Thread: A neck chisel

I guess a follow up question is are you buying it to use it for its intended purpose, or to use it for something else?

First for its intended use. I'm building a Japanese timber framed shed for my garden and trying to use mostly traditional Japanese tools and techniques. But after that I think it might be generally useful for leveling grooves in places where a router or kotenomi would be awkward or impossible to use. Or maybe it will just be a curiosity.

Then it's probably important that it's japanese. It's something I would shop make myself if needed, but it definitely wouldn't look like it was japanese. On my list to make something laminated, though.

For someone with no toolmaking experience, something like this can be made out of bar stock in the thickness of the chisel's width with the rest of the work done just with a hack saw.

But I have plenty of japanese stuff, too, and don't intend to replace it - the aesthetic of the tools is nice.

The reason I asked is when I went through my buying phase of japanese stuff, there are a lot of specialty tools. They have purposes, but back then it was a little more popular, I guess, for people to ask "do I need ______" with that ____ being something fairly unusual. Bottom cleaning chisels, and so forth.

I'm glad to see you're using it the way it's intended to be used. your business and not mine, of course, but it's nifty to see the specialty tools being used vs. just collected because they're the next pokemon card not yet on hand.

I do have a few tools in the shop just because they look cool or odd but mostly I have users. I don't like to tie up space or funds with stuff that won't get used.

As I understand it, the trick with forging the neck chisel with its laminated blade is get the bottom straight and flat over its length, which looks to be about 10 inches. And to get the head portion in line with the rest of the blade.

I've been posting about the Japanese-style shed project here:

How far along the bottom does the lamination go? Is it a couple of inches or is it almost full length?

There is some skill to doing this in solid by hand - in learning to pre-quench, then cycle steel to reduce grain and establish fresh grains and then quench again. I don't know if any of that belongs in japanese tradition given the laminated steel.

I have made some knives out of laminated white steel or maybe it was V-toku (similar) and the nice thing about them, and with this chisel also, is if there is distortion in the quench, you have an additional option - you can hammer the unhardened part of the lamination straight and the hardened layer will not crack. The window of opportunity to do that with solid steel is too narrow (it can be moved after quench, but generally it's better to push the quench to as low of a temperature as possible as fast as possible).

the shape of this chisel makes what I do with solid something that would work, though - it doesn't have weird biases or curves that would create distortion in the quench.

In the US, if a western version of this tool was made, we'd probably ruin it by making it out of something full hardness end to end with a 58 hardness so that the edge rolls. I wouldn't do that, of course but what can be done with steel by hand in several steps is not ideal for even a boutique manufacturer who wants to outsource.

Some of the heat treat services here advertise that they can straighten simple steels, but there are a lot of cracked knives on the knife forums from someone trying to do it quickly. It fits into yet another one of those "you could do it and make $30 an hour as an individual, but it's not as easy to do it as a company, demand $100 an hour for the employee's work and then pay the employee $30 an hour".

The neck chisel arrived today. To D.W.'s question, the lamination goes about half-way. The scale is Imperial.

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