Tools
Choosing an anvil, and what its parts do
It is the most expensive thing in a small shop and the one most often bought for the wrong reason.
An anvil is a large block of metal with a flattened top, and most of the purchase decision hides inside that sentence. The block must be massive, because mass drives the hammer’s energy into the work. And it must be steel, or faced with steel, because plain cast iron dents and gives nothing back.
Why mass comes before anything else
An anvil works by inertia: the heavier the block, the less it moves when struck, and the more of every blow reaches the workpiece. A 45-pound (20 kg) Bavarian pattern stands near the light end, its sloped brow credited with keeping the face from swaying through nothing but added mass. At the far end, the block under a 12-ton (about 11-tonne) power hammer can pass 800 tons, roughly 725 tonnes, on foundations of timber, masonry and concrete. Weight is the function, not a feature.
The face, where every scar travels into the work
The flat top is the face, hardened and tempered so that years of blows do not deform it. It should be flat, smooth and edged with rounds, and the reason is unforgiving: any mark in the face is transferred to every piece worked across it, and sharp edges cut into hot metal and start cracks. The reference is blunt about one habit that protects all of this: hardened hammers, tools and workpieces should never strike the face at full force, because the result is a chipped surface.
What are the horn, the step and the holes for?
The cone at one end is the horn, usually left unhardened, mostly a bending surface and the place where round shapes are formed. Smiths also use it to help draw stock out, longer and thinner, which together with upsetting makes up the first two moves at the anvil. Between horn and face sits the step, soft steel kept soft on purpose for cutting, to spare both the hardened face and the chisel’s edge; many smiths refuse to cut there anyway, since it damages the anvil over time.
The square hardy hole holds the forming and cutting tools called hardy tools. The round pritchel hole is mostly for punching. European patterns sometimes grow two horns, one round and one square, and specialized work has produced side horns, clips and an upsetting block for making a bar shorter and thicker. The trades bent the shape further: farriers, cutlers, chain makers and saw tuners all had anvils of their own, and bladesmith anvils tend toward a plain rectangle with hardy and pritchel holes but no horn at all.
What should the block itself be made of?
A working anvil is forged steel, cast steel, wrought iron with a hard steel face, or cast iron with a hard steel face. Plain cast iron is the failure mode: it cannot take the impact, it cracks and dents, and without a steel face it has no rebound. Most modern anvils are cast steel, heat treated by flame or electric induction. Cheap castings of inferior steel, the kind stocked by hardware stores, are known in the trade as “anvil shaped objects”. Inexpensive cast steel anvils with hardened faces have become common online, and some blacksmiths consider them suitable for beginners; the full run of patterns and warnings is laid out in Wikipedia’s anvil entry. Amateur smiths have worked for years on railroad rail, forklift tines or plain blocks of steel.
A shape with a long pedigree
Anvils were first stone, then bronze, then wrought iron, and they took steel faces as steel became readily available. References appear in ancient Greek and Egyptian writing, and anvils have been found at the Calico Early Man Site in North America. Most anvils in the United States today follow the London pattern of the mid-19th century. Wrought-iron anvils with steel faces were built until the early 20th century: makers forge-welded billets of wrought iron into the shape, the welds placed differently from one maker to another, a joint described in how forge welding works. Solid cast steel arrived with the 20th century, and modern anvils are steel throughout.
Where the anvil stands, and on what
Placement comes down to a single step. The anvil sits as near the forge as convenient, generally no more than one step away, because every step in transit sheds heat from the workpiece. The base must be sturdy and resist impact and fire, held down by spikes, chains, steel or iron straps, clips, bolts or cables.
The traditional base was a hardwood log or timber buried several feet into the shop floor. Cast-iron bases arrived with the industrial era, added stability, and are now sought after by collectors. Steel-reinforced concrete was tried and abandoned. Recent stands are fabricated steel, often a thick section of I-beam, or drums of oil-saturated sand for damping, and steel tripods have become popular.
How do you read the stamp on the waist?
An anvil may carry a mark for its weight, its maker or its place of origin, and the weight system tells where the block was made.
| Origin | Marking |
|---|---|
| American-made | Pounds |
| European | Sometimes kilograms |
| English | Three numbers: hundredweight, quarter hundredweight, pounds |
The English system is the one that stops a buyer cold. Three numbers read as hundredweight, quarter hundredweight and pounds, so a stamp of 3-1-5, if such an anvil existed, resolves to 3×112 lb + 1×28 lb + 5 lb, which is 369 lb, about 168 kg. The next time a triple-numbered stamp turns up, do the arithmetic on the spot, and know what the iron weighs before anyone lifts it.
About the source: en.wikipedia.org hosts the free encyclopedia. Its anvil entry covers the tool part by part, placement, types by trade, the history from stone to cast steel, and the anvil’s later careers in cartoons and in the orchestra, with a standing request for citations and printed further reading.