Peter Wright anvil value?

Good morning, Haines. Not enough info (pictures or rebound information) to answer your question.
Kinda like taking a picture of the hood ornament and asking how much the car is worth.
 
Like Billy said, pictures are needed of the face especially, from the side it looks like part of the hardened face has broken off. It may also have a sway but I cannot tell from the picture. PW's do tend to sway over time. I have one almost just like it.
 
It's a decent size, so there might be plenty of good, usable face and edges after dressing.
 
Here are a couple of additional pictures.anvil sway1.jpganvil face1.jpg

The rebound was pretty good. Because of the face condition and the fact it is not on a level surface, the ball did not bounce stright up but on an angle. It came back up to the drop height.
 
What that is worth depends on who is looking at it. When I look at it, I see a well used anvil with some damage but it still has use in a forge. The edges, surface and table can be dressed and used as a teaching anvil, or when doing something like punching where I may damage my "good" anvil. The sway is bad for knife making but not too bad for general blacksmith work. With those eyes, I may give $200-275 to use it as a beater in my shop. The main reason is, I may hit that thing once and break it in half. It may last for decades in a shop but there is no way to tell which will occur so I prefer to spend $600 for a new anvil with a warranty.

All of that being said, I bet you, if you dress the edges, table and surface, someone will pay you $4 a pound for it.
 
Definitely do not grind the face smooth. If you do you may grind away too much of the hardened face and destroy what rebound it has left. I would leave it as is.

Doug
 
Haines Custom said:
By dressing I assume you mean grinding it smooth?
Click to expand...
Not sure I'd use the word "grinding", but yeah. I'd use a flap wheel (not a grinding disc) on an angle grinder just to soften the sharp corners. Like Doug said, you don't want to grind through the hardened face, so having a machined flat surface is not necessarily the goal here.
 
On a lot of Peter Wrights you can tell where the weld line is if you clean around the top inch of the sides of the anvil with a deburring or flap wheel. Those deburring wheels like an epoxy-coated very coarse scotchbrite stuff work great. That'll tell you if you have enough depth left to have it face-milled or surface ground flat.
 
That is a good video. It's funny to me that we all marvel over the "ring" on an anvil when we first get it, then spend a lot of time and effort trying to stop it from ringing...
 
Sorry if the vid mentioned this (I only watched the start). Ring magnet on the horn tip quiets 'em very nicely, better than a chain or nailing it down. Has to be on the tip for the best effect. (Trick learned from the lead smith at Centaur Forge, to give credit where due.)

If one is really handy with an arc welder, one can hardface an anvil and restore it, also. The anvil shown needs a lot of work, but one edge looks like it might be intact enough to re-radius and not have to do radical restoration stuff. That dip in the top is really problematic, though, without a secondary anvil-like-object to straighten on. It's also badly dinged up and that will reflect in the steel being hammered.

One other point about anvils: prices domestically for old anvils vary a great deal by region. A $4/lb anvil in one place is a $2/lb anvil somewhere else.
 
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