Anvil hardening process

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bjalongi

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Oct 23, 2006
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I picked up a 60 pound anvil this weekend.

It's not the highest quality and the surface needs to be hardened a little better.

I read a post last week where a guy put his anvil face down in a coal forge for ~30 minutes or so, then dropped it in a bucket of ice water.

How have some of you hardened your anvil(s)?

Your advice is greatly appreciated.

-- Brook
 
You're assuming that the anvil you have is made of a material that can be hardened. Some inexpensive anvils are made of materials that can't be hardened very well.
 
I wouldn't quench in ice water, but if it's got enough carbon to harden, and not a cast iron anvil shaped object I' turn upside down in a coal fire or wrap kwool around it and use a gas forge burner and quench with a water hose or just dunk it in a large tub of water. If you try it be sure to wear all safety equiment in case it decides to shatter. If it's cast iron your pretty much out of luck, but you can get some surface hardness by working it with a hammer to work harden the surface.
 
more hoping than assuming.

If the hardness can't be increased, it will still work for me. Worse case: I'm out $20 for a second hand anvil.
 
hmm... anvilforge.com IIRC had a topic on this... a 300lb big blacksmith anvil was old, softer than ideal, nicked and dented, and needed hardening, so the sanded the top down nice and smooth again then wrapped chains around the fbase and used a crane to lift it up, then 3 or four guys played hot propane torches oover the PCB'd top and when an infrared non-contact thermometer said it was hot enough the crane dunked the anvil the current over a weir.
 
It will take a lot of heat to bring 60 pounds of steel up to 1400F. The best thing is to clean up the top with a belt sander or angle grinder and use it as it is. Hardening and tempering an anvil is mostly the stuff of folk lore (and definitely not as easy as the stories sound. It pretty much requires a foundry.). You hear a lot of stories about guys doing it, but never seem to meet a guy who actually did it.
The other choices are to weld a tool steel top onto it, or case harden the top.
Stacy
 
Another option is to surface harden the anvil. I have rebuilt several anvils with Stoody hardfacing rods. weld a base layer with either 7014, 6013, or nickel rod depending on the anvil's metal, and then weld two or three layers of the hardfacing rod, any more than three and it can start cracking. Grind the face smooth, it should have a surface around 54 HRC.

Ken
 
Stoody is only a brand name . Which Stoody hardfacing rod do you recommend ??
 
:eek: :D I can't get this picture of a guy with a really big arm holding a glowing red anvil with really big tongs over a really big quench bucket. Oppps...almost forgot to mention the really big hernias.
 
Wouldn`t it be much easier to just get some steel-plate of some sort, harden and temper it properly, then just weld it onto the anvil?
Mind you, i don`t have any proper anvil, other than a piece of railroad track, so i`m definately no expert.
 
Old, old topic. Ideal hardness depends on the alloy for acceptable toughness at high hardness, but I'm loving my Refflinghaus anvil at 60-61 rockwell. Most good anvils are in the low to mid 50's. As an aside, I made a post anvil from 4"x4"x12 of 4140 and tried hardening it in a 50 gallon barrel of water. Didn't work well, so I made a 35 gallon batch of super quench up and that worked to get the hardness in the low 50's. But what a PITA.
 
1050 Anvil. We need to pour water slowly because we want to harden only at the surface area and prevent any distortion.



[video=youtube;cEuMyahrWYI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEuMyahrWYI[/video]
 
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