Considering how hard you hit things for an anvil, most rocks won’t work, you would just imprint any bumps back into the metal. It’s about density. Also it’s not just being flat the rounded part is used when you want to bend the metal, especially if your working to fold or bend the piece.
One of our old Farrier’s had a smaller anvil bolted to the back of his truck, along with a small enclosed heating element oven thing to make the horse shoe a bit softer. He used the round part of the anvil after heating up the horse shoe to bend it so it fit the hoof properly for the horse. He said it’s a better fit if it’s custom than just slapping it on like most farrier’s do. It’s cool when you learn all the uses of things like that.
The guy was good, he used to be the work at the Churchhill Downs racetrack, and handled it for the Derby for a few years. If people trust you to put shoes on multi million dollar horses, it’s a fair qualification.
I wonder why metal files are not in the game. They could probably having metal sawing 1. You’d find them @ hardware stores and in various places.
