Anvil Project and Short Intro

Hello Everyone,

I am a 17 year old living in Canada. I first started forging roughly 2 years ago. One year ago I took a class with the American Blacksmith Brian Brazeal, where I also met Joshua McLaren, and Alec Steele. Since coming back from Mississipi I have been forging in my backyard. At this point I am searching for a dedicated forging space. Daniel Lea has introduced me to this forum.


Now that the intro is done, I can share a recent project of mine.



This was a final high school metal shop project which I began in March, and finished in September.

You can read the full writeup I did on Anvilfire through This link


I also made three videos while working on the anvil

First Anvil Making Video

Second Anvil Making Video

Last Anvil Making Video

Thanks for Reading, I look forward to seening the work of others on this forum.

Hi Paul,

at first: Amazing! This Anvil looks really great! How many hours have you needed to build it?
Is it usual do to such "heavy" projects at highschool and have you done it completely at your own? (If yes, wow!)
But there is something that drives me around: How did you do the heat treating after the hardening? What i mean is the annealing! (Is that right? Sorry, i hardly know the words...) I think that this is really tricky without the right equipment, isn't it?

Really looking forward to see more things like that from you!

Greetings,
Christopher 

(Actually, my English isn't that good, please excuse possible misstakes or hard-to-read sentences! ) 

Hello Chris,
The anvil took about 80 hours to complete. I could have done it far faster had I used a plasma cutter to cut he bevels instead of a ginder. I also could have used MIG instead of Stick to weld it all. 
I designed the anvil myself and did all the work myself.

This is by no means a 'normal' project for highschool. The machining class had two levels (mixed class), one which focused on manual machining, and one which focuses more on CAD and CNC. I was the onlt one who took the manual class so the teacher asked if I had anything in mind for a project, which I did :) .

The top plate was of 4140, because of it's large cross section (3'' wide) It did not need to be tempered. 

Don't worry about your English, it's very good.

Paul

 

Paul, maybe you could share the video how you hardened the anvil!

Hi all,

he did share the video! (second anvil making video in the first place!)
Just watched them at work, in my break, nice ones! Directly subscribed to your channel! 
Was it your intention to let the two horns be unhardened? They seemed a little bit to cold at the quenching, weren't they?

Nice that you have had a teacher which was open for new ideas! 


Greetings,
Christopher


 

It was difficult to get a good heat across the entire face in my forge, so the square horn was a little cold. I did not intend for it to be softer. 
The round horn is just mild steel. It was common among old english and american anvils for the horn to be of wrought iron.

 

Hi,


I found an very interesting article related to your anvil project on  http://www.anvilfire.com/FAQs/got_away_with_it.php.
Also article 66,69 and 166 (http://www.anvilfire.com/iForge/) are of interest.
 
 
Kind regards
 
Robert      
 

Looks really really good but I'd question that it will last you for long. How did you welded the pieces together? Aren't they all lose in the middle? Not only that it will probably brake, I'm quite sure that it wouldn't have the impact on the material like a "real" anvil with the same weight would have. 

All in all a very nice project. You must be quite eager to get threw a project like that. Hope it will work fine for a long time!