[TheForge] Free at Last!

[Peter Fels And Phoebe Palmer]

Hey Peter;
With that soft old anvil stake thingie ( here, i'll get rid of it 
for you, grin), rather than grind it; I'd use a hard,polished 
hammer with a slightly crowned face, and work the face level.
Work from the high spots towards the pits. Use a bigger hammer to 
move mass deeper. Nearer the edges is more fragile.
You can only strike it so many times before you have problems 
however.
Getting away with it depends on the surface hardness. The softer 
it is , generally, the more you can move it around before you get 
cracks or delamination....pete f

Peter Hirst wrote:
> Good God Almighty, the Stake is Free at Last.
> 
> After taking in all your posts here, and using a mostly well-planned 
> approach, I spent the last four hours in the shop and am very happy to 
> report that what rust and simple machines had joined, man hath torn 
> asunder. After soaking the assembled stake anvil and swage block in PB 
> Blaster for a week (1/2 a can) I was prepared to go the red-heat, 10lb 
> sledge and drift route.  I prepared by cranking up my wood stove in my 
> cold shop (20 F this morning) and hitting both sides of the joint with 
> PB Blaster.  When the block got to an estimated 150 F, I took a wire 
> brush to the joint  on both sides of the block and made an important 
> discovery.  After the PB and wire brush removed a good 1/4 inch of rust 
> and sludge, it revealed that this was not a 2 " stake in a 2" hole, but 
> a 1 3/4" stake in a 2" hole, with wedges driven in on 2 sides, flush 
> with the surface of the block.  This changes everything, I thought, 
> since I could destructively remove the wedges, something I did not want 
> to do with either the block or the stake itself.  I could see that one 
> of the wedges was well-worn and deeply grained wrought iron, while the 
> other appeared to be mild steel.
> 
> I immediately attacked the iron wedge with a rectangular drift 1/4" 
> thick and a 4-lb drill hammer.  It crumbled before this onslaught, and 
> soon I had a 1/4" slot right through the swage hole, completely clearing 
> one entire embedded face of the stake.  Elapsed time about 1/2 hour.
> 
> Applying the drift to the second  wedge, the first blow felt like a 
> broken bat foul ball on a very cold day.  This one was not going to be 
> so easy.  I took the wire brush to it a little more to see if I could 
> see better what I was dealing with, and it slowly brightened to a light 
> grey satiny surface. Uh-oh.  I then took a 1/4" high speed steel drill 
> to the end of the wedge, and while it didn't exacly skip off, it sure 
> didnt bite, either,  This stuff was almost as hard as the drift I was 
> hitting it with, which was made from an old file.  This wasnt going to 
> be so easy.  elapsed time, 1 hour.
> 
> I still had that one face free however, and 1/4" of space on one face 
> all the way through the hole.  Surely I could
> use that the  get a little movement going between the still tightly 
> wedged faces.  More PB and alternate series of blows on opposite sides 
> of the shank, parallel with the wedged faces.  I figured if I could use 
> leverage and sheer power to rotate the shaft even a degree or two, that 
> woul be enough to break the rust on the wedged faces, and the rest would 
> be easy. Using the 10 pounder, 10 blows to a side, I could get the 
> wedged faces to rotate about 2 degrees with repect to each other, but no 
> more.  Elapsed time, 1 1/2 hrs.
> 
> Having got this much lateral movement aolong the tightly wedged faces, I 
> figured the basic rust bond was broken, and now its time to drift the 
> stake frm the bottom of the block.  I have a beautiful old wrought iron 
> drift, about 1" square at the business end and about 2" across the 
> head.  Best thing I could think of to apply a blow to the stick end of 
> the stake without risking peening it into the block.  50 or so blows and 
> many checks and measurements later, the stake had not budged in the 
> hole.  Elapsed time, 2hrs.
> 
> More PB.  ANd more lateral movement.  Instead of trying to rock the 
> shaft laterally in the hole, I starting applying lateral blows with the 
> 10 pounder and the iron drift right at the base of the stake, right up 
