Anvil resurfacing

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Frontier Forge

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Aug 25, 2002
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Im looking for someone in the western washington area who has a surface grinder or maybe an engine/head surfacing machine. I have a 325 lb anvil 15" tall 6" wide and 20" long....its wavy and to much material to remove to do it with an angle grinder.....Please help
 
While my geography won't work for you, I can provide some info. I had my Trenton ground for about $100. I think I got a bargain, given the job. I needed about 80 thousandths taken off to remove the sway. When I received the anvil back, it was flat and also exactly parallel to the base. The machinist said he had to take about 180 thousands off of the base to make it parallel with the face, before he could grind the face. Since they use a magnetic chuck to hold the anvil while they grind it, they need to have a flat and parallel surface to chuck.

Some have warned about taking a lot off of the surface. I still have between 300 and 350 thou of the hardened surface as seen from the side. All in all, I am happy with the results. BTW, the grinder was larger than a car. -Doug
 
Have you checked with your local machine shops? If they are half set-up they should have a surfacing tool that will do 6" easily that attaches to an ordinary mill. They are called fly cutters.
tooling-fly%20cutter.jpg


They should also have a face mill that would do the job. A face mill can give a mirror finish in the right machinists hands.
face-milling-cutter-218286.jpg
 
Thanks for the good info guys...A number of years ago I took the anvil to and Old school machinist, his machines ran off big flat belts from a jack shaft....He tried to mill the anvil face with a spiral fluted mill 6" wide on a horizontal mill...
Im not a machinist I watched in amazement as it skated across he surface and no shavings even came off the anvil....Maybe the feed speed was to fast, or the depth off cut was to great...But he told me the anvil was to hard to machine....I think he just got frustrated and quite...A shame really considering the time it took to set up the cutter and clamping the anvil....I will still keep searching....and listening to others ideas....
 
Carbide endmills can cut through mid-60s-HRC steel endmills... I think carbide can cut through the hardened face of an anvil.
 
Like said above, carbide cutters will work fine.

Will take a very large surface grinder for that anvil.

Personally I would just use a big angle grinder and finish up with finer flexable discs.
 
A good friend of mine has a machine shop just southeast of Lubbock. At one time, they did military contract work during WWII, and they were heavily involved with the railroad before and after that. They still get large size specialty work orders from all across the country. I'll have to email him and get the specs on his machines, but I remember from talking to him that they are simply enormous!

When I received my anvil, I considered taking it to him to flatten it up some, but I ended up doing it myself with an angle grinder with flap discs and a hand held sander. Luckily, I didn't have to do too much. From my understanding, my anvil would have looked like a toy on his machine.

--nathan
 
Well, I heard back from my friend. I thought I'd just copy the paragraph into here just for grins. Some good size machinery they've got:

"Our machines are all quite large. We have a 36" rotary magnetic chuck Blanchard surface grinder and a Pratt & Whitney 12"X 40" reciprocating magnetic chuck surface grinder. We have various belt sanders and polishing wheels and our large cylindrical grinders using 20" O.D. reinforced grinding wheels. All of our machines are manual, no CNC. Our lathes and turning maching vary from a small 8"X 36" lathe to a 60" chuck vertical boring mill with everything in between. And, as we have mentioned, the Clark Air-O-Space Rockwell hardness tester. A bit large for knife makers are our 500 ton vertical and horizontal hydralic presses. We also have an internal hydralic cannon chamber grinder with a 36" manual chuck that will grind and polish a chamber 24"X36". Of course all of the standard radial arm drill presses, welding machines and such. "
Click to expand...

:D

--nathan
 
Yeah, Ed. If you ever need any OVERSIZE machine work done, Sikes Machine Shop in Slaton is your place.

--nathan
 
A carbide insert face mill can cut any steel. I've machined high carbide steel in the mid 60's, it just takes modern tooling. Sometimes you'll remove inserts from a face mill to reduce cutting loads and eliminate chatter, you just have to feed slower.

In my opinion, this approach would be better than grinding because grinding is so slow, dusting off a couple thou per pass. Though after facing you'd need to rub out any cutter marks.

.. my .02...
 
I've refinished a few anvils and I started with a fresh 9" grinding wheel on a big angle grinder and flattened them back out that way. Then a rubber backing pad with 36 through 120 grit discs and some careful sanding does the job.
- Loren
 
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