Jesse Bert San Miguel de Allende: Journey of an Anvil

As many of your know or maybe not know, I like tools a lot! So much that I make them! They are a very important part of what I and the rest of the jewelers out there do and thus begins my journey…

I found this used but beautiful little hand-forged anvil at an antique place here in Mexico. It is quite small 11 inches to be exact. I suspect it was originally a Farriers anvil (used for making horse shoes). Since it originally took the abuse of red-hot steel it will hold up to silver quite nicely, and will make a wonderful jewelers anvil, after it is sanded a little.

The little beauty.

Since I already have one just about this size, which I found a number of years back, I offered to sell it to my friend, Kent, that also does some jewelry work here in San Miguel. He was quick to snap it up. I then offered to mount it for him if we could find a good dry hardwood stump. After a little asking around our friend Zach was generous enough to donate a nice big log of Mesquite wood to the cause, which is more than hard enough… and thus the project had begun, not the least of which was cutting this baby in two!

That 150 year old hand saw my dad gave me still has an awesome tooth and cuts very straight but even so it still took me 40 minutes to get through it!

Here I am putting wooden pads with bits of leather for stability of the base.