have been sworn to secracy by the locals
i useto think that MO had been stripped of all tools (now to find a decent scource of local steel) every area has it's pitfalls
look in the most unlikely of places

[KYBOY]

Ebay is killing the tool market Seriously, when people pay $300-$400-$500 for a 110 anvil on ebay it kinda skews the market....Lord forbid you try to buy a 300# anvil off ebay..It will probably set you back a grand...:o

[orgtwister]

speaking of ebay i just lost a bid on a peter wright 334 pound it went for i think 228 my xxxx aol lost it connection when i was raising my bid with 10 min. left i guess i should have raised my max bid sooner and the anvil was only an hour from me so no shipping you can find some ebay stuff at a good price if its heavy and you must pick it up

[ironrosefarms]

The problem I have rann into here is "collectors", we have two guys in the area that are known as anvil collectors. One of the two will sell, so when I was anvil-less I went to him. If the anvils he wanted to sell me was horses I could have had the privilege of burying the old sway back nag for about $6 per pound. Any decent anvil was $8 to $12 per pound... Both these guys are willing to pay $4 or 5 per pound even for worn out anvils at auction and they won't keep their hands off vises either... this kills the new guys trying to find tools. When I was at that guys 'shop' 15 years ago he claimed he had well over 1000 anvils.

[Dave M]

I have found a lot of stuff listed wrong on craigs list or the local paper, like bench vise $50.00 it turned out to be a perfect leg vise they just did not know. Or I find stuff listed as old tools. I have purchased tools from farm auctions or blacksmiths to be who just did not stick with it. At the last auction I went too there was a women there buying any tool she could she did not even know what most of them were she was just going to put the in her store.

[ThomasPowers]

IronRose Farms: relax and consider that someday there will be an estate sale and all of them will go back into play!

Now go find the ones in "hiding" out there!

[ChrisB]

Around here its all by word of mouth. I'm not a local so I'm mostly out of luck. Plus they are smart enough to check ebay before telling you how much they want. Last item I looked at was a destroyed anvil and the sweet little ole lady wanted $6 lb and told me that is was 150lbs. Cause she couldnt sell it for any less because of the memories attached to the anvil. Everybody has their price I suppose...

[Finnr]

Finding stuff has been mostly keeping both eyes open and jumping at anything that I thought to be decent.
Finnr

[BlackCrowMetalsmith]

Being in the city there's not much in the way of smithing equipment at yard and estate sales...lately I've tried driving out to the country on a few Saturday mornings, but no real luck yet. Most of my stuff I've either built myself or has come from craigslist. Usually it's the mislabeled or vague listings ("old vice"). Here's something cool though: you can really speed up your craigslist searching by searching for multiple terms at once, including misspellings. For example: ['anvil' 'anvel' 'forge' 'vise' 'vice' 'tongs'] etc. If you enter it just like that, sans brackets, it will return search results for listings containing any, not all, of the search terms....if you accidentally miss an apostrophe you confuse it though. Double check it and then save your list as an email to yourself, so after that you can just copy and paste it...this way it only takes you about 20 seconds to search for everything you're looking for.

[Max Mulholland - Tetnum]

black crow there has got to be an old foundry bulding in portland some whare they tipicaly have tools in the inner depths

[ThomasPowers]

I've found and bought more anvils inside the city of Columbus OH that I have found in Arkansas or New Mexico, not counting the ones that got away: anvil in the subbasement of the OSU Hospital, one sitting in a back yard in the inner city, the ones in the steel foundry, etc...

Remember that most every industry used anvils in the old days in the shop that kept their machines working. I know of complete blacksmithing setups that were in cannaries, sugar processing plants, a glass factory, shoot even a car repair shop that had been in the same location since 1919 had a set of blacksmithing equipment in it. (The one from the OSU Hospital was used in WWII to make custom splints and supports for people who needed them---I talked with the fellow who had been the smith back then!)

[HWooldridge]

There was a big anvil in the basement of a local hospital and since they could not remove it easily, there it remained long after the last smith worked there. I never saw it but a friend who worked in the hospital said it was around 300 lbs and virtually unmarked.