Thread: Does anyone else shave with old car springs?

Originally Posted by DVW

... You should try one and let us know

Well I would love to but, alas, I have neither forge nor anvil nor tongs. All I have is a charcoal chimney starter and an air mattress inflater. Really I could potentially get by without the forge but I have no anvil so...

Originally Posted by PaulFLUS

Well I would love to but, alas, I have neither forge nor anvil nor tongs. All I have is a charcoal chimney starter and an air mattress inflater. Really I could potentially get by without the forge but I have no anvil so...

I started with an old brake drum and my mom's hair dryer as a forge. The fuel was pine bark (burns hot but makes a lot of sparks and ash). My anvil was any scrap piece of metal that was flat. I would go out into the fields and the woods and find abandoned cars and farm equipment to use as tools and blade steel. Some 1/8" steel plate nailed to a stump can serve as a make-shift anvil. I just now got a decent forge. I was using an old Bar-B-Q


My current anvil is just a piece of track that I ground down and welded a plate to. The stand is made from scrap as well. My mom used to say "Where there is a will, there is a way." Think outside the box and get creative. You can also watch some YouTube videos of guys in third world countries making some extraordinary knives and axes from old car parts using only the most basic hand tools. Sometimes it is worth biting the bullet and spending your hard earned money on a nice proper tool. Other times it can be rewarding to make the tool yourself, or even do things the "old fashioned" way.

Case in point. I found about 15 or 20 future razors on a fence post while bear hunting today. This could also be flattened out and used as a make-shift anvil.

I can't tell what that is. I am with you on improvising and I may just have to jump back down that rabbit hole. As previously mentioned, I played around with file steel and was not successful but the charcoal chimney actually worked pretty well. One improvement I would make is a bellows that is more adjustable. The air mattress inflator was one speed only. In that pursuit I didn't use an anvil. I saw these at an antique store yesterday though.

This is similar to the forge my dad had.


I really know nothing about anvils. These two the guy pointed out to me as the, "more sought after."

A Hay Buden
And this one
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A Fisher Norris.
They were marked at $800 for the Hay Buden and $750 for the Fisher Norris but offering 30% off. I wouldn't know from Shinola if those were good or bad prices but it was more than I could spend at the time. Probably wouldn't buy that from an antique store anyway, especially being totally ignorant.

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Before you go down the hole .....

The market for traditional anvils has exploded so the prices are very high. Before, they were $2-$3 per lb. Now it is well above that.
They are also completely unnecessary for razor and knife work.
Simple, large blocks of steel in most any shape are adequate. It just has to have one flat surface area.

A traditional anvil with a horn and a hardee hole is good to have if your going to be a blacksmith but absolutely not necessary for knife/razor making.

Just my 2¢

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Howard Clark makes swords, knives, and razors.
Here is his "anvil"
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yeah, i was fortunate enough to be gifted a nice 60lb. anvil which works fine (i'm more interested in general blacksmithing than knife makin) but it was a huge jump from my piece of rail. A nice flat piece is a huge advantage. Something that is harder than mild steel if you can find it. Look for something like a fork lift or tine or something like that.

I guess for me it's just sentimentality that makes me want a traditional anvil...also so I can drop it off a building and turn coyotes into acordians. My Dad's was like that Hay Buden mounted on top of a wood platform on about a 18"-20" round metal pipe. He sold it when I was about 20 I guess. Boy that brings back memories. Love to have that back now.

For my anvil I welded a piece of scrap armor plate to a scrap piece of track. I simply went to a local machine/fabrication shop and asked if they had scrap pieces. They use things like hardox, AR400, and AR500 plate for rock crusher hoppers. He ended up buying a razor from me and I gave him $20 off the razor in exchange for the plate.

Ha HAAAAA!!!!!

I was at a friend's warehouse today buying some more hinges from him for a door job and he had this sitting on a bench.

I said I needed a piece like that for an anvil and he said, "well take that one. I almost threw it out when I moved." It would be nice if it were a little longer but 5 1/4" I can work with.