Boomshakalaka

Sly Stone dead at 82. Not a bad run and left behind a lot of good music. 

I found my anvil the other day. I looked for it when I was cutting up the railroad rail but couldn't remember where I put it during the cleaning frenzy. I cleaned it up with the wire wheel and then primed and painted it. There's some overspray on the top but I'm planning on sanding that off with a fine grit disc and then putting a light coating of grease on it.

The anvil is a Vulcan #4, meaning it's a 40 pounder. Since it's a small anvil, I figured it wasn't worth much. However, a quick internet search turns up ridiculous prices for small anvils. I didn't see a #4 but a #3 has asking prices $200 - $300. Ain't no way I'd pay that kind of money for an anvil of limited usefulness due to its small size.

The cone was kind of rusty, so as long as I was slinging rust dust around, I polished it up and put some primer on it while I was at it. The cone is actually made up of weld metal deposited on a 1" piece of bar stock. That's not the normal procedure, but if you're a welding instructor with access to a machine shop, why not?

Likewise, I'd consider making an anvil from scratch out of steel plate. If I had access to some 1" plate scrap, I could laminate a nice body, cut it to shape and then hardface the top surface with some Ni-Mang rod or something similar. 

One of these antique anvil-vises would be nice for light duty blacksmithing, especially if it was mounted on a post so you could work all around it. I don't have room for anything like that, but I'd be willing to bet an enterprising welder/fabricator could buy a cheap vise and anvil and put one of these together without much trouble. Make some tooling to clamp in the vise jaws or weld a socket to the side of it if the anvil didn't have a hardy hole and that setup would be handy as a pocket on a shirt.

More this & that on the agenda today.