Peddinghaus anvil... Cut in half... Interesting to say the least...

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[video=youtube_share;bLspR7BKKFQ]http://youtu.be/bLspR7BKKFQ[/video]





I thought some of you might find the construction of these beasts to be quite interesting... After all, how many people do you know that would spend the time cutting an anvil in half???

 

Yeah, the void that you see there had the volume of almost two 16oz bottles of water, and the rebound was 40% max... I've restored a few anvils so far, but this one's issues were a different monster all together. I'd planned on drilling the cavities out and filling them in with weld but this cavity is huge! I'm back to the drawing board as far as ideas are concerned...

 

I wonder if they would honor the 40-50 year old return policy? If I were them I'd honor it just to get the pics and vid of the internets... Seems like an interesting way to construct an anvil to say the least, as if these cones were meant for tensioning after press-fitting the two pieces together? If you take a close look at the center of the circular pin i cut in half (not the cone) you can see a center hole... That little hole is threaded...the thread pitch is huge...

I had a machinist friend of mine take a look at it, and he'd never seen anything like it in his 40 some years of work...

 

Thanks, glad it hasn't sent people into an epileptic puke-seizure... I need to get one of those tri-pod dealios...

I honestly hadn't considered bronze specifically... I'd originally thought lead, but bronze sounds a bit healthier. The anvil itself is quite hard, a file skips across the top even when you try to dig. If I can keep the interpass temps lower by running weld beads it might be a better option..? True challenge; I just have to keep it from losing it's temper all the while filling in the huge void. A fools errand to say the least but I have a real passion for getting anvils back in service.

I've thought seriously about just going to town on it with the stick welder, not worrying about annealing it, and just rehardening it by my own means... I just cant for sure tell what kind of steel it is?

I get very small/faint short bursts of red with red-orange clusters, then I'll get longs streaming sparks of yellow/white with a lot of fanning clusters...I'm no metallurgist, but it's weird stuff to say the least, almost as if the the steel isn't the same consistency throughout...?

I've never seen anything negative either, and I consider myself spoiled rotten when it comes to forging on my #12. This one hit the all the ugly branches coming down and amazingly fell a good distance from the tree if you catch my drift...

 

I contacted RIGID through their website option yesterday and received a phone call from them this morning. I spoke with the regional sales rep Larry, who directed me to their customer service representative Irwin, who promptly transferred me to a tool tech by the name of Mike. In spite of how awkward my question came across within 5 minutes I was talking to the right guy, which is pretty uncommon in my experience dealing with customer service.

Mike stated that the tensioning system that was utilized in the earlier Paul Ferdinand Peddinghaus anvils was obsolete technology regarding their modern manufacturing methods. My guess in their reasoning and utilization of the two-piece option was due to limited industrial capabilities. I pointed out in the video what I thought to be a faint arc weld in the #12 RIGID; this was a false observation. Apparently the RIGID Peddinghaus anvils are all one-piece drop-forged tool steel, which is actually quite impressive. "Simple is Betterer"; there is more consistency in the anvil and less that could go wrong with the one-piece option.

I don't see any of this as being trivial information. 1; because I'm an anvil nerd and 2; It lets those DIY types in on some pretty cool ideas. I've read numerous DIY anvil threads where a few individuals proposed the idea of a tensioning system being utilized... Smart cookies to say the least.

 

I kinda regret using the chop saw... I didn't wreck havoc on it, but it would catch on the inclusions... It's been acting weak and tired since...

 

Please disregard any of the aforementioned content associating Peddinghaus with the anvil above. With a great bit of discussion and due diligence, along with some very thorough research from a friend in Germany, the manufacturing of Peddinghaus (Rigid and Paul Ferdinand Peddinghaus PFP) have never utilized the pressed cone method, even for R&D purposes. They've manufactured P'haus anvils the same way, consistently, throughout the age of modern industrialization, since the first original PFP anvil became available to smiths in the early part of the 20th century, even when they expanded manufacturing to the domestic US in Bradley, IL.

I will post an updated video to counter the earlier misrepresentation and misinformation disseminated in the previous video. I'm sure everyone can respect the notion of deleting the video in it's entirety. I'm not one to even entertain the idea of spreading fallacy and or even assumption. Thank you all for watching, commenting, and taking part in the discussion. The new video will not disappoint! :thumbup: