PSA: Stop using your anvil as a workbench for everything

Used to hammer out brackets on the flat face of my anvil, all day, every day. Thought it was fine until I noticed my hammer blows felt dead and my shoulders ached after a few hours. Turned out I was beating the life out of the face, flattening the radius near the horn. A buddy in Tucson pointed it out during a demo, said I was turning a $600 tool into a 50 dollar plate. Now I keep a heavy steel block on the stump for general work and save the anvil for actual forging, like drawing out and bending. Took me 4 years to figure out something that basic, feels dumb looking back. Anyone else wreck a tool by using it the lazy way and have to pay to fix it?

2 comments

2 Comments

robin_campbell3617h ago

Did you ever catch that video where a guy tested an anvil face hardness with a file and showed how fast people ruin them? I read a forum post about a guy who used his anvil as a drill press table and wondered why his bits kept snapping.

ward.piper7h ago

Hang on, I gotta jump in here because I completely disagree. An anvil is a hard chunk of steel, it's meant to take a beating. People act like they're these delicate museum pieces, but they're tools. If a guy wants to use his anvil as a drill press table, that's on him for snapping bits, not the anvil. The file test thing is just people trying to feel superior about their gear. You can file a brand new anvil and it'll show marks too, that doesn't mean it's ruined. A little surface wear doesn't hurt the face where you're gonna be hammering hot metal anyway. Honestly, the real problem is folks treating their tools like they're made of glass instead of just using them.