MY DREAM ANVIL!!!

ladies and gentlemen welcome back to the workshop it is fantastic to have you here as ever whole lot of stuff is gonna be happening today but I am most excited to talk about a future new product or at least it's gonna be a future new product if when we test it it works well Before we jump in the sink today's sponsor please sponsor its Squarespace and you can get started building a new website today by getting a free trial at squarespace.com forward slash forge and when you decide to make your first purchase you'll get 10% off using Kota forge a checkout Thank You Squarespace for sponsoring this let's jump into what's happening today cuz a whole lot of weird stuffs gonna happen in this video we're gonna be talking about anvils there's a very special project that we've been working on but before we get to anvils they're types what makes them interesting and a special secret project that we've been working on I want to preface it all by answering a question that is very commonly asked which is how do you get started blacksmithing when you don't want to spend a good amount of money on an anvil right off the bat you want to give it a go and get into it and I want to answer this question because I don't want this video to seem like the only way to make things is by spending a good amount of money on tools because it's not the case as you'll have seen from the recent series that will has been putting together about making things in his garage you don't need a whole lot of tools to get things done and the same applies for an anvil as with everything it is so much more about skill experience muscle memory that it is about the tools themselves this right here is a chunk of three inch or three and a half inch round steel this is a scrap from a local steel supplier it's not even that heavy it probably only weighs about 15 pounds I'm gonna start this and show you just how easy it is to turn this into an animal here is a file [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so there we go that is how you make an anvil with about twenty dollars of scrap steel buying it at an expensive price a little bit of superglue and a two by six piece of timber in blacksmithing and metalworking it is the same story as it is in every aspect of life it's not about the tools the equipment how nice and expensive it all is it's so much more about just getting it done is it the best Alif ever no would it be better with better tools yes does it stop me from having a good time and learning skills absolutely not so with that about 21 dollars of investment you can get started but let me tell you a little bit more about anvils as a whole yeah this there's a cast steel Brooks and it's quite hard which means you get good rebound it does however have a huge Hardy hole as an inch and a quarter Hardy hole about a half inch pretty all whole you see it's a single horn anvil with a step and unfortunately quite a stubby and not very pointy horn now this anvil here is a forged this is a Peter Wright it is one of the most famous makers of anvil there is in the world Peter right anvils were forged out of wrought iron pieces all Forge welded together culminating in a forged welded on steel faceplate this particular animal is about 230 pounds it features about an inch and an eighth party hall and then about a 5/8 or so pretzel hole it was my first ever and will bought at eleven or twelve years of age with Christmas and birthday money I found it on eBay for ninety pounds - this thing has certainly gone up in value a little bit over the last ten years now you might be asking yourself why Alec do you use the small anvil over there instead of this larger anvil there is a little bit more historically significant being it's a forged construction why do you use that one well by using an anvil that is less used have a flatter face you've got better edges you get a square of body off the side this one here it's all rounded over here as you can see the edges haven't been chipped out on a new anvil like they have on this and this one's in frankly great condition but the reason I this is it's generally in better shape I like having a flat surface I like being able to control what my edges look like and I like having a pretty clean horn and over the years of blacksmithing I've kind of tallied together a list of the things that I wanted in a normal forging anvil to be able to make the most use out of it enjoy it and love having it in the workshop and so wouldn't it just be practical if I had the combination of that list sitting on a pallet right over there this thing arrived yesterday in from the foundry we spent months working on the design on this it's been a long process to get it to this point the foundry made their pattern their wooden pattern they set up their sand molds and they poured our first prototype anvil this is a 140 pound cast steel anvil 52 Rockwell it has a one-inch hardened Hall a 5/8 spiritual hole it has all of the features that I wanted in an anvil and the reason that it's 140 pounds is that means that we can ship UPS and FedEx Ground to customers which really significantly cuts down on the shipping cost of getting an anvil out to folks means you don't have to go the freight the quality of this casting is incredible it looks so clean the logos came out beautifully and of course the proportions of this thing or exactly while we modeled and I'm just so grateful that it looks so good it's exactly what we were after it's exactly it one of my favorite things about what we were able to do with this anvil is we were able to get mounting holes in it one of the biggest nuisances with a normal animal is being able to actually mount it properly so often they're only able to be nailed into a stump or you come up with a contraption like this that just loves to come loose and doesn't support it well enough and it's all-around very difficult to get it mounted to the stand very easily well now slap four bolts