Can you forge weld on a faceplate to the harbor freight anvil? ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-sLzq8WShJXM.html This is the latest video in this series... You don't want to miss it!
From a profession welder standpoint; there are rods designed specifically for hard surfacing underlayment (buttering layer) such as “tensilweld” made by Washington alloy. This particular filler metal is an excellent all-around maintenance rod and is essentially a high tensile strength 312 stainless which helps tremendously with porosity in cast materials. That is what I use for my anvil repair when I need to replace horns, heels, & repair/replace faces.
Nice, I only weld a lot for my job, not certified or anything, as not needed, I was thinking and mentioned, either 309, or 6010, etc in that series, then hardface. Just out of experience.
@@Plastikdoom 309 would be a much better choice rather than 6010/etc due to its ductility by nature along with the added silicon in most stainless filler metals helping the porosity issues that are inherent from castings.
hey roy, I'm rather surprised that it actully worked was not expecting a 14-15 inch robound on the drop test, thanks for another good year have a safe and happy new years and will be watching you in 2022
I'm a retired professional welder. A word of caution about hard facing. Don't put on over 1/8 inch or it will chip off. It's just the nature of hard facing.
If you treat it like cast iron and pre heat it and post heat, or just get a bunch of heat into it before welding, you’ll get good results. Work at a paper mill and the chip yard/hog fuel boiler equipment receives a ton of wear on drag chains, screw conveyors, and I’ve personally built up more then 1/8” with good results.
@@678friedbed This is too true. I see sooooo many "professionals" that acquire a title either educational or employment based.... and never progress. Getting the credentials and titles is just a starting point - it is what you do with the opportunities that those things (title/creds) afford you that really matters.
@@678friedbed Nor, do they know everything. I've been a welder/fabricator for 32 years, I still learn new things everyday. Maximum 1/8" is what most rod manufacturers suggest.
@@jong2359 It's what you learn from experience that becomes wisdom. 32+ years of building everything from utility trailers, to gas and oil pipelines, to nuclear power plants. That piece of paper just got me started, I learned to weld and fit on the job.
That was fun! That being said, anvils way back when were cast iron with a forge welded hardened steel face. So this isn't THAT much of a surprise. If you take a cast iron base with a hardened steel face you'll get a pretty lively anvil.
Your are thinking of wrought iron (iron with hardly any carbon) with forge welded steel faces, besides Fisher anvils pretty much every anvil before 1900 was forged wrought iron with a steel face. I have owned a few from the early 1700s which are solely wrought iron with no hardened steel face.
@@connorlee7840 right. I do not own a cast anvil. They’re all wrought with steel work surface. The softer iron of the table and horn allow hot cutting without damaging tool.🙂
Thanks for taking the time to experiment with various options. Great video as it looks like you have demonstrated a viable solution if it holds up to forging on it.
Wow, great information. I have a HF anvil. And another similar type cast anvil. I use them for general workshop efforts and save my larger antique anvils for smithing work. I’ll give this go to see how it works on mine. Thanks!
It will be interesting to see if the welded surface cracks off under the hammer. In my limited experience in welding cast iron the cast needs to be hot and we used nickel rod (Very Expensive) .
Recently a friend of mine who happens to be a skilled welder used nickel rod to repair my lathe headstock. It was painstaking but he got it repaired and my Victor 20X40 is up and running again.
I would have too agree with this comment. Though I have had good results TIG welding cast with stainless steel. But I do believe stainless does have some nickel in it as part of the alloy; that's what lead me to try it in the first place.
nickel rod is recommended for cast iron repair due to its increased malleability when cool, so it doesn't put as much strain on the cast iron part (cast iron is very brittle and will sometimes crack after the abrupt heating and cooling which naturally occurs during welding). As such, nickel rod is really not ideal for a repair where the desired end result is a hard springy surface, but might be worth it to try as an intermediate step before the hard face? Might add to the overall durability of the anvil. Similar reason as to why copper and nickel are applied to steel before the final layer of chrome during the chrome plating process.
Can't argue with results. I really enjoy this experimental style of video. And the sped up footage of you laying those stick weld beads is strangely addicting. Thanks Roy and have a wonderful New Year.
Great job Roy! For not being a pro welder, I believe you have come up with at least one "Reasonable and viable solution", for a lot of people out there on a tight budget. best wishes from a welder.
I've done a little bit of welding in my life and man, I do not envy you with getting rid of all that slag. Always had a rough time getting it out of the edges of the weld.
