I own an anvil weighing about 180 pounds, good rebound of 80% to 90 %, when I use a bearing-ball for check. But: It's ringing very bright and is annoying loud. Fact is, I don't want to disturb the neighbors living around the shop more than absolutely necessary. I want to keep the actual harmony intact and so I decided to use the stand I had to build for the anvil as a possibility to dampen the sound as far as possible.

As a first step I made a tripod out of heavy 6-inch tubes, about 1/2-inch strong, on top I welded a 1-inch iron-plate as a rest for the anvil, bottom side iron-plates as feet for stability on the floor. I filled the tubes with quartz-sand before welding. Additionally, I put the stand upon old rubber-pieces, cut out from a car-tire. The second idea was using lead as material between stand and anvil. The anvil is resting on a massive plate of about 160 pounds of lead, dampening the former noise in an incredible way. There is not even an idea of ringing anymore.

I could imagine, that the added mass of about 240 pounds (tripod filled with sand about 80 pounds and 160 pounds of lead) might be a benefit for the anvil in more than one way: more quietness, additional stability resp. resistance against "dancing around" and hopefully more rebound especially on heavier work. I think I read that some IFI members like Mr. Frost prefer as well tripods built of Iron as anvil-stand, this practice seems to be well known. But - I also remember a description of rebound - I think it was written by Mr. Frost too - that its ultra-fast “travelling through the metal” could be dampened instead of coming fully back to the surface under certain circumstances, and I understood this as a loss of rebound. I am not sure, whether my understanding of this process is correct or not and should I therefore be concerned, because I „sacrificed rebound for the price of silence?” Or the other way round: Will I get more rebound, when there is no dampening surface under the anvil? (e.g. caulk or in this case a soft metal like lead)

So, if it is advantageous to use traditional methods for silencing like chains or magnets to “keep the rebound fully intact”, please let me know. Thank you in advance,
firefly
 

G'day Firefly, good to see you delurking, be nice to hear from you more often but hearing from you anytime is a good thing.

A couple points. First NO a heavy anvil stand does nothing for increasing rebound, it can't. Rebound is the compression wave the hammer blow imparts into the anvil, traveling to the bottom of the anvil's foot and bouncing back. It known as ring because sound waves ARE compression waves but it's more helpful to visualize them as compression waves. The steel is literally compressed by the hammer's impact, the wave spreads spherically from that point until something stops it where it rebounds. (bounces back) 

Because the compression wave is moving at the speed of sound through your anvil (iron or steel) it arrives back where the hammer struck it while the hammer is still decelerating on the iron / steel you struck. This means that the anvil returns the blow from below while the hammer hasn't stopped moving downwards. So your work is struck from both sides within a couple microseconds. It doesn't double the effect of a blow because the anvil only rebounds a few millionths of an inch BUT the rebound essentially makes the anvil behave like it's stiffer than it is. 

How you mute the sound you hear is by stopping the anvil from resonating which is the sound waves bouncing back and forth, you WANT the rebound but NOT the resonance. Rebound once, GOOD. Rebound 300,000 times, B A D! Make sense?

I've mounted my insanely LOUD Soderfors anvil on lots of things, it was shrunken into a spruce block for years and I THINK the wood being shrunken onto the foot helped kill the ring some. Still if you missed a blow and struck the anvil it would make your ears ring through muffs and plugs. I tried rubber, a piece of sheet zinc, sand, clay, poured the gap full of wax, wrapped chain, stuck on magnets. All to some effect but still not good.

Got to talking about resonance and hanging dinner triangles without damping the ring, twine, leather thong, etc. work well but hang one on a nail and the sound is tink, no ring. Ring a bell and touch it with a piece of steel say a nail, etc. and the ring damps to a buzz and silence. 

So I applied it to my dangerously loud Soderfors. I didn't put a steel plate under it it wedges into a flange up angle iron rectangle that just barely fits the anvil's foot. The frame is welded to 3 rectangular legs on IIRC 14ga. steel feet. 

How this works is the anvil and the stand has two very different resonant frequencies that don't harmonize. Are not whole multiples of each other. The anvil is cast monosteel and the stand is made up of mild steel which has a ring of clank. The two in direct contact interfere, like a 300 tooth gear in contact with a 40 tooth gear, they can NOT mesh so any motion stops almost immediately. Two different non harmonizing resonances damp. 

I can work on the Soderfors with just ear plugs though I usually wear my Bose noise canceling head set and listen to an audio book at a low enough volume I can hear the steel I'm forging, and shop around me. But its pleasantly low volume.

Give it a try, LIGHTLY strike your anvil with a hammer on the tail. Then lay a short piece of angle iron, flat bar, etc. on the face and tap the heal again. 

