[TheForge] Re; Treadle Hammer Anvil Stand

[xlch58 at swbell.net]

I ran into a book on the subject ten or twelve years ago, "Stress Waves 
in Solids" by Kolsky, published in the early sixties.   It seems that 
the big names of the 19th century Stokes, Poisson, Rayleigh etc knew 
they were there, but had no experimental or analytical means of 
experimenting.  ( It  amazes me how in the twenty first century doing 21 
century projects I end up using a preponderance of formulas devised by 
19th century guys.  RF engineers use Rayleigh's formulas for fading to 
this day to model RF wave propagation. )  Evidently, the computer 
stirred things up on the topic in the sixties and then it went dormant 
again until the mid nineties with the rise of Finite Element 
Analysis(FEA).  Somewhere I have links to some FEA simulations that are 
more germane to an anvil and hammer, I will try to dig them up.   At 
some point someone will have to use all this to model the perfect shape 
for an anvil, my guess is it will be a frustum of a cone of pyramid. 
Charles