I just got my forge set up, haven't made any video with it yet. Im new, only have a few vids so far. thank you for you faith and teachings. I have what I this=ck is the 112 pound Peter Wright anvil, boy does it need resurfacing bad, but I haventyet because its old an I don't want to ruin it. Well, I'm going to try it. Thank you againn for the inspiration.
Be really sure first... You can always weld something to It but not so easily remove something that's attached.. glad to inspire And thank you for watching
Im not usually one to make a comment, but I have been very intrigued by your efforts to tackle the harbor frieght anvil and make it usable. I dont know much, but I do know that forge welding a hardenable steel onto the anvil body was tradition. Would love to see how you would do that and how well that would work. And if it doesn't work, a bonus clip of trying explosion welding might make for some great entertainment!!! Thank you for helping us out!
I came to scoff, but your results speak for themselves. Still seems like a lot of work to turn a boat anchor into a usable anvil, but obviously it works.
Wow that's pretty good. Definitely not expecting that. Good video Roy. Keep up the great craftsmanship and hard work my friend. Forge on. Keep making. God bless.
I took a 1/2” hardened tool steel plate and liquid nailed it to my Harbor Fright anvil and it actually works well except a little more bounce than I like!
that bounce is to be expected your basically putting adhesive silicone under your strike face your going to get a ton of bounce and if you hit it on the edge you might start to get separation which can be bad if your working a piece so just be careful liquid nails is not a permanent way to bond that stay safe and check it after every use oh i would also state that epoxy is not even an option too brittle while jb weld or other chemical welding adhesives might work they are probably not going to be the best
@@ferrofeles2063 I knew that using liquid nail would give me more bounce than I wanted, but I didn’t want to weld it so that I had options in the future. Thanks for the comments and advice.
It looks like it'd beat the pants off a piece of railroad track! for a first anvil, it's usable, cheap, and available everywhere, I'd love to see a durability test, with lots of edge-work to see how it all holds up.
For a first anvil I'm going to have to disagree with you. 50/50 odds at best a new guy already has the right welding skills and equipment to do this. If you dont then you have to buy the anvil and find and pay a welder to do it for you, which is probably going to be as much cost and a lot more hassle than purchasing a mid range anvil. And id have less durability concerns with the mid range anvil.
If anybody asks me what they should do for a first anvil, my advice is simple. get the biggest, most solid chunk of metal you can find, and put it on the most solid foundation possible. while rr tracks are made of tough stuff, they just don't have the mass required to make those hard-earned first hammer blows really work. unless maybe you cast it into a block of concrete.
The process of welding with a non hard face rod first is called padding. Hard face rods ends up check cracking and padding the parent material can prevent cracking in the parent material.
Well, I'd have bet against that being possible and would have lost my money! Roy did a great job of "hard-facing" there -- something I didn't think could be done -- but he was sure skilled enough to pull it off. I've been beating up iron since I was 13 or so and I was born in '55, so do the math subtract a couple of years for the army, photojournalism and judgin' and you'll be able to figure out my experience level. Among my anvils -- which are mostly older than me by 50 to 100 years -- is one of those Harbor Freight (Russian or Chinese?) things. At it's weight, it is perfect for what I need so that I can do blacksmithing work on 'poop-deck' of my steel schooner. The 'hardness' or SOFTNESS, actually isn't something that worried me. I've seen some of the India Indian videos where some squatting blacksmiths are turning out some pretty damned good looking kukris using a 18 or 20 lb. sledge hammer head as an anvil. One such blacksmith even had two "striker boys" dug down knee-high in the dirt so they could whack the hell out of truck springs and reduce them to the right size for a knife! They sure impressed the hell out of me with what they're turning out with some of the crappiest looking tools in the universe. It says a lot about their mastery of the craft and their artistry. My H/F anvil needs some 'help.' But not in the hardening dept. I can live with that for the work I plan to do on it. Where it needs help is in it's shape to begin with. The horn is too damned fat and it's so far off of being 'round' or 'rounded,' that it's about useless for making anything that needs a graceful curve or circle. It's more like some kind of longitudinal "hump" than an anvil horn. That is the area that I'm going to introduce to Mr. Grinder at next opportunity. Also, all that nasty-assed blue paint needs to disappear. I'd rather have rust than the "advertisement" that I'm using a cheap-assed anvil when I'm forging on my boat. But I wouldn't sell a Harbor Freight anvil short, nor would I sell short a lot of the tools that can be bought there. A lot of "self-taught" and "self-teaching" people who got their first tools there have become some pretty damned good artisans. Hell, at one time, I remember making my forge out of an old brake drum from a Chevy pick-up truck and using a chunk of railroad rail as an anvil. If beatin' iron's in your blood, you'll find a way to do it. Good luck, you Youngin's! Go make somethin' hot and make somethin' special out of it. The world is your oyster.
