anvil repair

Just my few cents. Bladesmith

Traditional anvils were made by welding a piece of tool steel to the top of a wrought iron body. The anvil was then heated to red heat, quenched to harden the steel, and then tempered by bobbing it out of the slack tub, letting the residual heat in the wrought iron body warm the anvil up to the proper temper before a second quenching.

Imagine doing this with a 200# red hot anvil!

Welding will anneal the area around the weld and create a soft spot.

However, if you are going to cover the entire face of the anvil, using hardfacing welding rod, a suitable face hardness can be achieved even if the underlying steel is annealed. If you choose to do this I would recommend looking through the archives of www.keenjunk.com as there are detailed explainations on this site.

The normal way of fixing rounded or chipped edges is with a grinder. Be careful not to grind all the way through the steel top.

You need to know that most blacksmiths like at least one "softened" (rounded) edge on their anvil anyway.

Good luck in whatever you decide to do.

Cliff

The square hole is the "Hardy Hole" used for holding bottom tools such as hardies (used for cutting stock) or fullers (used for drawing out longer). A pritchell hole is round and small ~3/8" and is used for clearance when doing activities like heading nails.

Rounding of the hardy hole is not normally a problem because bottom tools are pounded into the hole hot and formed to fit exactly when they are made. Grinding it out would also make it larger which may or may not be a problem.

If you really want to square it up, I would recommend a "diamond file" and a little hand work. Diamond impregnated files are available from industrial supply houses (Page 2447 of www.mcmaster.com).

Cliff

UG!

I have no answer as to what to do with the worn off corners. I have an old blacksmithing book that tells about anvils (the way they are made and their usage), I will see if I can find something in it!

From the book; The Art of Blacksmithing, by Alex W. Bealer {ISBN 0-7858-0395-5} (page 68)

�Blows with too heavy a sledge can break off either horn or heel and greatly limit the usefulness of the anvil. Cheaper ones with a thin steel face of only 3/8ths inch or less will, after constant pounding, become swaybacked in the middle and useless for precision work. Even the good ones on occasion develop uneven places, or have the corners of the face chipped or rounded.

When this happened in the early days a careful smith dressed the anvil face on his own forge to restore its pristine quality. It took an hour or more, depending on the size of the anvil, to bring it to the orange heat necessary for dressing face and corners with hammer and flatter. Some smiths during this process delayed hardening the face until they had filed and rounded the corners in certain areas for special uses such as forging the edges of chisels. Then another hour or more in the forge brought the face to the cherry-red heat for hardening under a stream of water, and the smith was in business again.�

Hope this helps!

Boy a anvil would have to be well worn before I would build it back up. Alot of the older anvils were made for a specific trade. Example a blacksmith anvil was different shape than a sheetmetal anvil. This was to allow for making/finishing diffferent shapes that each trade used.

If you still want to build yours up, 7018 will do just fine.

T_Bone