Got a new-to-me anvil today - Peter Wright patent "solid wrought" marked for 146 lbs (1 1 6). Should on the whole be an improvement from my 104 lb cast-with-steel-top unit, assuming I get much time to play with either. Seemed reasonable at $200 within an hour's drive.
Has a few small defects on the top which I expect to be repairable. Reading up on what I can find the usual approach seems to be hardfacing rod (with Ernie waxing eloquent about hardfacing wire, but I don't have a wire welder and I do have 10 lbs of hardfacing rod, though I don't recall offhand what type it is).
Ernie's wire (dualshield MIG) method had the advantage of needing no preheat - all the rod use instructions instruct to preheat significantly. In any case thorough grinding to clean before hardfacing is recommended.
Any significant points I've missed? I prefer to ask the dumb questions in advance and save the pain of avoidable mistakes when possible...
Your approach sounds fine. But I encourage you to simply try using the anvil as is for a bit. Unless you're going to put it in your living room to show off .. :-)
Well here's another can of worms. I went to an old machine shop a while back to discuss resurfacing my anvil, and the machinist wasn't very keen on the idea of doing anything to it that involved any substantial amount of heat. Apparently he'd tried to weld on top of a couple of old anvils before and ended up destroying them - something about the way old anvils were made, cast upside down in two layers of steel with different degrees of heat expansion. To further add to this issue, my anvil has no markings of any kind that I can find anywhere on it. Anyways, point being that I'm not sure what to do with this beastie or who to believe. Not that it matters right now as I can neither afford to drive over hell's half acre to get coal nor to install a gas forge at the moment, and I'm getting a mite tired of charcoal.
Have you seen the info on the "Ron Reil " type propane burners ? A small to medium forge can be made for under two hundred bucks ... I made two burners for less than twenty . Nice ones too , with chokes , nicely machined throat , they work very well . Might get around to the forge one of these days .
Nah, I can procrastinate longer than that. I was going to reply hours ago!:)
If the face only has a few rough spots or divots, just find the smooth spots and use those areas. I think you'll find you eventually tend to use only a small part of the face for most of your forging.
A pristine anvil face is not necessary for most work and for work that requires it you can just put the work on a smooth spot.
I worked for years on an old Mousehole that had a separated face for about 4 inches from the heel. Had no problems working on the good spots. That anvil is still in service part time to Saint Phlip.
BTW, A little swayback is a Good Thing. Even black hot steel often tends to spring back a bit when struck: Cooler steel is even worse. Some swayback lets you allow for that when straightening a piece.
Besides, it's a sign of long and honorable service. :)
"Snag" wrote in news:MVmQg.7223$ snipped-for-privacy@bignews2.bellsouth.net:
I was building a Riel burner, but at some point I seem to have mislaid the difficult-to-find reducer I'd machined up for it. And I never did figure out quite how to construct the flare without some heavy duty machine shop goodies at my disposal. I suppose, though, that it's one more project I ought to scrape back together and get done. Even for my jewellery work, it'd be nice to have a kiln for bulk soldering and a foundry for making ingots. I'll see about this once I recover a little from my latest finished project - vasectomy. Owie.
Just how deep are the dings? Have you considered taking the anvil to a machine shop and having the face decked flat? Carbides will go through even hardface like a hot knife through butter. This is a cold operation with loads of coolant applied to the tool, and shouldn't take more than ten or fifteen minutes on the machine. Auto machine shops deck cylinder heads and blocks every day, so an anvil shouldn't pose an 'overload the machine' situation.
BTDT , over twenty years ago . I still remember the pain ...
There's somebody selling the flares , but a bit pricey , I thought . I machined and welded stock pipe fittings , but also have one that a friend built , looks rougher , but functions just as well . I'm just more anal than he is ... I also saw in a link related to one of the Reil Burner sites a small forge/kiln that was made from like 10 or 12 firebricks and some scrap angle irons . Less than fifty for the brick , and free angle if you watch the curb ... I see a couple of old bed frames a month around my neighborhood .
NONE of it should be cast iron if it is to be worth having around!
WROUGHT iron! It should be wrought iron. Wrought is a way different animal from cast iron.
Cast iron anvils are dead under the hammer, cast steel, not.
The typical construction of an anvil like a Peter Wright was for the base and horn to be forge welded together with a higher carbon steel plate on the top.
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.
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
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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.
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