The difference a month makes on a new anvil face

I picked up a beat up old anvil from a farm sale back in March, it had this rough, pitted face that just ate up my hammer blows. Every strike felt dead, like hitting a sack of wet sand, and I was spending way too much time flattening out the marks it left. After a month of grinding it smooth with a flap disc and flattening the top with a file, it's like a whole different tool now. The hammer rebounds so cleanly I almost overshot my first few hits because I wasn't used to the energy coming back. What really got me was how much less effort I'm putting into each swing, I used to finish a day's work with my elbow screaming. Now I can forge a set of three hooks in the same time it took me to do one before. Has anyone else seen that big a jump just from cleaning up an anvil face, or did I just have a really bad one to start with?

2 comments

2 Comments

jordanc325h ago

Man that sounds like a frustrating process but totally worth it in the end. A rough anvil face can really sap the joy out of forging, glad you stuck with it and got it sorted. Did you notice a big difference in how clean your hammer marks are now too?

chen.casey2h ago

Not sure I totally agree with this. A rough face can be annoying but you also lose a lot of metal when you grind it, and anvils only have so much life in that hardened top. I had a similar issue with mine, just used a sharp file on the high spots and left the pitting alone. The rebound came back plenty once I wasn't fighting big gouges, but I kept the original mass and hardness intact. You might find down the road that thinning the face out cost you some striking energy that you didn't know you had.