Railroad track is actually decently hard already (especially used, it work hardens), the problem with a railroad anvil is lack of mass. I made myself one as I could get used rail free from work, but I have a piece of rail upright so you get much more mass under the workpiece. I cut another section of rail and welded it to the top of the upright rail to get a bit larger work surface, but still try to do any of the work directly above the upright rail when possible, there is a huge difference in efficiency that way.
That is reassuring to see. I got ahold of an old Mouse hole anvil from a mechanics shop where i live. 142lbs but the harden face was hit with a cutting torch and it began to separate and rust. I took it to my work shop and cut as much of the damaged areas out, and began to butter some 11018 rod over the areas to make a good surface to put the hard surfacing rod on. I havent gotten around to finishing it yet, but to see that it does infact work makes be belive that ill have it in working order, im sure it will still be a dead ringer, as i think at one point in its life it was in a huge fire as while cleaning it up i caught some fractures and started to fill them in. But heres to high hopes that i can get it atleast useable again.
This is a big plus. I gave a big negative response to the attempt to surface harden since of the brittleness of gray and white cast iron. I included an article of a company that converts white cast iron into Malleable cast iron that is far less brittle. I suspect that the annealing process for white cast iron would work for gray cast iron. If I remember need to heat the casting to 400C for a few hours and then let the casting slow cool. This change the crystal structure of the metal.
Wow. Definitely gonna have to try this. Got a iron anvil for pretty cheap a while back that I wanted to face harden. This looks like a pretty good option...
I'm sure it will crack with some real hits on it. The reason why I say that is you didn't preheat the anvil before you welded on it. When you weld cast iron you need to pre heat it or it will break. I've done A lot of cast iron welding with ni rod 55 and 99
I expect if you trimmed it down and welded on about an inch of appropriate hardness steel plate you would get a decent anvil like object. (Preheating cast iron helps with welding by the way).
Thank you or the testing. i have hard surfced small ( i kg ) jewlery anvils successfully using tghe sme techniques, but hey really aren't anvils at all. Still, I had good results. zi had considered surfacin my HF anvil, but it's an awful lot of work with no idea if it might acually work.Again, thanks for the tesing. Anvils are a hobby for me (as opposed to a usiness) so buying "Good" anvil is right out, until after my yacht and sports car.
thats got quite a bounce after hardfacing, looks like quite a bit of effort into it though, and that laugh its like santa on christmas made me laugh. and hope you have a good new year and joyous rest of the christmas season, of which there are 12 days.
Hey... Harbor Freight... LISTEN UP!!! This gentlman did it in a hobby shop - your factories can do it overseas for $2 a pound in welding rods and and one man hour of work...offer it as a different model for what, $50 more? Well worth it.
Oddly many smiths don't study welding nearly enough. Specialty fillers and weld filler materials in general are highly advanced technology. Welding fora are a good place to learn about them. Stoody, MG and other makers have fillers for nearly every task and being able to repair or upgrade anvils is quite handy. There are also abrasives for every task (Walter, Norton and 3M are rightly famous). Crown Alloys sell the 44-40 cast iron repair MIG wire (requires argon gas) which is outstanding. It can even repair installed exhaust manifolds per aametalmasters Weldingweb and other threads which show pics. Every metalworker should have welding capability. If you want serious amps the old transformer industrial machines can be gotten cheap (because they're heavy, scaffolding casters and an angle base solve that if ya get one without a cart) and their high OCV makes them a joy to use.
Thank you! Been thinking about trying this for the longest but kept talking myself out of it. Would have liked the bounce test compared on that beauty below it though.
I guess my only question is how much does 2 lbs of weld metal cost in terms of rods used, can that be recouped by buying an anvil that’s just that much more expensive than the harbor freight anvil. All in all very cool though
It's just a waste of time. I make 43 bucks an hour. Spending 3-4 hours making a garbage looking anvil isn't worth my time or materials. That being said, if you're a poor smuck with no education or possibility of working anything beyond flipping burgers... by all means waste the time.
