Dressing an Anvil (or Making an Anvil Shaped Object useful)

I saw a thread a while back here about a Harbor Freight Russian made 110# anvil for a real good price. Never having enough tools and stuff around, I went to check it out and came home with one. Kind of rough, still plenty of tool marks as you can see.

Here's what we started with.

So, I called on my friend Dan Tull. He said it was a good place to start, but we could do a few things to make it a much better tool. Take out the tool marks, put a radius on part of the near and far edge of the face to make nice bends, and try to make that duck bill into a horn.

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By rickevans at 08/14/2006 - 5:37am | Blacksmithing HowTo/Troubleshooting: | Tools

Where to start?

Ok...first we laid out some lines to make a radius on part of the near and far edges. You can see the chalk lines in the pic. They are exaggerated to illustrate what we're trying for. Also note the center line of the horn.

More like duck bill than a horn...

R. C. (Rick) Evans

By rickevans at Mon, 08/14/2006 - 6:30am | login or register to post comments

Dressing an Anvil

OK...here we go. We used a 9" angle grinder for the edges and the horn, with a 1/4 " thick course grit hard rock on it. Round off part of the near and far anvil edges, going from about 1/8" radius to 5/16" radius. This is also used to take the casting marks out of the horn and shape it some.