I've just started brazing 8 gauge copper wire into rings. Handy way to keep a radiator bleeder key from disappearing, a nice big shiny ring for it. This welding stuff is addictive.

My name stamp doesn't punch quite deep enough into the profile of round wire. Gonna want an anvil to flatten an edge. Then a forge. Then more grinding and polishing tools ...

I looked over a job years ago in a wreck of a house but didn't sell it. Place full of junk. But did recognize three wood boxes of anvil attachments. The guy working the job let me have them all. Tools for the hardy hole. For making spoons and cups, maybe. A young gal who blacksmithed at a local historical house bought the whole lot. A decent trade, it is.

In the '90s I attended the Byer Metalworks auction. All the tools from when Philadelphia was candy-making capital of the world, the tools to make the vessels which supplied the candy manufacturers, were auctioned. Even a sand-filled table, must have been 8' x 8' or bigger, covered with different-shaped anvils which slid into slots in top. The guy who won that piece seemed overwhelmed with emotion. A hundred years old and still suited to a metalsmith. The building, its single story 30' roof and full length skylights, c. 1890, went for $82,000. Worth $400k a decade later. Triple that now ... (I could have bought a turn of the nineteenth century three brick elevator factory, the top floor crammed with vintage parts, for $52,000 in the mid-1990s. Just those parts would be worth several times that, marketed via the internet).

I met old man Byer in '94, when I wanted some brazing advice. He showed me the most wonderful salesman's samples from the '30s, miniature copper buckets and such, the rivets and banding perfect. And we both shook our heads in disbelief as he told me of the crack cocaine punks who broke in through the roof and stole worthless crap. Leaving an antique barometer and the antique miniature copper vessel samples ...