@@MrGregggleziii sometimes the journey is just as enjoyable as the destination. You can see it as a waste of effort, but for me the satisfaction of working on a project like this is enough for me to enjoy it. But seriously, how small is your ego that you need to brag about your hourly wage to random people. What are you compensating for, did you loose your bathroom tweezers and now your boyfriend is mad that you keep soaking the toilet seat?
That's a good idea, but you can also buy a piece of bar stock the size you want from a steel shop, and maybe if they have cones get one and weld it on. I have a piece of 2x8" flat bar that I use, but to be honest my Harbor Freight anvil worked ok. I hammered out a sword and several knives on it. The difference isn't huge.
Honestly being a welder that’s expanding my blacksmithing skills I’m not really good at the blacksmithing but slowly getting better. Anyway usually when welding cast iron with 6013 kinda works but it’s very weak around the weld I’m not sure if it will eventually start to pull off a ST rod is what is normally used to weld cast iron and can be tricky sometimes with preheating and slow cooling to prevent cracks. I’m going to look for a update video for this now.
Keep at it! I started 2 years ago, my "shop " was outside and covered with a tarp every night . Very seasonal ( I live in Northern Idaho) Now I smith in 10×12 shed that I have made into a full blown blacksmithing shop. I fabricated my own forge And I am using a chunk of mild steel as my anvil. Works fine, making hooks knives, decorative twists etc.. The moment you move that metal under your hammer..... I was hooked. 🤟🇺🇸🇷🇺
Haha you actually have the best harbor freight anvil out there now lol.. I don't think I'd go through all that trouble but man that's a nice rebound.. now thinking about it, harding it like that would make it a nice light travel anvil.. maybe that one would be a good giveaway/bid anvil once you done testing it
I haven't done any hard-facing as a pro for... decades, but I seem to recall that Stoody makes an electrode that they call "BU" for 'build-up' that is often used as the boundary layer between the hard-facing and the parent metal. As others have said I would have suggested pre- and post-heating the anvil during the welding process. Bottom line, though... if it works, it works.
a quick spark test would show if that anvil is either cast steel or cast iron. if that thing is indeed a cast iron anvil, the hard facing will pop off on the first good hard use of it. no pre-heat virtually guarantees that, and if it's cast steel without a pre-heat the hard surface will crack eventually if it hasn't already
Thats what the books have you believe. I've welded some cast b.s. monkey metal out of necessity and had it hold for years. Sometimes it just defies reality.
@@1980Baldeagle there is some truth to that. i've seen it too. the cast iron pieces i've welded with regular rod didn't stick at all. brazing was the only thing i;ve used that actually held together aside from nickel rod. but then it also depends on how much the part is stressed before it breaks.
👍🏼not bad ! I don't know if it's possible but you can also try getting hardened steel plate and welding it to the surface of it and try that out to see if it's any better. I've heard from people that's the best option 🤷 because you can pick the exact hardening of the plate steel and thickness to your liking.
ive seen someone do that and they ended up with an anvil worse than the starting anvil because their was a gap between the top of the harbour freight anvil and the hardened plate. a hardened steel plate would have given equally Good results.
You’d have to forge weld the whole plate to the anvil face, or you get a completely dead anvilive seen people try it, and don’t remember the channel, but years ago someone took the time to forge weld a plate on, then clean it up, rough, then anneal, harden, and temper it, great results, but definitely for the cost and time, the equipment you’d need, you’d already have at least one good anvil, and likely a bunch, so it’d be a net loss, unless you’re trying to make good ones, out of garbage, and think you can make them fast enough, to justify doing it and selling them. At that rate though, you’d probably have to cycle through as many as you could in a day, on just forge welding, then have people who could anneal and harden them as you welded more, etc. but they’d still cost a lot, so people could just buy good ones for slightly more….maybe even less.
@@Plastikdoom on the price of anvils $350-400 ballpark at the low end for a 70 pounder Not including shipping. So unless you have the tools I would not do the plate way. but the stick weld way. It would be at or less than buying a new one if you started from scratch even then it kind of a win. you now have a welder and anvil. On larger anvil this would be a win. As the start at $800 and up.
@@blackgriffinxx yeah for sure, I was saying for forge welding the plate on, not worth it, as it’ll be same cost or more with your labor, materials. And that’s even with big trip hammers, want to try to do it by hand? Sure it’s possible, but will suck, haha.
I would say it's perfect in a pinch. If you don't have access to a better anvil or on a job with limited resources then It will work beautifully. The real test would be put it through an honest days work and see what it looks like at the end of the week. You could also resurface the entire deck with a mild to hardened steele plate sandwich. The mild steel would act as a cushion for the hardened steel and give the cast iron base a little protection. Just a thought.