I don't know about filling the legs with sand though lots of guys swear by it. The added weight can't effect the anvil positively though maybe it could make the combination of stand and anvil more stable. I make stands stable by measuring carefully and making sure the center of support is wider than the center of gravity. What my intuition tells me is. I KNOW the different resonances of anvil and stand works. So my voices keep whispering that IF the sand damps the resonance of the stand it can NOT damp the ring of the anvil because there will only be the anvil resonating.

The legs of my steel tripod stands are 2 different lengths, 2 one length and one under the horn a bit shorter. The legs under the body a bit behind the center of the anvil spread wider than would be stable considering the centers of gravity and support but I use bending forks and other lever like things at the tail end so it's wider. I made SURE the stand doesn't have a prolonged resonance so it'll always be in discord with the clear ring of the anvil. It's the same principle as making bridges cant at an angle so the bridge beams are different lengths so they can't resonate and shake it apart. That's ancient tech.

Sorry for taking off on a long yak. The steel tripod stand works, doesn't need anything fancy and certainly doesn't need extra weight. Feet wide enough they don't dig into a dirt floor is a good idea.

Frosty The Lucky.

 

Thank you, Mr. Frost, for taking your time and sharing your experience.  And please, let me first of all react to „…lurking…“ and “…taking off on a long yak…“ as a sidenote: for me it is a sad fact, that fora containing really serious content are nearly extinct meanwhile. You are certainly aware of dogmas like “...modern, fast, easy...” conquering our society on nearly all levels; there is nothing wrong with those principles per se, but I still like to take the individual circumstances in account before using one of them. On the other hand seems behavior as “listening carefully and building whole sentences within a given context” to become rare. That's why I never would see answers like yours as “long yak“, because I appreciate a form of articulation showing an effort to make the own point of view understandable for others too. In the very opposite: it is exactly this clearly visible effort – which can be found within your community since many years now – that led me to “delurking”. I only can read something about a matter touching my interest, if another one has written about it before.

In return to the topic, I hope, I understood correctly, that you have not given any advices against the used construction, although it seems, that some of it might be unnecessary. What I can confirm from my experience: filling the stand’s legs with sand caused a noticeable dulling of its vibrations and sound, checked by tapping legs as well as top-plate. I gave the additional rubber-feet to avoid the transfer of vibrations down into the concrete floor. And using a massive plate of lead on top of the stand stopped the anvils resonance nearly completely and turned the former bright ringing into a somehow dull “tink” (like one is hitting a cheap Chinese ASO for example).
But it was this huge effect, that made me fear, the rebound might have possibly been affected in a negative way also. If this didn’t happen, I am glad with it.

In addition, should the bed of lead between stand and anvil following your argumentation cause a separation of their different resonances or even more so stop/hinder the travelling of the anvil’s resonance down into the stand? If so, it’s a good thing too. To be clear, I cannot really feel negative consequences caused by the given construction, but I never used the anvil for working without it to avoid the heavy noise, why I cannot talk about a possible difference regarding the anvil's performance. Therefore, I think I might leave everything in the given state, as long as there are no strong arguments from more experienced smiths than me against it.

firefly

Oh my, thank you, it's my pleasure. Call me Frosty please. For most of my life the only time people called me Mr. was when I was in trouble. I believe Mothers started the tradition. 

You touch on one of the issues being long winded presents. In all that talk I'd forgotten the key point of your question, Lead. Yes, lead makes an excellent damper, it is almost a non-Newtonian liquid. A layer of lead should indeed do as you wish, the one caveat is alloy, there could well be alloys of lead that aren't very effective dampers. It doesn't need to be "thick", 12mm. should be more than enough.

Heck, in fact I bet it would lower the amount of sound conducted to Earth but good seismographs can pick up people walking barefoot miles away on bedrock. I spent must've been 15 minutes at the seismic monitoring station on Hawaii watching the monitors and talking to the on duty seismologist. When I worked for the Alaska state soils lab there was a set of geophones a steel plate and a 5lb. sledge hammer that sat on a shelf unused, in the back room for the entire 19 years I worked in and out of the lab. In spite of that mere human blows aren't going to make the planet ring enough to disturb neighbors. If you're planning of running a power hammer you will want to put it on a foundation that damps the contact between hammer and ground.

 Having given more thought (slept on it?) to the issue of rebound gives me an idea for an experiment to indicate how much if any effect the stand has on rebound. It'd require a calibrated mechanical impact device, not a freefall device. Then we could test impact energy with calibrated coupons on a calibrated anvil on different stands and I'd like to test the anvil hanging oriented horizontally to remove the stand as a factor and measure the rebound of the anvil alone. A swinging target like that would raise the importance of anvil's mass of course. . . probably?

It'd be an interesting experiment just because but I can't see any practical importance at  our level of kinetic energy craft. If a person were interested I'll bet the information is available in ballistics studies so it'd just be a matter of collecting the info and doing the math or maybe just graphing it.

