Railway Line Anvil

Step 5 New ideas

Well I've used this anvil a bit now and its limitations have caught up with me. The pictures below show a possible design, again using railway line. Ignore the shape of the horn, I'm still getting used to this CAD software. If you can't make sense of it, it's two sections of rail, on end, with the upper flanges together. This gives me a very well supported forging face of aout 70x80mm, just from the ends of the upper flanges. The brown parts would be welded on to give addtional area for straightening and bending. These would not stand up to heavy blows but would not really need to.

This design was derived from discussions on the Anvilfire discussion forum, with input from a number of members including the Anvilfire Guru. See the archived messages here, click on June 1 - 7, 2007 log.

Would halving the length of the upright sections reduce performance considerably? the second picture has tentative dimensions.
Any other comments?

ANOTHER EDIT
I added another drawing showing a second possibilty, involving a single upright section with a continuous face/horn piece welded on. Which is better?

AND ANOTHER EDIT
I decidd to go with the heavier option. No photos of construction unfortunately. The parts were cut using an oxygen/acetylene cutting torch and partially finished with an angle grinder. Welding was done with a MIG welder. My future holds quite a few more hours with an angle grinder.

Comments

[KronoNaut]

Here is another option.
http://www.castle-ranch.com/page7.php

Gary

[scafool]

We used to be able to get rail cut offs like that. We used to just burn some holes in the lower flanges or gring notches into them so we could spike them down to a stump. The top were the train wheels rode is really hard.