Kinda surprised the 6013 made a decent enough weld to be a filler layer…hmm. Especially without heating the cast. Wonder how well some 309 would do with a preheat, I’ve definitely had to weld ductile with 309 to stainless, or carbon, or other ductile, and it worked just fine. Then run it over with 7018, then hardface? Could probably double layer then with no issues.
@@ChristCenteredIronworks ahh, ok, no worries, was just curious as to how it managed to work well enough on that much cast, thinner stuff will weld kinda decent without it, if you don’t need a lot of strength. Great results though, I have one of those anvils I got awhile back, and thought about doing that, might actually do it now, any improvement to it would be far better than they come.
@@huckstirred7112 yeah, it would bond better and let the 60 or 70 series really weld great. Also figured you’d end up more like an alloyed steel layer on top, as it’ll burn out some of the carbon and mix it all together. Taking out some of the brittleness. Just from basic experience of getting into blacksmithing years ago, and lots of welding for my current job, on dirty crap metals, the old existing stuff on dairy farms, we install and maintain pumps and equipment on them. And before that just shop class and welding on farms growing up.
I usually take a piece of scrap, a mild steel plate, cut out a hardy hole, and then harden and temper the plate. I then weld it to the top of the HF anvil.
I’d love to see a test about how well the face of the anvil would work-harden. It would prolly take a while to get it to any reasonable level of work-hardening, but it would be interesting
@@ChristCenteredIronworks EXACTLY!!! Lol thanks Roy, if I’m being honest. I’ve got one of these and they suck, BUT!! I make a living using it so 🤷♂️ I know, I’d have to work less with a good one but in Kentucky most people want the anvils for yard decorations 😢
So I guess the biggest question I have is; since the layer of hardened metal is quite thin, after actually forging on it for some time, would the work start to temper the hardened surface? Thinner metal heats up a lot quicker. Would be interesting to see a test where you do a significant amount of forging on this anvil, then do the ball bearing test again.
Assuming the weld layer was fused well I wouldn't expect an issue as it is really all one piece of metal, just a layer of a different type, so should dissipate heat well into the body of the anvil. If it was a sheet of hard steel sitting on top of the cast anvil, then I could see there being issues
For $25 Harbor Freight sells a "forged, high carbon steel" 12 lb sledge hammer. Taking out the price of a handle, that means their manufacturing cost for the head is probably no more than 50 cents a pound. If you can manufacture that, you can manufacture a 100 pound forged steel anvil and sell it for $150 and make a good profit.
would be nice if it worked out like that but there is a major difference in working with a 12lb hunk of steel vs 100lb hunk of steel. that would take some serious effort and equipment to accomplish. there is a reason good anvils are not cheap. i do think it would be a good business tho, with the demand being what it is its crazy what some people are paying for worn out crap. i have a 100lb vulcan ( cast body with hardened steel top) in great shape and only paid 40$ for it but i see people paying a few $ per lb for some of these things that look like they have been thru hell.
Great job! Curious how it would hold up. My guess is not long at all. I had an old 100# Fischer sawyer anvil that was grey cast and hard face plate it too Bounced nice , about 90%. Rebound.
The cost of a Harbor Freight anvil the welding rods the grinding disc and time when it be better then just go by a good a start with just curious what do you think.
So theoretically, if you have a cast iron vice with an anvil on it, it would DEFINITELY be worth it to harden that due to it not being a large surface?
I am guessing that if you were trying to hard face a large block of mild steel instead of a cast iron anvil, you wouldn't need to bother with the 6013/7013 base layer right?
Excellent. While I have a good anvil in the forge area, I have an old harbor freight anvil in the fab shop. I'm going to give that a try. I have some old 7018 that I need to use up, I'm wondering if that would make a good base layer.
I question the longer term viability of so thin a layer of hard face material. About 30 years ago I had some hammer dies faced with a specialty material which I no longer recall, but it was fairly exotic and made for the sort of application to which I was going to put it. The dies failed in minutes due to the lack of sufficient thickness, which was about 1/4" on a set of 4140 hammer dies. One pound of hard face rods over that large an area isn't going to yield a very thick layer. It will be interesting to see how much use this will stand.
Would have thought before you started welding on it you would have preheated the anvil. Burn some of that surface and near surface junk off, and 60 series welding rods are cellulose type rods. An handle burn through garage, trash, etc,,, 70 series welding rods want a very clean surface to stick too.
