Last year I bought myself a beautiful anvil from a nice lady who had it collecting rust in her garden. Finally, getting my act together and going through a few plans I have finished the stand for it.
I originally made a much taller stand for a smaller railroad track anvil, but for the last few weeks I’ve been planning to use a fir tree round from some felling near our house. After deciding it was not quite big enough and had a slant that made me twitchy, this is my final stand.
My beautiful anvil 
Scrap wood router smoothing frame 
Smoothed on both sides using router 
Steel straps to hold it all together 
Chains and turnbuckles ready to hold down the anvil
Made from 200mm x 100mm softwood sleepers cut down with my mitre saw, the 6 peices are heavily glued together. Using some scrap wood from a pallet from work, I build an adjustable height frame around the block and a simple router sled. It’s not pretty, but the wood was free and it only needed to last for the one job.
Knowing the limitations of my carpentry, I perposefully cut the sleepers slightly too large and used my router and it’s shonky sled to smooth of both ends and get the desired height in 3 passes. 20mm x 2mm mild steel flat bar was then bent and screwed in with heavy hex bolts around the top and bottom as a kind of ‘strapping’ to reinforce the glue holding it all together (the contact surfaces for the glue are not perfect, so there’s a little bit more horizontal strength from the metal straps).
The edges got a softening with the belt sander and I used the same hex bolts to fix an eye plate on each side to attach a nice heavy stainless stell chain and some turnbuckles to tighten it down. Now all it needs is moving to a place to forge in and the anvil sat ontop.
All in all, it’s been a very productive day and my back feels like it’s going to be very angry with me in the morning, but that’s tomorrow’s problem.
Parsnips and Iron 