 Today we are forging one of the most crucial tools for blacksmithing and metalworking. A request that's been very prevalent in the comments, an anvil, and finally get passed by makeshiftrocks. An Anvil is one of the most important tools in blacksmithing and metalworking. At its core, it's just a large chunk of metal to hit against. However, the larger the anvil, the higher the inertia, the more effective each blow transfers to the piece of metal being worked. Getting something strong and dense enough to handle the countless blows makes the anvil one of the most important tools of the blacksmith. So with this difficult forging project, I enlisted the help from some experienced blacksmiths we've worked with before, Joe and Adri. Be sure to check out Joe's work on Instagram at Adri's own YouTube channel. Alright so I'm back with Joe and Adri and we're going to tackle the next step with kind of a blacksmithing, which is making an actual anvil. Historically, especially in the earliest phases of ironworking, you would have been working with very rudimentary tools and probably using a stone or a lump of bog iron or a smelted bloom that they'd compacted to continue forging their anvils. They would have found anything that would have worked that was large enough to absorb the force of the hammering and not suck out all of the heat from the metal. And stone makes a terrible anvil because of its thermal properties and how chippy it is and it doesn't, yes it does not does not do well under hammering forces. The earliest anvils were likely just rocks, like what I've been using so far. From there, some would be cast in bronze, something we did last year. Unfortunately that anvil didn't survive long as it eventually snapped at a weak point in the casting. Andy has cast a bronze anvil in the past, but those when moving into iron tools really would have been short-term solutions. You can't really use bronze long-term as an anvil because you'll crack it or the heat will anneal it and you'll deform the face. Eventually iron and steel became the preferred metal with early anvils basically just being a chunk of iron. As it evolved, more specific shapes were designed and formed for specific purposes such as the bick or horn which is used for working curved pieces. In the 20th century, as mass produced manufacturing techniques became more prevalent, the anvil has become a rarer and less familiar object. Today most people are likely more familiar with its use in cartoons as a heavy object that is dropped on people's heads. This trope emerged as anvils were easily recognized as a heavy dense object that was easy to draw and then became a tradition of animation even as people became less familiar with the actual use of an anvil. The earliest example in a cartoon is the 1942 A Tale of Two Kitties. 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There we go. Ready to go. Shoulder so far. So I think that's good. This is looking like an anvil now though. Yeah. This is super close to a lot of examples I've seen already. It's definitely starting to look like an anvil. I think it's a very clean taper though. Yeah. I probably want one of these things for traveling. Yeah. Take one more heat with the flatter. Sounds good. Nice little mushroom anvil. I've got beeswax, linseed oil. Linseed oil works. All this is basically the scale that's forming in the outside soaks up the oil and it forms a protective coating like gun-blowing. And then there's wax mixed in with it which melts in and seals it off to further protect it. It's definitely a steak anvil. Yeah. It turned out nice and flat. Yeah. Nice and flat on the top. It'll do the job. With the first steak anvil done, next we moved on to the second piece, the horn anvil. Start working some of the hum. There's good instincts to pull your feet out of the way as soon as it starts slipping. The blacksmith's shuffle. Yeah. Yeah, now that we got the first taper down, this is striking. This is striking. It's a strike. This is a hammer. It's a hammer indeed. Good rhythm started. That was pretty good actually. Everything was solid. There's not a lot to clean up. No, I'm honestly pretty proud of how that forging went. So if you ever do want to make a socketed spear, there's your mandrel. And it's a burn itself and to have a really nice tight fit that you don't want to burn away anything. So when you chisel it out, you don't split the wood. There we go. With the anvils completed, we brought them back to the studio. If you're like me, you might be wondering that if an anvil is just a heavy object to hit against, is an iron one really that much better than a rock? To put it to the test, I challenged Egery to try and forge the same thing on both the new anvils and a rock and see how they compare. Now we're going to try and compare and see what the difference really is between our homemade anvils here and a rock. This is a new rock after the untimely death of rocks one through four. So through this process, we'll be able to see what we're capable of, what the different tools can do differently, how many more options we have when we're forging. And in doing so, we're going to try to make a couple more tools for the coal forge. First up, the rock. Thank you, I guess. Or not. Next victim. If I can split this one, it's going to be hilarious. This is honestly more tiring. Like you have to have intense focus to get it to stay on this while you're striking it. And it's not just because it's on a smaller log, it's because the surface isn't flat. So every strike you have, it pushes it back and forth. There's just one little nook that I can use to actually flatten things out. I think that's the best we're going to get, so it's not even worth trying to draw it out any further. Because this is relatively straight, and there's no way you're going to get it any straighter, so you might as well bend it over. You just have to make concessions when you're working on that thing. I think that's what we're going to get out of this because I have no way to fix it. Now to try and forge the same thing using the actual anvils we just made. You can definitely see more little dents and dings in the one made on the rock, and it's definitely not as flat when you look at the surfaces. A little bit about this anvil setup here. This is a fairly common setup to have a steak anvil and a separate horn because it's easier to manufacture. A lot of these parts can do really specific things that you can't just do on a block of steel or a rock. You can use the horn to concentrate your force on a smaller area or you can use it as a guide to make round shapes. When you're working on the flat face of the anvil here, you know that you have a nice flat register and you can compare your work to the surface of the anvil itself so you get a nice even surface all the way along. You can also use these edges where they're mushroomed out to part off pieces like we did here. When I took that and hit it against the side, what that did is create a tiny little concentration on this sharp edge. It helped me cut through without having to use a hot cut chisel. So between these two tools, you can make pretty much anything. We have made two different rakes out of the same material in the same forge with the same hammers, just changing what we use as an anvil. It's almost impossible to keep things straight and stable. Everything flies everywhere. You can't hope to get a square edge or a flat corner no matter what you do. Every single thing is a shortcut with how much the rock shakes. You can't go down into planishing heats and clean things up to get a nice smooth surface. You leave pock marks in your work all the time because we uneven surface the rock. Overall, it's just a way different experience. Even though you can make the same thing, it's a world of difference working on an anvil compared to a rock. A huge difference in effort. Every single swing I took on the rock, I had to really swing it because that's the only way I could get any metal to move. Working on our steak anvil, I had the ability to choke up and really think about where I wanted to move metal just ever so slightly you can finish up and just get a smooth surface. I never want to work on a rock again. Thanks again to Joe and Adri. Check out the link to see more of their work and now with this crucial step in our block smithing we can move on to some larger and bigger projects. Thanks for watching. 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