Oh God, why rail?

Well, like most people who are blacksmith-curious, I eventually ended up browsing iforgeiron late at night. I was browsing through peoples’ forge setups looking for inspiration and admiring all the beautiful anvils that I knew I would never find near me. I did notice the warnings against rail anvils; however, there is an abundance of rail track here, and it felt somewhat fitting as we are a historic rail town. Eventually I stumbled across this post by Charles Stevens which shows a method of using the rail more like a post anvil, with most of the mass directly below the hammer. This seemed like a good enough idea I figured I would shamelessly copy it for mine. So I caught a local rail worker doing their grocery shopping to ask about purchasing some track offcuts, but they were kind enough to drop off several sections of nice heavy gauge track at my place for free!

The Plan

I have an angle grinder and a belt sander at my disposal. The bit of track the wheels ride on is typically hardened, so that will form the main striking face. The rest isn’t hardened so will act as utility surfaces. I’ll round over the webbing section to act as a fuller of varying radii. On the foot I’ll grind a hot cut on one side and a bick on the other.

Flattening

Although one end of this piece of track is already quite close to square, it could still use a bit of fine tuning. I spent a good bit of time going at it with a 40-grit belt on the sander until I was satisfied that it was not just good, but good enough.

Dressing the Anvil

My research tells me you don’t want sharp edges on your anvil. Simple enough! Couple licks with the angle grinder using a grinding disc to start, followed up by a flap disc to smooth out the radii. I attempted to put a slightly different radius on different edges of the striking face. Its so small already I’m not sure how noticeable the difference will be. I also polished the face a bit with a stripping disc to remove some of the sanding scratches. At the end of the day though, this is a learning anvil anyways and will get dinged up with use.

Utility Surfaces

I marked out a rough center line on the foot of the track, then ground up to the mark using a grinding disc on the angle grinder. Once the first bevel was done, I ground the other bevel to meet at the center mark. Hindsight 20/20 I will probably re-grind this to a more acute angle in the future.

The process for grinding the fuller into the webbing of the track was pretty much identical to dressing the anvil. I went for a larger radius here and tried to vary it a bit along the length again. I used a cutoff disc to rough out the shape of the bick on the other side of the foot.

I finished shaping the bick using a combination of grinding discs and flap discs. I found it quite difficult to get a smooth radius that tapered all the way down the bick. Decided to call it good enough and gave it a quick polish with a stripping disc.

Finish Quality

The finish could be much better, but like I said, its a learning anvil and will take a beating anyways. I figure I’ll probably have to keep dressing the face as I ding it up.

I gave it a light heat with a torch and rubbed some linseed oil on for rust protection as it will live outside for now.

An Anvil Needs A Stand

I happened to also come into possession of a few rail ties. These are big heavy timbers impregnated with creosote for rot prevention. Should last quite awhile and add some much needed mass to the whole system.

I wanted the striking face to end up at about wrist level, instead of the standard knuckle height, as I have a bad back. I plan on using a second piece of track horizontally with the foot mounted up as a larger surface area cutting and punching plate. This will also increase the mass of the system significantly. I cut the ties long enough that I can sink the stand into the ground a bit and have it end up at the correct height. I used some chain and turnbuckles to bind the 4 ties together tightly. I outlined the anvil on the stand using some pink spray paint so I could carve out a recess for it to sit in to.

I knew how far I had to sink the anvil into the stand thru the magic of math so I used a bit of duct tape wrapped around a drill bit to serve as a depth stop.

I hogged out most of the material from the outline using the biggest drill bit that would fit in my drill. Sorry to any trypophobes in the crowd!

All that was left was to attack the remaining wood with a chisel and hammer. This was a super satisfying process as big chunks break out revealing the final recess.

I dropped the anvil in place and gave it a couple whacks to seat it, then used another length of chain and a turnbuckle to strap it down nice and tight. All is set and ready for forging!

Future Plans

I still need to work on the second rail piece that will serve as my cutting plate. Once I decide on a hardy hole size, the first step will be to take it over to a friend with an oxy-acetylene torch to cut a square hole in it. Then I can give the surface of the foot a quick sand and polish and mount it next to the vertical anvil.

