LINSEED OIL ANVIL STAND SERIES

The sculpture weighs about 400 pounds, yet Putnam made it alone, heating the metal in his 3,000-degree forge, drawing the curves in chalk on the primitive platen table and bending the metal to meet them, then pounding it with both a mechanical air hammer and his own strength and persistence. “When you’re doing something like that you have to worry about not just the physical engineering of how it’s going to stand up and who’s going to come play on it,” Putnam says, “but then how is that negative space or the space you’ve defined going to look to the eye?”

LINSEED OIL ANVIL STAND SERIES

It is part of his series Lines In Space, some of the sculptures man-sized and some small enough to sit on a table, and all inspired by the childhood books by Thornton Burgess, whose Old Mother West Wind is depicted as lines that eddy off toward the horizon. In the sculpture garden outside his White Oak Forge in Huntly, Virginia, 90 minutes north of Charlottesville on rollercoaster roads, the 7-foot-tall West Three Wind circles back on itself three times before shooting back through all three layers and off toward the distant sky. Hot like this, the crystalline molecules of the metal slide past one another and re-form under Putnam’s tools as delicate petals and leaves, or as soaring swoops and swirls that cantilever out over broad bases. Flying sparks have burned constellations into his beret and shards of metal have scarred his skin, yet he awakens each day excited to return to his fire. His hands are strong, his shoulders broad, his hearing damaged by the clang and the clatter. Putnam, 80, has been creating art from iron for more than 40 years. The angle of the peen and the force of his follow-through shape hot metal the way a rolling pin pushes pastry. I did these with a little Ozito gasless MIG I bought last week: The new one, where the feed and voltage are both adjustable rather than just the feed rate.HUNTLY, VIRGINIA – Nol Putnam forges wind from iron, his hammer metronomic at 2½ strikes a second, steel against iron against anvil. I welded this in place because the strap sits in a channel and could not be fitted over otherwise. PS: Below you will see the welds I did where the ends of the flatbar met. The last step will be to add the tool holder to the top and secure the anvil with some brackets that I'm yet to make Overall, I'm super happy with the outcome. I sealed the charred base with two layers of boiled Linseed oil.įinally, I created the 2x metal straps that fit snugly in the channels I had milled, welded the ends and drove 16x 45mm coach screws through it to bring it all together. Once I was happy with the shape and size, I used a blowtorch to char the exterior and really bring out the wood grain, followed by a quick Scotchbrite scuffing to blend it nicely. I also used the router to create 2x 25x3mm channels around the base, 150mm from the top and bottom ends. I traced the anvil's footprint and used my router to drop it by about 10mm so that the anvil sat nice and snug and couldn't slide around.

I used a power planer to get the sides relatively flush without completely ruining it's rugged looks, and also threw a bevel on the edges while I was at it. So I started off with a 100x100x2400 timber post that I cut in 4 and glued together to create the 200x200圆00 blank to work from. I wanted something epic, preferably medieval looking with a mix of charred wood and bare steel. Naturally an anvil needs to sit on a sturdy base and I didn't just want to settle for the old tree stump solution. Now while I had no immediate need for an anvil in the garage, if you love tools, you probably love anvils too A couple of weeks ago, I picked up a little anvil for a very reasonable price off Facebook Marketplace.

Linseed oil anvil stand