Anvil touch-up

Hey Rust, did the pics come through? Regards Charles

Geez there are some decent folk surfacing these days, good to see :-) Charles

I've got a 150# Vulcan, love it. It's on exended loan from a bud, so when I retire completely I'll have to give it back. It rang fairly loudly at first, but a piece of sheet lead under the base cured that, much to the delight of the neighbors. The hardface extends out onto the horn and around the nose, appears to be cast in place at fabrication, about a half inch thick on the face. Sure beats the crap out of the railroad rail I was using.

Charly

Gunner wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Thanks, I appreciate that. Got some photos though that suggest I was barking up the wrong tree looking for a smooth flare when a shoulder won't hurt its operation, and it looks like I'll be able to set the thing up on my own. Probably.

Nah, but it had may as well have been. Years of experience at the dentist's office have made me suspect that I'm kinda resistant to freezing, and now I have definitive proof.

-Rust

Chilla wrote in news:4513beb6$0$5110$ snipped-for-privacy@news.optusnet.com.au:

Yep, got them just fine. Thanks very much.

-Rust

I surface grind anvils for people who have already repaired them or when someone wants a face touched up.

Here are comments from my webpage on the subject (excuse the html code). Particularly note the comments about the edges. Also, you can do a pretty good job of truing up a repaired face with a 7 or 9 inch angle grinder and a carpenter's square.

from

Several people have asked me questions about the Face Grinding of anvils that I do on my old 8? X20? surface grinder. Here are some of the answers: Yes, I do some anvil resurfacing. But I only do surface grinding of the anvil face. If that's all that is needed, I can do it. I charge $2.00 per thousandth of an inch removed. That gets me about $20 per hour for me and the surface grinder and includes setup and base truing, if necessary. I haven't ever worked on an anvil that took less than 30 thousandths to true up. I have worked on anvils up to about 150# and I think I could handle one up to about 190#.

In sizing up your anvil, lay a straight edge across it several different ways and, using a scale (machinists rule) that measures 64ths of an inch, estimate the amount of "sway" in the anvil and the depth of the worst nick or dent. One 64th of an inch is 16 thousandths or $32. Don't worry tooooooo much about nicks on the edges of the anvil as long as there are a few inches that will probably clean up to "square". I say this because most of us don't have ENOUGH radius on the edges of our anvil as it is. You need a radius of as much as a dime at the edges of the face closest to the horn and it should taper to nothing (square) 4 or 5 inches back from there. ---Both on the near and far sides of the face. That is, unless you are a farrier; they like sharp square edges.

Sometimes an anvil's owner tells me about how much removal they want to pay for and sometimes they just say "clean it up". I would prefer that the owner be there when I grind it so they can decide when I should stop if the anvil isn't cleaning up completely. This makes sense because sometimes there will be only one spot that has a deep gouge and it's really not worth it the grind away at the whole anvil for just one spot. I can take the anvil down a agreed upon amount, (or less if it cleans up), stop grinding, then call the owner and report the condition. The owner can then decide to stop or to take off more----As long as I don't have to wait several days to contact the owner.

If the anvil needs to be welded on to replace missing metal, I don't know who is doing it right now. In the Twin Cities area, Myron Hanson has done several recently, Dick Carlson has done at least one as has Bob Beck. But it is a dirty, lengthy job and Myron tells me that he doesn't want to do it anymore. You can certainly ask around. In order to save yourself a lot of time, if the anvil is repaired by welding, take the time to true up the face to the best of your ability before you send it to me. It takes just about as long to make one full pass of 0.002 inches to catch a small bump as it does to work the whole face!!! I hope this discussion solves more problems than it raises. Please let me know if you need more information or if I have just confused you. I have been doing this anvil face grinding on and off for over 3 years now and this is the first time I have written this stuff down for anyone.

Pete Stanaitis

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Ecnerwal wrote:

I've done a fair amount of work on a friend's 300 pound Vulcan. It is dead, but it seems to work just fine compared to my 246 pound PW.

Steve

This thread has been cross-posted for the most part, I see your post is only going to a.c.b tho and Gunner may not have seen it. :/ (did you knowed that? do you know how to change it? etc)

Everybody knows Gunner, he's all over the place. :) Even you've met Gunner now. :)

LOL, when you called Charly "Mr Bastard" that was funny as anything! I'd bet money he thought so too. :)

Alvin in AZ

I try not to cross post where I can, but I'm sure her saw my sentiments ;-)

Charly's a good bloke, and has a good sense of humor :-)

Regards Charles P.S. You should hear what I call my close friends... would make an old sailor blush :-D

That almost warrants the DI's response. ' Sir??!!?! I ain't no pansy-ass officer, I WORK for a living!' I got to use that not too long ago, the guy almost dropped his teeth he laughed so hard. Ex-Navy...

Charly ;-)