Work holding options for the anvil – blacksmithing for beginners

[Music] sometimes you need a better way to hold your work at the anvil so let's take a look today at some anvil hold downs or simple work holding solutions for working by oneself at the anvil certainly a willing apprentice to hold this bar for you while you worked or to hold strike with a sledge hammer while you hold the bar and a handle tool I would do with a hand tool is an excellent solution and you rarely need any other work holding but most of us work by ourselves these days and we need some other way to hold work at the anvil now a very classic method that a lot of people use a lot of people advocate I use it from time to time but not very often it's to simply hold the work between your legs one I find this a little awkward because it doesn't it doesn't allow me much freedom if I want to work over here I can't do that there's only one orientation that you could work in this way but it does work I find it uncomfortable I find it awkward I like my anvil a little bit higher than a lot of people like theirs so I can stand upright when I work instead of having to hunched over and that just makes that somewhat impractical but it works it's cheap it's free you probably have all the equipment you need but there are some other ways you can hold work at the anvil simply using an adjustable work stand to set the work in is a help although it can still be a little bit loose and floppy and it might still slide around on you but it's way better than just trying to balance it on the anvil now to make this solution a lot better and it's very simple just get yourself some sort of a weight in a hook system this is just a big chunk of steel on a piece of chain and now that's a lot more stable and it's adjustable to anything if you need wider bar you can just a little bit white or hook but you can use much longer bar you can put it on any side of the anvil it doesn't have to fit your anvil it fits anything you're using and it's really a pretty handy system very simple now if you've been watching a channel for a while you've seen me use this this is called a holdfast and it is just a bent over bar that locks in the hardy hole and that holds things very well it's still going to slide a little bit because the metal anvil doesn't grip as well as you might like but it's very effective again very simple but you have to have one that fits your anvil know and this is a loose fit the way it works when you drive it down its contacts the work here the top of the anvil on one side of the original hole and the bottom of the anvil on the other side I may have said hardy hole earlier but you could make these for the hardy hole I don't want to make one for an inch-and-a-quarter hardy hole but if you've got a three-quarter inch hardy hole that would be just fine so when those all three points Jam up they lock and you just sit down and it locks sometimes it takes two hits it hit from the back and it releases it's very versatile very easy to use very easy to make so let's make one of these probably the most important aspect of one of these is the relationship of the shank to your perl hole or Hardy hole if you're making one for the hardy hole and that should be a loose fit about a 60 to 30 SEC of an inch undersized so I have a three-quarter inch personal hole on this big anvil that means I use an eleven sixteenths cold-rolled round now most of you are going to have that you prior to Forge down some 3/4 inch round or if you have a half inch Hardy hole you might be have to forge down a half inch to a little bit under half inch I just have this because it's also the size I used to make holdfasts for woodworkers so I have a bunch of that stuff around now there's not really a magic formula for the end on one of these things as long as it's got something that's going to grip so I'm going to make this one very simple just going to make kind of a flap taper it out here that's really all you need to hold your work double the top just because I can so this is just so you don't accidentally gouge hot work that might be a little delicate but if that's the case it's better to put a sacrificial piece of scrap in there next thing we just want to bend it now the longer this arm is the better your hold is going to be unfortunately the longer the arm is the more like you are to unbend it driving it and setting it if you get carried away this one's 7 inches I think that's probably more than you need I think I'm going to go for about 6 inches on the one I'm making here I just want to get an idea where 6 inches is with my ruler which is right about where my he tends which is perfect so I'm gonna put that and the hardy hold just because it's a handy place to bend this I'm gonna go past 90 exactly how far past 90 is just kind of up to you I think I'm going to go just a little bit further and refine this bin and make it prettier let me do some of that right here and if need be I can work a little over the horn if I've over bent need to straighten out any kind of a dogleg there but I think that's about what I want that should be very functional but now what about this angle we don't wanted that sharp how do we set that angle really pretty simple we can just put that right in a pretzel hole where we're going to use it drive that a little bit to make sure it's the right angle and set the end of it just let it cool please don't need to be hard to to temper it or anything else and see people making them out of leaf or out of coil springs but I just don't think that really benefits you much you can if you want to but this works I think I'm going to bevel this end a little bit just to make it a little bit more refined of a tool I just want to knock the sharp corner off of that I may hit that with a grinder a little bit to clean it up or you can file it or you can leave it that's really all there is to a holdfast so gonna let that cool before I Drive it because otherwise I'm just going to straighten it out well let's take a look at something else those first few options holding it between your legs getting some help from an apprentice or the neighbor or friends or whoever happens to be hanging around the work stand with a chain or the holdfast are really all I've ever used at the anvil it's all I've ever needed but there are some other options out there that some people like and what I've been meaning to use for a long time is a half of a pipe clamp now the other half the pipe clamp I use to make a safety stop and the treadle hammer so this is just left over and I thought I would make a little animal hold down out of it I'm going to use one of my u-shaped Hardy shakes so I can put a wedge in here to hold it down in the Hardy hole so I've got a wedge this is made out of mild steel it's just ordered by one and a quarter or something that's either been bandsaw and ground or forged into a taper to act as a wedge I'm gonna put that in the shank about halfway so I got some extra space of course it's easy to make new wedges you need them they have to feed this down from the top put that in and I can pull this up and I know now we're by the level at the top of the anvil is so now I'm going to trim that off but I need to think about that a little bit on how much of this I want now I can run this pipe clamp all the way down this little pipe nipple I've got and weld this right there and I think that'll probably be fine but if I wanted to get rid