Railroad track anvil on craigslist12/9/2023 I burned myself once on a piece of cast iron that had been buried in ashes for four hours. You need to anneal it - take it from the heat and bury it in a big pile of ashes, or - less desirable - sand. The simplest way to do it is to cook it on a gas grille until it gets red hot. (Charcoal is the next best way.) If you let it cool naturally, you are normalizing the steel that isn't good enough. You will need to remove the temper from the steel to make it flat and stay that way. You will notice your spring section is curved. One end (the end to be mounted at the base of the horn) needs to be square the other can be ragged for the time being, just be a little generous with your measurements. You may as well torch it, since you are doing it anyway. Depending on how long your track section is, you will need perhaps a foot to eighteen inches of spring. This is where the section of truck leaf spring comes in. The next step is to make a flat surface on the top of the anvil. Remember, dents and rust pitting on the surface of the spring will be transferred to the work, so try to find a smooth piece. You will also need about the same length of a truck leaf spring, so, while you are poking around, looking for a section of track, ask about a piece of spring, too. You can get by with eighteen inches, so that is in your favor. I can even show you places where surveying markers were made out of sections of track driven into the ground! You don't need a lot of track - two feet will be oodles. When they pulled the track up in my area, scraps were available everywhere. You might find pieces in scrapyards, auto repair shops, antiques shops, or various other places. In the country, especially in areas where there used to be railroad tracks, it is a little more doable. While there may be plenty of track there, I'm almost positive they don't want you pulling it up. That may be easier said than done, especially in more urban areas. Another example of learning some cool stuff after the original post.First, you find a piece of railroad track. Some had been there for who knows how long. I was also shocked to find out you could get in trouble for having some rail as the last shop I worked at was next to tracks and was littered with swapped out rails. Today I checked back and there is a semi done one for $25, that I could handle. There has been a number of people trying to sell rail pieces on the local CL. Should have known that a rail wasn't just a rail. There was some silly commercial extant back then that showed a cowboy hatted track worker carrying a whole section of rail on one shoulder-but someone pointed out, this would have been far less improbable in the old west days when they used 80-pound rail-still, that would be a mighty heavy load. Some of the old little used sidings had very old 80 or 90-pound rail. 139-pound is the only exact number that I can recall, but I think that we installed some reconditioned 110 or 115-pound rail in Virginia due to a lack of 139-pound. So far as I know that was the heaviest size rail in common use at the time. All else being equal, heavier rail gives a steadier platform and allows faster trains-plus it lasts longer.Īlmost all the new rail that we installed was 139-pound rail. When I worked for the L&N Railroad (35 years ago) I found that rail is identified by how much a yard of it weighs. If I decide to finish polish and/or mount it to a scaled stump, I'll add some more photos. When I got it done, I had to set up this photo. I used a bandsaw to rough in the shape, and used a Diamond X grinding wheel to level the surfaces, a diamond cutting wheel to slice the base to make the "feet", a 4 1/2" Pferd Polifan wheel to make the inside radii, then some flapdisks to smooth it all out, and a wire wheel to de-rust the rest. I took a 1/16th off the "sharp" side with a 7" grinder to level the top. The side with the sharp corner had a bit of a lip or burr. I don't know what kind of rail this is or how old it is, but the curved side and top looked worn in, rather than ground. There wasn't enough material to copy the heel, and the whole top is offset, so I worked that into the shape. The horn is modeled after the one on my Trenton anvil. I didn't need it, and may never use it, but that's never stopped me before. The 155lb Trenton anvil inspire the design. I wanted to, but never did anything with it until I saw the excellent one that Tuomas Soikkeli posted here recently. I got a small, butchered piece of rail track some years ago in a lot of tools that I bought.
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