The BIG BLU ANVILS were designed over a decade ago as a collaborative effort with several of our partners in the community to bring all of the most iconic elements of the traditional Czech Anvil into one masterpiece in iron. An anvil is more than just a collection of shapes for forging, it's a work of art. Just like how you can combine elements together to make something greater than the sum of its parts, we struck out to execute the same with this astounding tool.
All that time ago, when we drafted the design and perfected the mold, we never imagined that we would be able to cast this anvil in the USA. As you can imagine, American foundries cast with the best steel in the world, but the challenge is that they do not have the processes to cast, harden, and finish something as nuanced as an anvil. After all, it may just be a block of steel, but it has got a lot going on: sharp corners that must withstand work hardening, cavities like the Hardie hole that must be precise and homogeneous, the overall structure must be dense, but not fully aligned.
So without the proof and the resources to go to engineers at an American foundry and ask for all these things, it was a clear choice at the time to have our anvil made by a seasoned European foundry that had hundreds of years of history-making anvils like ours..... but we didn't let the story end there, because we never stop trying to improve. In 2017, Dean Curfman, the owner of Big BLU, made it his next challenge to bring the production of this anvil stateside.
But several things had to happen to make this dream a reality. It took 4 years of painstaking research to arrive where we are today, consulting with literally hundreds of engineers and foundrymen from across the country. In the end, the process is like nothing else out there. This anvil is cast in a US foundry using top-grade US steel! Even better than that, we have made the investment to refine a process that is a marriage of age old European tradition and experience into the high tech science of the foundries we have evolved here in the USA.
For all of you who have a BLU anvil, thank you for supporting us on this journey, and for those who are about to make this the centerpiece of their metalworking trade, welcome to the family!
From all of us at Big BLU: thank you!
- The Big BLU Team
One of the most recently developed ferrous materials is AusSteel. Developed initially by Ford Motor Company for a powerful material for camshafts, AusSteel has now become a go-to engineered material when abrasion resistance plus toughness is required. We are happy to now bring this science to your tough anvil applications.
But what is AusSteel? It is a high strength, high wear resistant, high toughness, heat treated variation of Ductile steel. Ductile Steel has been a favorite of design engineers for decades when they require much higher performance than cast iron. Now, with the advent of state of the art metallurgy and heat treating, we have been able to virtually double these properties.
AusSteel gets its remarkable properties from a special micro-structure developed by this sophisticated austempering heat treatment. This structure is called Ausferrite. This is how it is formed.
We first start with casting the part in a special alloy compensation that will react sufficiently to the special heat treat. Trigger elements such as tin, titanium, chrome, vanadium, and sulfur must be tightly controlled. The process used to cast the part must produce good nodularity and high nodule counts. We then heat the part up in a controlled atmosphere to a temperature of 1600 F. We hold the part at this temperature long enough to saturate the microstructure with carbon. Then, the part is cooled at a slow rate to around 650 F. This is done to avoid undesirable transformational products. We then hold the part at this temperature in molten salt until the Ausferrite is formed. No other single engineering material available today exhibits the range of properties obtainable in AusSteel.
Now we are utilizing this amazing material to produce the finest anvil available in the world today. All BLU Anvils are now finely crafted in the USA!
Tools are where the metal meets the road. A good anvil has a lot of shapes on it, but that gets even better with a nice spread of Hardie tools in the mix. The one inch square Hardie hole makes it easy to find or form standardized tooling to fit this anvil and if you are looking for hand-forged American made 4140 and S7 Hardie tools, look no further than BLU.
No anvil would be complete without our one last accessory: the stand! The fitted stand that we make for this anvil is like no other on the market. Its plate steel construction ensures it's well overbuilt for the task at hand while the thick mounting plate gives a solid bond to the anvil via our silicon mounting process. On the stand the anvil is 33" tall to the face.
Each anvil is cast and dynamically hardened, ground, and inspected in the USA. Here are some of the things you may want to know about this anvil.
Hardie and pritchel sizes?
- This anvil has a 1" hardie hole, a 1/2" pritchel hole and a seconds 5/8" pritchel hole.
How hard is it?
- On the surface 54 to 56 HRC. You may even see small circular shiny spots in your anvil's finish where its test was performed, because every anvil gets tested! But it doesn't stop at the surface, this anvil has an astounding depth of hardness of over 1".
How big is it?
- 150 pounds! +/- roughly about 5 pounds
- Over 200 pounds with the stand
-The length is 30-3/8" horn to horn with a face width that is just under 3-5/8" wide. The height is 10"
- On the stand the anvil is 33" tall to the face
Why should I buy a Big BLU Anvil?
- Because you have read to the bottom of the page, you are obviously in love, and we can't blame you. It's the nicest anvil we could dream up.
