New railroad track anvil

D

dmelton

Joined
Jan 2, 2001
Messages
164
Check this out. Chris Crawford and I recently came into some railroad track. I had my half of it cut down and here's one piece of it I had milled into a nice little anvil. It has a surface ground top and one edge has been milled to make a nice 90 degree angle. I also got 2 of the track plates and mounted the anvil to them with some railroad spikes, it added a good bit of weight and secured the track perefectly. Anyone got any ideas on how to harden this thing???

newanvil.jpg
 
I'd just use it as is, it will work harden over time. For that matter you can just take a hammer and lightly work the surface repeatedly.

If you really wanted to harden it you'd have to build quite a fire and it would take a while to get up to temp face down in the fire. You'd need a handle of some sort (a length of cable attached to the base maybe?) and at least a 55 gallon drum of water to quench in. I'm not sure what color you'd want to draw the temper of the face to, Something similar to a hammer face, peacock purple maybe? You might want some more input on the tempering colors for the face draw.

Railroad track should be somewhere in the range of 1070 or so and should harden nicely on the face. I don't really know if you'd have to worry about cracking in the quench using water seeing as you have a thick cross section but brine might be necessary to harden to any depth. Interesting project, maybe someone who has actually done this will chime in.
 
I've seen some where where a guy took some Kawool and wraped it around a block of 1040 or 1050 steel, kinda like a big gas forge. He stuck the burner in the end blowing on the face. when the upper part of the block was non-magnetic, he used a water hose to quench the face.

I havent' tried it yet, but I am planing on trying it when I get the chance.
 
Hey will, maybe it was my pics! I did exactly that with a 8" x 8" x 6" block of 1050 steel. Here's the installation to heat it:

fded11d0.jpg


And here's me cooling it down:

fe1f533a.jpg


The block is more than 100 pounds of steel. It took about 90 minutes to heat it to non magnetic and 10 minutes to cool it down completely. The surface got plenty hard.

Achim
 
Hi, its been a while since i have posted here but now that i have moved to a new house and settled in i will be visiting more..

I have made a RR track anvil and heat treated the top portion per a article i read..unfortunatly i do not have the article anymore..but here is what i did

i used a metal 5 gal bucket and a old half round bbq..the BBQ had vent holes in the bottom so here is what i did..placed the BBQ on top of the metal bucket filled the BBQ with charcoal..i used just regular BBQ charcoal..all i could get at the time..and made a 2 inch hole in the bottom of the metal bucket...started the coal with lighter fluid and used a hair drier to blow air into the bucket and thus thru the BBQ's vents and up thru the charcoal...I used coat hangers attached to the bottom of the track and placed the top of the RR track into the charcoal..covered the track portion completely with coal..it doesn't take long for the tack to get hot..waited till it got a good orange color took about 20 min to a half hour then dumped it in a large metal can of water...and it steamed for about 5 min quite a scene..there was some discolor on the top of the surface of the track but that was polished out with a little work..thats it..I defiantly notice a hardness difference..i have some pictures and i will bring them in tomorrow

Randy
 
i would have made the horn round cone shape insted of the v shape that it is..i also would have undercut the back end so i could have made a hole thru it for a hold down device or a hardy..thats about it, it works ok like it is..but if i were to make another one

Randy
 
I had plans to cut the underside out from the front and back to make a horn and a hardy but since this is not my only anvil I decided to just make a good flat anvil to do nice finish work on. My work anvil is a 90 or so pound Peter Wright, it has a nice hardy and pritchell hole I can use for cutoffs etc. It's in good shape and the face is flat but it has no square edges anymore. Besides, who can have too many anvils?
 
Hey AchimW, Thouse are the pics I was talking about.

I am curently useing a welded together block of steel with an old bush hog leafe spring for the hard face. I wish I had seen your post befor I did that! It works great for finish and shapeing work, but realy heavy work breaks the hard face welds.

Where did you come across the 1050 in that size?
 
Will, that's easy. I just ordered it from my local steel supplier. They have 8" x 8" bars of 6 yards length, but this is not the biggest size they have. The price was around 50 $, smoothly cut to size. Add the 3 $ for the propane we needed to heat it, some elbow grease to draw file the anvil face and to round two edges to different radii and you have a perfect 110 pound knife making anvil for 53 bucks, which is pretty cheap in my eyes.

Achim
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top