of some of these threads or I wanted to try and incorporate this pipe all the way down into there somehow I could Plus with it but I think just welding it right to the bottom here is going to work out just fine for me so I'm going ahead and cut the hardy shank off I decided I was going to go ahead and grind back that pipe so that it fits inside to you a little bit I think that'll make for a better well to be a little bit stronger tool probably complete overkill I don't think it needs it but that's what we're gonna do and I'm gonna go weld that up I don't think you need to watch me well I am going to take this off the the pipe before we weld it so I don't mess up the threads on this so I've welded all that together and I thought about putting a plate on here so that can't go through the clamp will keep it from going through but if there was a plate on the bottom you could wedge it it'd be wedged tight and when the unclamp it it wouldn't be loose unfortunately that plate would be in the way of the clamp head going all the way down tight to the anvil and would affect the way you could use it and that I think it would cause problems but it's also something I can add later if I can figure out a way around the problems I'm gonna put that back together help if it actually thread it there we go now one advantage of this is the slot always has to go this direction but because it's threaded you can rotate this and either just unthread it a little bit or tighten it up just a little bit probably for me I'll use it like this most of the time so if we put the clamp in or the wedge in so that clamps tight to the anvil so you know it'll hold just about anything I want to put under there so we can put that bar that I was working on earlier clamp it just a quarter turn of that and that's pretty solid not as solid as I might look here we go yeah not as solid as I would like but part of that is because my anvil has a little crowning at this direction and I need to grind that down that's better they get it right tight to the the middle that works much better so that's another option for a an anvil hold down you turn it your way so you can see what I'm doing here so that goes in there the wedge tends to stay put so it's not really a problem falling out and that clamped sat down and that holds your your work down fairly simple I don't know that it's better than the holdfast but I'm going to try it I'm going to use it some since I took the trouble to make it that's really all it is now our holdfast I ended up actually with a five inch arm on it so it's not quite as long as I wanted but I think it will probably work just fine it's still a little bit warm to the touch long as it's not right over the hardy hole and it is not and that holds about as well as I would expect again because an anvil is polished steel or smooth steel it doesn't hold as well as a woodworkers holdfast does but that's enough to keep this bar from sliding off the anvil it rotates very easily but it doesn't move into end or side to side it's just I've got enough leverage here to rotate it but they're very effective and they're very simple and in a lot of ways I think I still like that better than I'm gonna like this but we'll try it out I have two other ideas here and these are things that I've seen other people do that I've never actually tried myself but they should work okay one of them is this drill press clamp and this is something that is sold just like this for clamping to a drill press table and it's got a threaded shake in this big nut and that could go through your pretzel hole but for my anvil this threaded shake isn't long enough so I would have to extend this weld something on rethread it and because I'm not sure what these threads are they're not just 1/2 inch threads it seems to be 1/2 inch but not quite that the right pitch I'm afraid they might be Wentworth but they could be a metric thread it just doesn't seem like it's the right seems like it's exactly a half inch diameter so I'm not sure it's really metric but if you could extend that weld something on put a threaded rod you know about put a different nut now one problem with anything like this is the bottom of your anvil is not flat across the bottom it tapers so you need some sort of a tapered spacer for the nut to engage with otherwise you don't get a very good fit that's the reason the pipe clamp doesn't really work with just as a pipe clamp because that bottom part of the pipe clamp doesn't really engage very well you would need a tapered spacer under the heel of the anvil but I've seen people use these and I think there may be some available with longer threads on them because other people I seen use them I don't think they had to do anything with them it may just be that my anvils were you thicker than theirs but you can also make some sort of a threaded insert for the Hardy hole to put that in and then it would work quite nicely and it works just like a pair of vise grips which is the other thing I've seen people do they take a pair of vise grips and they cut this section off and they mount it to a hardy shank so that it goes into the anvil and then you could have a plate here so it doesn't go in because as you tighten this down you could lower it below the level of the plate I think that would work very well I just don't want to sacrifice my vise grip c-clamp because like I say I've never used these options in 30-some odd years I've always managed to get by holding it between my legs using a chain with a work stay in or hold fast though I'm not going to cut up my vise grips just to have another option that I already know I don't need but if you're just starting out or if you're having trouble holding your work these are options that might work for you well it's just a quick look at some workholding options things you can use at the anvil you could adapt similar things to work at your workbench if you need to hold down to a workbench or if you have a big platen table that you need to hold things down but odds are if you have a platen table you've probably already thought of a lot of this stuff because that's kind of what it's for chasing stuff around on the anvil can be really frustrating so having some way to help hold your work on the anvil can really make your day go smoother increase your efficiency and probably make your work come out better in the long run as well so make yourself a holdfast or set up a chain with a work stand or figure out some other way you can keep your work on the anvil while you work on it and it'll make your day go better I hope that helps I hope you found it interesting give it a thumbs up if you liked it love it if you hit the subscribe button share the videos with your friend watch a few more but get out to the shop make time to make something and stay safe wear your safety glasses we'll see you for the next one

Channel: Black Bear Forge

Views: 165,500

Keywords: Wondershare Filmora, work holding, anvil, work holding at the anvil, hold down, hold fast, holddown, holdfast, blacksmith holdfast, anvil hold down, securing work, hoild, holding, clamp, holding work at the anvil, blacksmithing for beginners, blacksmiths anvil, blacksmith shop, basic blacksmithing, how to, blacksmithing tools, black bear forge, blacksmithing projects for beginners, blacksmith tools, tricks of the trade

Id: 1Edt7QGj3fI

Length: 17min 18sec (1038 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 09 2018