[TheForge] Free at Last!
Peter Hirst
saltydog335 at aol.com
Wed Jan 23 19:05:58 EST 2008
Thanks for the tips. I have noticed that the face is slightly peened over
at the edges, and the points of the horns are deformed. I think I can work
these back into shape, and could even heat forge the ends? I have a heavy
rounding hammer that I ground from a 2 1/2 lb ball peen. Could be just the
thing for the face. What about the horns?. One flat, one round, about a
foot of each down to about 1/4 " tips. They are in pretty good shape,
would be excellent with one pass with 80-grit then some sanding up to 600 .
This would result in mostly polished surface with few enough pits that I
could work between them.
PGH
----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter Fels And Phoebe Palmer" <artgawk at thegrid.net>
To: "Sponsored by ABANA" <theforge at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 6:48 PM
Subject: Re: [TheForge] Free at Last!
> 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
>>
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