Finally got that old anvil face flat again after 3 hours of grinding

My 80 pound anvil from a farm auction had a crater in the face from some idiot using it as a punch plate, so I spent my Saturday with a 36 grit flap disc and a straightedge, and now it rings true for the first time since I got it has anyone else had to rescue an abused anvil like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

mark_cooper18h ago

My grandfather had an old Vulcan anvil from the 1800s with the face split clean off one side, and he just used it like that for forty years until my cousin got it and welded a piece of truck spring plate over the top. That got me thinking about how everything in life has a second chance if you're willing to put the work in, like how my neighbor's beat up old fishing boat looked terrible for years until he spent a summer scraping and painting it and now it's the prettiest thing on the lake. Your anvil is the same way, that sound when it finally rings out clear after being dead and dull for so long is like a little victory over all the people who don't take care of their tools. The thing is most folks just throw stuff away or let it get worse, but a few of us see the potential underneath the rust and abuse and that's what separates the makers from the takers in this world.

harper_wright8h ago

@mark_cooper I'm going to push back on that pretty hard. Grinding three hours off an anvil face is a terrible idea if you actually want it to work right for anviling. You've taken off hardened steel and exposed the softer core underneath, so that ringing sound you hear now is actually the face being too thin to hold its temper. Most old anvils had a specific heat treatment that goes maybe 1/8 inch deep, and once you grind past that you've basically turned it into a soft iron block that'll dent every time you hit it hard. The original crater from the punch plate was ugly but it was probably still hard enough to do 90% of the work you'd ever need. Now you've got a perfectly flat soft face that's going to mushroom out after a few projects and need more grinding, which just makes the problem worse. I've seen guys scrap good anvils doing exactly this, treating them like they need to be brand new instead of just working around the abuse.