Thanks For Stopping By

I have always been a fan of Medieval/Fantasy genre works; whether that be books, tv series and movies, or my choice of video games. So I have always had a lingering interest in blacksmithing and ironwork. Unfortunately, I have moved often and lived in apartments for most of my adult life, so I had never had the chance to give it a shot.

That is, until we moved out into the mountains. To my surprise, there are atleast 6-12 blacksmiths in my little town alone that I’ve heard of. I quickly made some aquantainces who let me try out their forge to try my hand at making a knife. (Why is it that most modern blacksmiths focus solely on knives?) I had watched a lot of videos on youtube so I had some sort of idea what to do, although I don’t really have much interest in knives myself. I managed to struggle my way thru forging a barely-hot-enough high carbon knife and quickly realized I needed to get my own forge setup where I could practice the fundamentals at my own pace on mild steel, where I can see the results of my hammer blows more readily and adjust in real time.

Queue a quick shopping comparison online, after which I settled on the Cast Master CMF1000 single burner propane forge. Mostly because it only cost $49 CAD at the time. I was pleasantly surprised to see they include a pair of “tongs” that I don’t thinkw as mentioned; although, they are barely substantial enough to call tongs.

In my research I knew I would also need to coat the Kaowool ceramic liner in refractory cement as it is liable to cause lung cancer if ceramic fibers are exposed to the flame directly. I was quite disappointed to see no mention of this hazard in the instruction booklet from Cast Master. Shame on them! I sourced my refractory supplies from Canadian Forge & Farrier . After reading up on the benefits and drawbacks of different options on their site, I ended up going with Kaowool ridgizer spray, Kast-O-Lite 30 refractory cement, and ITC100HT high-reflectivity ceramic topcoat to improve my forge’s efficiency. I also got some small stainless needles to mix into the refractory to help prevent cracking; although I don’t think I would use these next time. It seems they may be more useful if pouring the refractory into a mould in my opinion. CF&F provided excellent instructions with each product that helped me out given this is my first time working with refractory.

Essential supplies include a P100 respirator as ceramic refractory can harden in the lungs if inhaled. As well as sturdy nitrile gloves and safety goggles that seal around the face.

The first step is to spray down the Kaowool liner with ridgizer spray. The stuff I got is blue so it makes it easy to see if you have even coverage. This stiffens the liner so that you can more easily spread refractory over it without it collapsing.

Next, I mixed up the KOL30 refractory using a heavy duty drill and paddle mixer. Make sure to wear your respirator! You need very little water, although I had a hell of a time getting mine to stick to the Kaowool until I thinned it a bit (against the express instructions, I know, I know.) The goal is to get it to form a cohesive ball in your hand and not fall apart, but no more water than necessary.

Once you’ve achieved the proper consistency you need to work quickly to spread the refractory in an even thin coat over the forge. I struggled to get it to stick unless I let it partially dry on one section before inverting it for the next section. The trouble with this approach was that my already mixed refractory was drying out at the same time! If I did it again, maybe I would mix smaller amounts of refractory so I could cover one surface, let it dry a bit while I mix more, then turn it over and do the other side. I ended up just adding a bit more water part way thru the first coat, and you can really see the change in texture of the refractory after I added (a bit too much) water for the end surface.

You can also see the stainless needles poking out in some spots after the first coat of refractory. I opted to omit the needles in the second coat to achieve a slightly smoother surface. Along with mixing the refractory slightly wetter from the get go. Here is the forge following the second coat of KOL30.

I’m starting to wish I had impressed the bottom fire brick into the kaowool a bit before applying the refractory. I am left with a very small fire chamber as is, but hopefully that is okay for the small stock I’m starting with anyways.

After application, I let the KOL30 air dry for about 2 weeks to ensure most of the moisture from my wet application had evaporated. Then I fired up the forge intermittently to slowly bring up the temperature. Once I was up at forging temp I tried out a small taper and curly bit, as well as testing out the hot cut built into my anvil (build post to come) to cut a piece of flat bar. Very cool!

Now that the refractory cement is cured, I was able to paint on a couple of thin coats of ITC100HT. This is a high-reflectivity ceramic top coating that improves the efficiency of a propane forge a good deal according to their claims. We’ll see how it works out as I haven’t had the forge out again to fire the ITC100 yet, but soon enough!