How to Perform Professional Blacksmithing with Anvils?

Blacksmithing is a term for metalworking and it has been around for a long time. This is a traditional method of metalworking, where the blacksmith (or a person performing this type of task) uses hand tools to forge wrought iron and steel metal sheets into desired shapes. Forging uses techniques such as drawing upon, shrinking, bending, upsetting, swaging, punching, and forge welding.  Blacksmiths use various types of tools for shaping metals. An anvil is a popular tool used by blacksmiths all over the globe for shaping the metal.

Why is this tool used? How to use it correctly? This post intends to introduce blacksmithing to beginners and also provides insights on how to perform professional blacksmithing using an anvil.

Woodward Fab Anvils

What is an anvil?

For the beginners, the anvil is the tool that can be used to flatten, shape, and curve metal sheets. Modern anvils are made of steel and the older ones were made of wrought iron.

Before delving into the details of using anvils for blacksmithing, it is important to understand its construction. A traditional anvil design has three faces. The main flat face, the step, and horn.

The Face: The main face is a flat rectangular metal surface that is used for flattening the object, in general. Often the hard work is performed using this face only.

The Step: The step is used as a cutting edge and also to keep the forging surface clean as well as to sustain the hammering force.

The Horn: The last face is the horn. It is a rounded edgy face that is used to curve, chamfer, and fillet the forged objects. It depends on the blacksmith to adjust the placement of the tip of the horn, in order to create specific shapes.

How to do Blacksmithing Using an Anvil

As said before, the blacksmithing process is a set of predefined techniques. Let us guide you through how to start blacksmithing as an uninitiated. 

Select the iron or iron alloy to use: Before starting any forging process, the first step is to select the material. Since blacksmithing is a process of forging iron or iron alloys, your choices are not only limited to wrought iron but different types of steel and cast iron. Nowadays, steel and its variants have emerged as a popular choice over iron owing to several advantages offered by this metal. Therefore, the selection of bottles down to choosing the right type of steel for blacksmithing. The process of steel selection is performed in the following steps.

First, pick the lowest quality steel metal piece. The trial workpiece can be between 10 to 30 mm long.

Start from the softest steel because hard steels are often difficult to forge. It will require hard hammer blows and accurate temperature judgment.

To know the suitable temperature, keep the cold end grabbed in tongs and start heating another end. You need a nearly yellow glow on the heated workpiece to work on. Ensure that you do not heat the metal till it melts, else, the workpiece will produce sparks when you take it out.

The first stroke of a blacksmith: This step helps confirm if you can work on the material without any difficulty. On the heated sample workpiece, you have to blow the hammer. In this step, you may or may not use an anvil. This is to test and practice your forging strokes. One needs to understand that blacksmithing is not only about hard hammer blows, but it is also about using a hammer technically. Therefore, you need to practice the technique of hammering at your lower arm.

Strike and shape (Workpiece to a shaped object): Striking and shaping is the process where you start the actual blacksmithing process by using an anvil. In this step, the blacksmith shapes a workpiece to create a base shape. Here, the ball of metal can be hammered and shaped to a brick, or a square block can be hammered to form an elliptical shape.

Object definition: This is the step where the extreme skills of a blacksmith come into play. Detailing is a process of defining an object. In this step, the step and the horn of an anvil are used effectively. To create features on the shaped object this step is used. Although, the blacksmith is required to be technically right to define the object.

Tips for blacksmithing like a professional by using an anvil

Blacksmithing is all about the steps mentioned above, yet a couple of tactics can help you perform blacksmithing with perfection.

Tap the anvil: Many times, professional blacksmiths would tap the step of the face of the anvil after a few hammer blows. This is done to rest their arm for a while and to verify the last few strikes meted on the metal piece or to maintain their rhythm while examining the piece. In the first case, it is convenient for the blacksmith to bring the hammer back to its original striking position, as there is a short distance between the hammer and anvil. In many cases, although a blacksmith may be confident of his striking and shaping skills, still, he would like to examine the piece at short intervals to check the process is going in the right way. These professional blacksmiths only tap the anvil and never pound it directly, as it may induce slight deformations to the form, which would be transferred to the sheet metal. This tapping also helps them to save energy and continue the task without interruptions.

Use wrist not shoulders: Unlike the traditional images of the blacksmiths who raise their hand in the air and blow the hammer so hard, a modern professional would hammer with the wrist. Using wrist movement while hammering makes a precise impact on the metal and it helps in object detailing as well.

Like any other metalworking process, blacksmithing also relies on the use of the right tool. Here, since you are using an anvil, you need to buy a quality anvil from a trusted manufacturer. Woodward-Fab supplies quality pound and London Pattern anvils that can suffice all your professional blacksmithing needs.

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