in that bad boy you're bolted down and you then have this gorgeous flat surface mating up with your stand meaning that you're gonna get as much energy as possible coming back to your hammer I understand the irony I still haven't bolted down my and will stand as you might assume by the little flag these things are indeed made in the United States of America so what I want to do today is I want to tidy up this anvil get it into a sellable condition and work out how much time that takes so that we can put that into our costing once we've done that it's then time to forge on it and beat the daylights out of it with a sledge hammer to see if it breaks cuz that's important too plus things first we're gonna clean up this horn grind down that parting line from the casting so let's get to it [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] oh my goodness this is an anvil that needs using isn't that right yo girl that's right we're good it like the fortune use the end there we go [Music] [Music] let's give it a little bit more of a heavy workout [Music] 26 pounder here we go [Music] my heart is like it 180 beats a minute that's incredible Holly movie that's a good workout hi Marlee I've been giving it everything I can I brought a pallet here so I could stand up a little higher and I was wailing away on it with this 26th pound straight fiend sledge trying to give it everything I could just due to the shape of any anvil the weakest points are going to be for the horn and of the heel so we wanna make sure it doesn't break that so I gave the heel a good test by whaling on it making that Hardy to level and I now give the horn a good test but since we're still in lockdown and I'm the only person here there's nobody to hold a piece of steel so I have to try and rig something up so I can beat on the horn some without needing to hit directly hard steel on hard steel we'll see how this does [Music] [Applause] this is cool Cold Steel and unlikely no good but it is the chap amazing unbelievable there is not a dent on this thing striking cold steel with a 12 pound sledge there's not a dent on it it looks incredible [Music] I'm thrilled with the first testing of this and it's not over there's so much more testing that needs to be done I really really want to make sure that we put this through its paces you might be wondering what steel is this it's a proprietary mid carbon blend of steel the hardens quite deeply I believe it's quite similar to a 4340 steel but based on how its cast and how the foundry produces it they're able to achieve a deeper hardness and better consistency in the casting so it's their proprietary blend that they've been using for a really long time so it's meant to be very deep hardening and this is specked out to be 52 Rockwell which I feel like is a very good balance between hardness as well as fragility because as your hardness goes up there's an element of fragility that comes with that on the edges can't believe it you know after growing up from age 11 just loving anvils and just having such a fondness for what this tool is and what it can do it is a very special thing to now have one that has this little scooter lying on the front of it so of course the idea with this isn't just for me to have my own anvil with a squiggly mark on it the idea is that we can get this in a whole bunch of people's shops for you to enjoy using feel like this is a very very special product and if it works well after a real thorough testing and evaluation we're gonna be launching pre-orders of this so stay tuned keep watching the videos because over the coming while we're gonna be testing it trying to abuse it trying to stretch it beyond the limits of what it should be able to handle and when the time is right we'll launch a pre-order so you folks can reserve a spot for it thank you all so much for watching today's sponsor making all of this possible has been Squarespace and I say making all of this possible because when I started my business when I was trying to sell the tools that I was hand making and the classes that I was teaching I advertised all of that and post it all up for sale on my Squarespace website as a young whippersnapper 17 year old fresh out of having left school and just trying to get this business up off the ground it was essential for me to be able to update my own website continuously because if my skills were improving rather fast and I wanted to be able to very quickly test out the market for what products were going to be successful and how I could best serve people and so I was able to put classes up for sale on my Squarespace website I was able to put tools up for sale and you can do the very same it didn't take coding experience to make this happen and Squarespace is continually updating what it is that they offer you which means that now you can even buy your domain through Squarespace you can do email marketing campaigns through Squarespace to reach all your fans right in their email inbox and you can get their fantastic 24/7 customer service anytime so folks please get stuck in their way you got some extra time build yourself a nice website or update what you've already got with a Squarespace trial at squarespace.com forward slash Forge if you like it on your first purchase you'll get 10% off when you use code forge a check out thank you Squarespace sponsoring this thank you guys for coming along and such a thrill to be able to share this journey of testing this anvil with you ceil will very soon hope you stay safe bye bye

Channel: Alec Steele

Views: 957,653

Rating: 4.9412436 out of 5

Keywords: alec steele, alex steele, steel, alec, damascus, blacksmith, make, forge, anvil, mill, lathe, weld, tig, mig, engineering, blacksmithing, blade, bladesmithing, knife, knifemaking, sword, handmade, diy, craft, woodworking, forged in fire, axe, fabrication, art

Id: Ku3Jh4hzWtc

Length: 15min 50sec (950 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 19 2020