Ah, gotta go, Later.

Frosty The Lucky.

On 7/26/2025 at 9:17 PM, Frosty said:

...Call me Frosty please...

You’re welcome, Frosty, if you prefer :-) Thank you for your assessment about the lead’s properties, accordingly I might have chosen a working way for keeping the peace with my neighbors intact.

On 7/26/2025 at 9:17 PM, Frosty said:

...one caveat is alloy...

Some of the lead used for my anvil’s “bed” comes from old drain pipes, the rest from a nearby handgun’s shooting range. That’s why the lead will for sure contain a certain percentage of antimony, used to make the bullets a bit harder. Theses bullets are gathered regularly, many reloaders are still using them as well as the cases from their fired cartridges – to keep the costs down and just for fun. I was able to get 160 pounds of fired bullets, already packed as raw “cakes” weighing about 40 pounds each in small wooden boxes for a reasonable price. Funny story aside: I had a friend picking up the prepared packs and delivering them to me. He had no idea about the content and couldn't understand, how these tiny boxes could be so heavy; they didn’t even move, when he first tried lifting them, using an amount of effort in regard to their size…His facial expression turned from curious to stunned, when I answered his question about the content with: "…just gold-bars, I acquired recently..."

On 7/26/2025 at 9:17 PM, Frosty said:

...idea for an experiment to indicate how much if any effect the stand has on rebound...I can't see any practical importance...

Your idea of a testing environment for anvils resp. visualizing the differences under changing conditions seems highly interesting. As the saying goes, the best ideas always come in the sleep… Visualizing complex circumstances to see hidden correlations easier has been one of my preferred tasks for a long time. Regardless of our relative weak power, the value might lie in the human nature, the wish to comprehend and to make the best out of given circumstances. Additionally, can everything we know (better) help to provide further mistakes. That’s what is driving us forward. In my experience is the highest challenge in duties like that acquiring the “correct” and “complete” raw-data. Their interpretation should only be a question of applying mathematics in a proper way.
Especially anvils have been many times longer in use than most other tools, they can stay in good condition for centuries - besides massive abuse and fire, of course.  I am sure, an effort like that would be highly interesting for many people and could on the other hand open a can of worms because one would find differences in various kinds and brands of anvils. Seeing the own beloved and highly trusted way of doing things underestimated and finding out, that another system gives noticeably better results, can sometimes make people behave strange. But nevertheless: A study like that, done seriously and scientifically approved, the magic words being “independent” here, could have a massive impact (Sic!) within the society of blacksmiths as well as the anvil-producers. Maybe this is done already and one of the technically experienced people within this community knows about existing studies in that area. I would like to hear…

Hmm, I fear, it’s my turn now to apologize for being longwinded. Nevertheless, I enjoy this conversation so far. Have a good day,

firefly

I don't have much to add to Frosty's discussion of rebound vs. resonance. Having more mass under the anvil does tend to provide a bit of stability as much as anything and if firmly attached, the anvil doesn't move as much, but this makes less difference with large anvils rather than something say like a stake anvil.

As to the immediate practical side - having the anvil firmly attached, clamped, or stapled to a work surface makes a big difference in cutting down resonance, and I'm still of the unfounded opinion that it's quieter when that's to wood. The chains, magnets, and what not all somewhat cut resonance, which makes it quieter. So does putting it on a rubber or silicone mat in a stand that's essentially a big sandbox, which I find personally distasteful, and one of the best ways I saw is as ugly as sin, big gobs of silicone caulk dribbled around the waist and under the horn and heel, but I truly hate the aesthetics of it.

I do like lead very much as a material for lots of purposes, not the least of which is to fill spaces and dampen vibrations, but the problem with lead is that you always end up with more exposure than you realize at the time and having it go places you don't want it in the form of fines and oxides. When I was young, I didn't care as much, but now that I'm getting older and realizing how high my exposure has been, I don't play with it much anymore.

Thank you for your opinion, "Nodody Special". To mention the negative aspects of lead is indeed a good idea - inhaling its fumes or dust - a very bad one. Many ancient artists as well as their helpers, preparing own oilpaint and using leadoxides for making their preferred "white", had no idea about the dangers and paid sometimes with their health or life, inhaling the powdery oxides-dust before mixing up with linseed-oil.

And I have to confirm: the significant higher total mass of a (compact) unit - stand plus anvil - has a clearly positive effect upon stability, why it withstands harder hits with less/no noticeable movement. (This sometimes seen "adventurous" constructions come to mind, when somebody places a relative heavy anvil on a wobbly folding table - ready for use. But of course one should consider, that individual needs can differ widly, depending e.g. on particular task, workpiece, direction of blows, weight and transferred energy from hammer...) 

firefly