#beginning blacksmith

Hey Portland, have you checked out Oaks Bottom Forge in Sellwood?

This is the Centurion anvil I recently brought up to Portland from my dad's shop, where I grew up welding and blacksmithing near Lake Tahoe.

It's been a circuitous journey for this young anvil. In its short life, it has moved from Port Townsend, Washington to Emerald Bay in Tahoe, then on to my dad's shop in Truckee, and finally up to Portland with me.

Nimba Anvils was founded by Russell Jaqua in 1993, and makes the best quality double-horn anvils in the states. Read more about how anvils are made in this article written by Jaqua for the ABANA journal. 

Before Jaqua passed away, we bought the mid-size Centurion for a job at Cascade Lake, a property on Lake Tahoe. The Centurion weighs in at 260 lbs, a manageable size to transport to the job site, where we built a large railing for a staircase. We camped at the water's edge and spent the day forging and finishing the railing.

(An interesting sidenote: the property had been in the family for a long time, and at one point, John Steinbeck stayed at the property as an English tutor, working with one of the children. Supposedly he went up to the north shore pretty often during his stay, where he got into all kinds of trouble, just like me.)

This is my dad's anvil, a Nimba Gladiator, which has never left Truckee. That's because it weighs 450 pounds. You'd have to be pretty serious about moving it.

And this is my shop anvil, a Peter Wright. At 112 lbs, it's relatively portable, a Craigslist find I picked up in Roseburg, Oregon, on our way up from California in the U-Haul truck. The London company boasted all-new iron in an era when many anvils were made from scrap, and the classic design defined the shape of the anvil in the 19th & 20th centuries.