First anvil?

P

peppen108

Joined
Apr 14, 2012
Messages
663
It's 170lb. Its about 300$ an with in driving distance.

I don't have any better pictures? :(

5079930855.jpg


Is it a suitable first anvil for knife making? Is there some thing I need to check?

What does need to be done to get it in working condition?

I don't have any better pictures?
 
Looks like that started out as a horned anvil that somebody cut the horn and heel off of, including any pritchell and hardie hole.

The corners seem a little chewed up, but probably serviceable. Hard to tell from the pics how good the face itself is.

Is is a useable/serviceable anvil? Probably so. Would I pay $300 for it? Not unless it had some phenomenal rebound.

I might offer half of the asking price without knowing anything else about it. It would be nice to know what the original brand of anvil was.
 
This one is hard to judge from the pic. It looks like a saw anvil, which can be great for forging blades, but I've never seen one with this profile, which almost makes me think it's a traditional anvil with the horn and heel cut off. That's fine, assuming it's got a good face plate.


One thing many here dont tell you, and that a lot of "blacksmiths" will steer you wrong about, is face flatness. You'll hear people telling you a saddle (depressed) face is good for straightening, which is BS. For planishing and straitening, knives in particular, you want as dead-nuts flat a face as you can get. Minor saddle can be dressed, but doing it by hand is very difficult. So unless you've got plenty of faceplate left, and access to a large surface grinder, or a blanchard, it's impractical.


Also, saw type anvils lack hardy holes and horns, which precludes a lot of operations. I recently acquired a large 375lb Fisher saw anvil, and while it's great for moving metal, I'm often back at my regular anvil using top and bottom tools or the horn.



So, if this has a hard face and good rebound, that's reasonably true on the face, I think it'll be a great 1st anvil, to complement any sized regular pattern anvil that you can later acquire.

There is some apparent edge damage, but it appears to not be significant enough that you can't easily dress it out with a flap disc. Getting a good radiused edge on the primary plane of your front and back faces are essential to efficient forging. Dead centerline of the anvil, all primary work is done on the near and far edges, and the middle section in between. The rest of the anvil is much less significant.
 
Yeah request a better pic of the face, and both of the face edges. If the face is flat and it's got good rebound, I'd say it's worth the asking price personally.
 
Regarding the asking price, it also depends on what's generally available in your immediate (or driving distance) area. Do anvils pop up often? If so, what do they normally go for?

Around here, it's pretty hit or miss for a decent anvil, but when a serviceable anvil of decent quality shows up, it's usually between 400 and 600 dollars (on average) or so.

That's not to say I couldn't shop around and find one for $200 bucks or $300 or so, but it would likely take a little longer. It really just depends on where you're at, and how hard you want to look for something.

At the same time, a lot of people put up an "antique" price for what amounts to an almost useless, or very poorly made anvil. They think that because it looks like it's 100+ years old and was dug out from underneath an old horse barn, that it's automatically a treasured antique worth several hundred bucks.

Again, assuming you are able to do a little dressing (and the face isn't in rough shape), you could easily use anvil like that for most knife related forging. The rest of it (like hardie tools) can be improvised in other fashions.
 
Take a small ball peen hammer with you. Don't "hit" the anvil with it, but let it drop onto the face while you're holding it loosely by the end of the handle like you're hitting it. It should bounce back to about the same height, possibly higher, possibly lower. This is called rebound. You want it to rebound as close to the dropped height as possibly, but don't get too picky either. An anvil with "some" loss of rebound will still work.
 
Good points by both K2aGF and Broomhead, although I'll take it one step further and say "do hit the face of the anvil with the ball peen". In fact, when I'm looking at an anvil, I'll slap the face pretty hard with the ball end of the hammer, and see how easily the faceplate dents.


A good hard face shouldn't ding easily, the best, will dent the hammer before the face of the anvil dents. I've got one old Fisher that'll wreck a new file the face is so hard. Although that's also why the edges chipped out so bad on some of them. It's a balancing act. Traditionally though, the larger the anvil, the softer the face. This was afaik a by-product of auto-tempering from the larger thermal mass, but also, advantageous since larger anvils usually employed strikers swing large sledge hammers, and they were more resilient for the rough heavy work.

Most of the 100-200lb anvils you see with big saddled(depressed) faces, are because they were worked heavily with a sledge that was inappropriately sized for the anvil.
 
Broomhead said:
Take a small ball peen hammer with you. Don't "hit" the anvil with it, but let it drop onto the face while you're holding it loosely by the end of the handle like you're hitting it. It should bounce back to about the same height, possibly higher, possibly lower. This is called rebound. You want it to rebound as close to the dropped height as possibly, but don't get too picky either. An anvil with "some" loss of rebound will still work.
Click to expand...

Good basic advice, but just to be clear it can not bounce back higher than it started falling from. There are some funny Newtonian Laws about that.
 
Thanks a lot for sharing your knowledge. You don't seem to amped about it. This anvil is slightly bigger slightly further away an slightly pricier. Is it a better choice? Ore should i go for a brand name anvil at twice the price?

4805445581.jpg
 
Don't be so quick to think that anvil is in better shape. It shows a *LOT* of face scarring, which indicates a soft face, and I'm very concerned with the fact that only the face is painted. It's got that cast-iron russian "harbor freight" ASO shape to it also.


Just because the edges are chipped in the first anvil's photo doesn't mean the rest of the face is bad, and honestly they don't look bad. The second anvil looks highly questionable to me based on shape.. I've never seen a "traditional" anvil brand with this body before personally. Either heavily tapered toward the heel (german), or not tapered at all (english), for example.


Not saying the second is bad, but I'd definitely do more research. The obvious chisel damage is concerning, and could be deep enough to not be repairable. Depending on the make, and the faceplate thickness.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top