Several ideas in this thread show up in my first Teemings piece, Watch Out For Falling Anvils:
That’s the spirit! An anvil, to me, is a musical instrument. As a percussionist, I come across a work or two every couple years that calls for an anvil. Using a real one would be great, though I do have a nice substitute.
The most common anvil-substitute for percussionists is a brake drum (as in, harvested-from-the-wheel-of-an-old-car brake drum). But several years ago I got my hands on an old oxygen tank. I tell ya, that sucker makes a realllly nice, loud PING when struck with a hammer! A friend-of-a-friend procured the tank for me, so I don’t know the precise origin, though I was assured it was legally obtained. It came with no extra hardware/valves attached and, in fact, had a hole drilled in the side (to improve resonance and, perhaps, demonstrate that it was empty).
I guess these details weren’t visible from the back of the concert hall. After one performance, a patron approached our conductor and worriedly said: “Tell your guys to be very careful with that thing. I am a retired nurse, and they can be quite dangerous. In hospital once, I saw an oxygen tank fall over. Its valve got knocked off and turned it into a missile. Someone could have been killed!”
Dude thought I was whacking away on a pressurized tank with a hammer! So, yeah, that’s my advice. Turn it into a musical instrument without raising the worries of audience members.
I have a couple - I have a shoemaker’s anvil (which I use for making shoes, natch), a jeweller’s anvil that I use for both jewellery and leatherwork, and a farrier’s anvil that resides at a friend’s place, that can be used for blades and other hot iron work.
I’d want to back off a bit more than they did. It’s not an absolute certainty that it would fly straight upwards with that setup.
I use it to mass produce rust in combination with my forge.
When I was growing up, my father’s favorite expression about my antics was, “Give him an anvil and a rubber mallet and he’ll break the anvil every time!”
My anvil’s stored in my memory.