DEMPSEYS FORGE / anvilfire.com
Jock Dempsey established DEMPSEY'S FORGE in 1976 at our old grist mill in Gladys, VA.
DEMPSEYS FORGE has been maintained as a business in various forms since then.
First as a blacksmith and fabrication shop, then a consulting service and software company, then the umbrella and R&D arm of anvilfire.com.
Sadly in these 43 years almost every company we did business with has gone by the way.
We still bank with the same company even though their name has changed three times.
. . Our server hosts have changed seven times as hosting companies went out of business.
anvilfire.com was established in the spring of 1998 after "the guru" had been answering
questions on the old "Blacksmiths' Junkyard" for a couple years. It was a member of that forum that gave Jock the nickname "guru".
anvilfire was launched with two forums, the 21st Century page with a series of articles, the Bookshelf book review page with a
half dozen reviews and a short lived classified ads page.
Within a few months the major blacksmith tool suppliers had banner ads on anvilfire.
As "the guru" Jock Dempsey has been answering questions on the "gurusden" with his assistants for over 20 years.
We've addressed everything from health and safety, education, business, metallurgy and identifying old tools.
About this time "Kiwi" Andrew Hooper volunteered to setup a chat on anvilfire. Over a period of
time Kiwi and the guru modified the chat to suit our purposes. Then in may 1999 launched an
on-line "classroom" called "iForge" using the chat. Over the next four years 196 Tuesday night
"demos" with images and interactive chat were performed. Over the years many new features
have been added to anvilfire such as the Power Hammer Page, Anvil Gallery, Vise Gallery,
Comic of the day and week, and Tips of the day (general, anvils, welding, newby, safety and
buyer). We also established other web pages such as
swageblocks.com and
repoussetools.com.
In 2003 Jock Dempsey "the guru" built the first anvilfire store selling many of the products we still
sell today. This was hand built using a relatively primitive little program called uShop (now long defunct)
a few years later it was replaced by a system called x0base, written by Jock's brother Paul. That cart system
went away with a move to a server that had a newer Operating System (OS) that x0base would
not work with. At that time we went with a Magento CMS MySQL database system and used it for
several years. On our most recent move we had to abandon Magento as its newer (buggy)
version was required for the latest OS. (notice a theme here?).
SO, our newest (Nov. 2019 store) is a hand built system by Jock Dempsey using PayPal buttons.
Thus we have been doing business on-line continuously for 16 years.
We started without integrated shipping, had integrated shipping on two cart systems and are back to fixed USPS shipping.
