What Makes This Anvil So Special?

that's way too much fun [Music] okay look at it one more time today we're gonna fire up the giant cincinnati mill and cut an anvil with will stelter if this is your first time meeting will he's a 22 year old with a fiery passion for big tools hot metal and one of the most talented bladesmiths i know he's traveled all the way from montana to spokane to get my help i have a dimply old anvil that needs cleaned up what does this thing weigh this weighs 390 pounds it's made by coleslaw this company was started in the 1500s and they started casting steel in the 1870s i think or 1880s but it was made in sweden i believe that it was probably an earlier model because of the lettering on the side it looks to me to be stamped in um as opposed to they did a a much more clean casting later on over three feet long approximately 14 inches tall and a working surface of 23 inches yep by six and a quarter first thing i'm noticing what the heck are these marks from probably someone used this as a cutting table and blasted through and just took a couple little divots out of it in a couple different spots i mean it's still a totally usable anvil as is but i plan on having this thing for the next 60 70 years and so if i get it cleaned up then i'll have a perfect anvil for the rest of my life i think we're probably only gonna have to take about three thirty seconds of an inch or so off the face historically are we impacting it at all by removing the surface since this is cast steel it doesn't have a hardened steel top plate that we're going to be grinding through and so we've got good hard steel presumably fairly deep down in there and we're only removing a very very slight bit off the top so we're not going to be affecting its integrity at all but we are going to be making it a lot more usable those will transfer into your work which we want to eliminate what about the edge this is going to now become sharper when we machine it down if you have a real sharp edge it's pretty easy to chip things out like you can see over here do any of these surfaces need to be surfaced i don't think so so this is the cutting table of the anvil so if you're going to do hot cutting with a chisel or something like that that's where you do it that area is surprisingly clean it seems like they did more cutting on the face than anything else anvils of this size are a lot more rare in america they're a little bit more common in europe in america anvils kind of go between three to maybe seven dollars a pound on average but when you get up to anvils kind of the three four five hundred pound range that price can bump up depending on the manufacturer and coleslaws usually go for about ten dollars a pound or so because they're considered one of the best anvils ever made partially because the cast steel quality is so high and then also their horn is perfectly conical how's the bottom is it flat so it's fairly flat it's not super duper flat all right so our goal then get it on the big cincinnati milling machine and get cutting on it awesome i promise i won't break your tail light i promise thank you okay maybe i'll just wreck your trailer [Music] because i'm mr shop scientist that i want to see how far the ball bearing rebounds so rebound is essentially how far uh a anvil specifically will send up a hardened piece of steel and so it's hard steel on hard steel and then the amount of mass that's underneath it will kind of determine how far back up that is going to send this ball so what we're looking for is if you drop it from a height of maybe two feet two feet you're losing about two and a half to three inches so depending on where it's hitting on the anvil i saw the best of only losing two inches i mean this isn't really super scientific no i think we're getting pretty varied results i bet that's because of the pock marking so let's lift it up and then that way we don't have the ground dampening it exactly see how it rings from there [Music] you have a hammer oh my gosh that's loud it is so loud i can't believe how loud that is so how are you going to stop that my current thought is to get it on my wooden base trace out the pattern for it router it in chisel it out so it's the exact right shape with a little bit of extra room around it and then pour heavy duty construction adhesive around it and it's the same as well better than that let's go see how loud your anvil is just just for some reference we can scoot mine out a little bit this is a taylor and sons anvil that i got from andrew alexander he's pretty well known for having a pretty large collection of anvils and there was just something about this one i like big things and i just have never seen one with this style it's kind of rare to see so especially in america there's not very many of these in america at all this is also about six inches wide and i only have 15 inches of working surface for the main face and then you've got this super useful tapered square horn on that side which is nice whose aim feels longer are we in a anvil measuring contest here 39 inches 13 inches how tall is yours 14. oh damn 14 and a half i think this weighs 400 you know how the code works don't you it's the english 100 weight system okay so it's 3 220 and so the first number is 112 pounds so 3 times 112 is 336 plus 2 times 28 is 56 so three um i need to get my calculator out plus 20 pounds it's over 400 pounds with this anvil weighs and then i've put it on this big heavy three-legged plate steel that's an inch and five-eighths thick and i think the base weighs 400 and some pounds just by itself so it's this thing was forged at one point in england underneath some big steam hammers so this whole thing was red-hot hot enough to forge well together which is nuts the way i have this stuck down i actually have construction adhesive called fuse it so i fused it to the base did i screw it up by doing that no people oftentimes use silicone to anchor down their anvils as well it's another good dampener part of the reason why it's nice to have your anvil be dead like that is it also means that when you're working you're dumping all of the energy into the work piece and not into making the anvil rebirth okay i haven't surfaced mine i have like an eighth of an inch sixteenth of an inch sway that's low in the middle and high on the ends from just being used i'm always afraid that if i deck it that i'm going to lose some hardness but i do notice that when i do forge on it that it is leaving impressions whatever whatever you're forging on is going to get imprinted into your work piece right and so if there is pits in it which wrought iron does pit like this but you can actually fix that if you don't mind it by just sitting there and whacking on it with a hammer and flattening that down and it will flatten it down and work harden it a little bit so if i were to deck this i'm going to get people say you screwed it up and then another crowd say that's okay yes if it's going to be more useful to you to have that be a dead flat surface which i think it will be go for it oh you didn't do the ball drop oh it's good to see i think because it's the hardened steel yours has better rebound let's go cut your anvil sweet let's do it this is a 1957 cincinnati number five milling machine it weighs eighteen thousand five hundred pounds it has a cutting capacity or envelope of five feet two foot in the y and about 20 inches in the z it has 50 horsepower and it is an absolute beast are there very many of these things around uh this is the first one i've seen but yeah they made quite a few of them then the six is exactly the same size as this but one foot longer table this is exactly what this machine was designed to do is face anvils like it this is what it was made for uh we have a couple choices of cutters and i can show you those the cutter i'd like to use is something with a carbide tooth because the surface that's probably gonna be pretty hard and my go-to is this one and but i'm also looking at something wide enough to cut that in one pass let's fire this baby up lots of room okay let's put the tool in how would you even think about doing this by yourself you got to be strong okay [Music] somewhere in there unfortunately we just can't put the anvil on the milling machine and start cutting the bottom and the top surfaces are not parallel to each other if we were to cut we would remove way too much off the surface on one side the fix is pretty simple the bottom of the anvil just needs to be shimmed parallel to the milling machine table this is going to greatly reduce the amount of material removed from the surface some shop shims someone had a good idea to come up with these theoretically if we throw a nice little fireball tool shop shim under this side then we'll bump it up and we'll take kind of off the average of the face and hopefully get it evened out a little bit more that ain't going anywhere [Applause] oh my gosh i'm just gonna kiss it there she is carbide is cool it doesn't need coolant to cut properly and it's happy cutting dry using the material to transfer the heat into it's also cool to see the chips perform that sparkler effect as they're flying through the air some of them even look like they're exploding [Music] two and a quarter inches per minute okay ready here we go [Applause] [Music] [Music] all right let's turn this thing off so the first pass we took was about what'd you say will uh probably about three thirty seconds of an inch and then we did a finish pass at five power so that's the surface finish we got looks awesome steel must be extremely hard i wish i had a remote hardness tester to test it let's see what we got it's definitely more consistent yeah that's pretty sweet it's pretty dang good what [Music] dang this is awesome jason thank you right on man looks great i think the surface turned out fantastic i'm really happy with the results i do think we made this anvil much more workable and made a huge improvement to the surface i really look forward to seeing how will uses this anvil in action be sure to check out will's youtube channel if this is something you're interested in and like to see what he makes with it

