I need a simple anvil to hammer against when I load rocket motors, so I grabbed the largest piece of steel scrap I had on hand and started facing it down so that it’s flat and the faces are parallel. Not exactly a complicated operation for most lathes, but my little 1HP lathe is definitely not cut out for this. For starters, it’s barely able to hold the 8″ disc in the 4-jaw chuck. I’m pretty certain that if this were half an inch larger, it would not be machinable in my shop. At any rate, perseverance paid off and I got it done. Probably would have been cheaper and easier to use a rectangular steel block and mill it flat, but I thought this would be more fun.