> against the swage block.  20 or so blows  finally opened up a hairline 
> gap. 20 or so on the other side closed it back up again.  ANd so on for 
> 10 or so sets.  I was now moving the stake laterally back and forth 
> across the wedged faces maybe 100th of an inch.  Another 10 sets and it 
> was moving maybe 1/50th.  More PB and another attempt at drifting it 
> out.  Nothing.  Elapsed time, 2 1/2 hrs.
> 
> What was going on?  The stake was clearly moving laterally in the hole 
> but would not budge vertically.  I was beginning to suspect that there 
> was something very peculiar about the wedge.  Could someone have used a 
> piece of a file for this thing?
> 
> More PB, and back to the lateral movement with the sledge hammer.  In 
> another 20 minutes or so, each 2 or three lateral blowls with the 10 
> pounder would slide the base of the stake sideways the full 1/4 inch of 
> slack in the hole.  At this point I could get about 4 or 5 degrees of 
> rotation between the wedged faces with alternating blows oth the end of 
> the stake farthest from the block.  After 10 or so cycles of this, I 
> could rock the stake back and forth about 10 degrees by hand.  Even with 
> more PB, it still took 10 good blows with the heavy sledge to finally 
> drift the stake free from the bottom of the anvil.  As it slid out, the 
> wedge didnt fall free, but remained in place.
> 
> Also, as it finally slid free I noticed that the two parallel surfaces 
> that had been hard against the wedge and the  against the inside of the 
> block WERE BONE DRY!!  Those two surfaces had been touched by not a a 
> DROP of the 1/2 can of  penetrant I had applied.  The other 2 surfaces, 
> that had been wedged with the iron wedge, were soaked with the stuff.  
> But even when freed, these two surfaces that had been wedged so tightly 
> were basically dry rust with a little bright metal shining through.  
> Elapsed time, 3hrs, 10 min.  Elapsed energy:  probably 4-500 blows with 
> the 10 pounder and twice number that with the drill hammer.
> 
> I went back to the swage block to remove the wedge, and sure enough, 
> there it was, the telltale pattern of a bastard cut file,  very  coarse 
> and deep, like a a farriers rasp.  But on one side only, the side that 
> contacted the inside of the swage block.  The other face, which 
> contacted the shank of the stake, had been ground smooth, and was as 
> noted, bone dry.  So there it was. A previous owner had mounted this 
> thing with a soft iron wedge on one face and a piece of file on the 
> other.  God knows what the result would have been if both wedges had 
> been files.
> 
> Anyway, I now have beatifully separate stake anvil and swage block.  The 
> anvil is not as heavy as I had thougt: only about 60 lbs.  It measures 
> 27" high and 29" tip to tip.  The face is about 3x 6" and the octagonal 
> shank is about 3" in diameter at the base, where its necked down to the 
> 1 3/4 " stake.   The block is much heavier than I thought at over 200 
> lbs.  It was once heavier, but the years of use as an anvil base, 
> obvously on bare dirt, rusted away significant voids on the bottom 
> side.  It is 5" thick in the sound sections, however, so there's plenty 
> of mass left there to dress up right.
> 
> I am alittle torn about whether to dress the anvil.  Its obviously very 
> old and I certainly won't touch anything but the working surfaces, and 
> some deformations at the ends of the horns.  I would like to grind and 
> polish the face and horns, and use it for fine work.  What do you 
> think?  Should I leave it as is or dress it up?
> 
> Thanks to everyone for all of their input on freeing the stake.  The 
> time and attention really paid off.  I hope this will be useful to 
> others sometime.  I think I used a little bit of most everyones 
> suggestions, and I would be glad to post pics when I can .
> 
> Thanks again, everyone.
> 
> Peter Hirst
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Manage membership or unsubscribe at:
> http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/theforge
> theforge mail list group photo site is
> http://www.photoaccess.com
> Login:  blacksmithblacksmith at hotmail.com
> password:  anvil
> ___________
> 
> 
>