Channel: Fireball Tool

Views: 9,800,990

Keywords: fireball, tool, Fireball tool, Welding, anvil, kohlswa, taylor and sons, Will Stelter, milling machine, cincinnati 5, mill anvil, ball bearing bounce, impossible ball trick, bouncing steel, resurface, resurfacing an anvil, forge, blacksmith, biggest anvil, oldest anvil, big anvil, fabrication, surface anvil, what anvil to buy, best anvil, alec steele, alex steele

Id: s3O2hwLcVUE

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/irishpwr46]

How long has it been common to leave "to be" out of sentences. I see it all the time when people type it out, but I have never actually heard it spoken. "I have an old anvil that needs cleaned up" just doesn't sound right to me. "Needs TO BE cleaned up" sounds much better in my opinion and less Kevin from the Office

[u/digaholetopoopin]

I was a little disappointed they didn't flip the anvil and mill the base to true it with the top. But I have no idea if there'd be any value in that.

[u/dmalhar]

What happened between Will and Alec ? Are they still forging together? They had a good business going on...

[u/EternamD]

Holy shit, that ball bouncing with air resistance being basically the only force affecting it was amazing

[u/christophersonne]

I could stand to see a few more anvils getting resurfaced, that was awesome.

[u/Ohrobohobo]

Fireball Tool is awesome.

[u/entotheenth]

Awesome video.

[u/jstewman]

That mill is skookum as hell