'Evening folks,
I have a cold-weather forging question for you. After having been cooped up inside sick for the last several days I was hoping to get out to the workshop this evening and hammer some very hot things. But then I got to thinking: is there potential for damage in cold weather to my equipment. Most importantly my anvil. In other words, is there potential to damage the face of my anvil when it is what we humans would consider very cold when I introduce it to steel at forging temperatures?
As an FYI, it is about -20 to -25c (around -4 to -13f for my Unitedstatesian neighbours) here at the moment. While I can easily bump the air temp up to a more reasonable working temp, that won't have much affect on the anvil for a while.
On the one hand, certain things start to get quite brittle at these temps. But on the other, the temperature differential right now is not that much more than if it was, say 0c. (i.e. 1225 degrees vs 1200 degrees)
Any ideas?