Thread: Wanna see an anvil or 2 or 200 ?

I got one...Forged even....

It is a Wilkinson 110 lb. The good news is it was only $150, the bad was I had to drive 540 miles to get it. The fella that sold it to me said a guy was coming to look at it on the 8th but his offering was by the pound. He was afraid the guy was a greedy cuss so he sold it to me knowing I would love it. I asked a ton about it before I went there, made him test for dead spots and made the guy take more pics with a straight edge on the face, LOL. Apparently it was purchased and used by a copper mine in Kingman Az. until or in 1910, I forget which. That is where I went to get it from. I haven't looked up any info on it yet but I am thinking it is 1900 or earlier. It seems there were 3 Wilkison brothers in a small town in England that made them.



The stamping is not perfect and neither are the pictures. But I got lucky, the condition of it is great.

Originally Posted by Bruno

Mine's this one.
250 pounds, 1 US dollar per pound

Attachment 128254

Btw, it's interesting that the very old anvils in that collection resemble small altars.

That's a good observation. Consider that this was a skill long in training, few in mastery and absolutely essential. The blacksmith was a metal worker, shamanic figure for many cultures. Only a select few were chosen. Godlike men in their day.

The guy that had this collection called some of the indentations church windows. They were smaller and looked like little arches. I saw a guy on you tube turn an anvil on it's side and turn a flat piece of sheet into what looked like a shoulder piece for armor. The dished out areas of the anvil sides looked different in size also. I have a feeling that the whole anvil was used in some way to shape something. There is a lot to be learned by reading the descriptions on those pictures. I think if a blacksmith made many of 1 certain thing he surely had an anvil design that made it possible if not just easier to do. Not to bring the blacksmith down a notch. Any man that could take from the earth and make a weapon of iron, or a tool to break ground for planting was a man you would want to praise at the very least.

I once saw footage of a sheffield master smith, forging small knife blades.
His anvil didn't look anything like mine. It looked like it had been through the shredder. It is a collection of small surfaces, protrusions and edges. Everything has a specific function, and it allowed him to hammer out a small blade without ever needing to use a hardy or swage block.

I'll take two, three if you include the loose piece of RR track on the ground that occasionally gets beaten. The vertical piece of track is what I started with. In the hardy hole is a fuller my son & I made from a jack hammer bit, the other half of the bit is next to it, which is used as a cutoff hardy.