Thread: SOme long awaited shed time

Very Nice!! They look like a high end professional chisel set.

Well Done!

Thats a nice set that you've produced and shown what could be done...have a greenie

Anyone that produces good looking tools like that certainly grabs my attention.
Well done!

Cheers

Very nice professional looking set

cool

Very good looking set Mat. How did you do the blueing?

Nice work toolin, whats the wood on the small one at the bottom of the picture?

Cheers

Great job Toolin, I bet you get much satisfaction out of using top quality tools that you made yourself...

Is that the first time you have used Redgum since you cam out to Oz? If so, what do you think of it?

Now you've got that one under your belt, whats next on the menu?

First pic is of the 01 tool steel in it's raw form. It's precision ground tool steel from Sarrett in the US. Not sure how easy it is to find here but I would suspect that a similar product can be found. I like Sarrett cause they have a very good reputation for a high quality product. I use O1 cause A2 HSS is too hard to work with with respect to hardening and tempering back. It has to be heated well above what my propane flame thrower can produce and cooling would be a monumental task also. And tempering back is next to impossible for the do it yourselfers.

Pic two is the roughing out of the tool with a 4" angle grinder. This is the 1 1/2" chisel blank. Thought I'd start with the hardest one first. I tend to be a bit loose with precision so most measurements are eye balled. You can see the faint line of the pencil where I was grinding to.

Pic three. Once I have got the basic shape of the "wedge" ground with the angle grinder it's on to the 12" disk sander I made for the lathe. The real beauty of the disk sander is I can spin it at any rpm I like so precision even by hand is very easy to achieve when it's only spinning at 100 rpm. Even though it's tool steel,because it's annealed it's "soft" and easy to work with.

Matt,

Really good, inspirational stuff! So? when does the full-length how-to movie hit the stands? You know, given the discussion we had on the way back from the Brisbane WWW show, you have the makings of an industry here. You could become a guru, like my hero Roger Gifkins.

Cheers,
Keith

Pic one.
Once I have a tapper I'm happy with it's time to grind the bevels. Roughing is done with the angle grinder and the final finish grind is done with the 12" disk sander at about 50 or so rpm. At that speed it's very easy to get a real good feel as to what is happening and is very easy to manipulate the grind as it happens. If I were to try this on a regular disk sander at 3000 rpm it would be impossible to achieve any sort of reasonable result, especially by hand.

Pic two
Cutting out the tang. Used a 1/16" thick cut off wheel in the angle grinder. Pretty self explanatory

Pic three
The roughed out blank and the template I used.

Pic one
Because i was grinding everything by hand I needed some way to make sure I was keeping the tang straight. So every once in a while I would lay the blank on a sheet of graph paper to make sure I was balanced and straight.

Pic two and three
Are the almost finished chisels. There is still the fine sanding, hardening, tempering back and final finishing to do. At about this stage I have about 10 hour in.

Pic one
On to the handles. Took a couple days to decide on this shape. It's my take off of the London pattern. The octagonal section has a slight dome to it that gives a nice feel in the hand. The socket ferrule will be turned later and the two mated together so that there is a good tight fit.

Pic two
The ferrules have all been turned from 22mm dia solid round bar brass. All turned by hand on the wood lathe using regular wood turning tools. Each is custom fitted to the chisels.

Pic three
The nearly finished handles fitted to their socket ferrules. If you look closely you can see that they're not all the same. I tend to eye ball things a lot and sometimes my eyes don't see all that closely. The red gum was a piece of fencing left over from a job that took place before we moved in. It's a nice wood to turn. By the looks of the grain it looks like it'll take a good thumping also.

Pic one, two and three
This is the hardening process. The propane torch I brought with me is called a tiger torch. It will send a blue flame about 400mm long and about 60mm wide. Propane burns at about 2500 F so there's more than enough energy for hardening O1 tool steel but no where near enough to harden A2 tool steel (I said in an earlier post that A2 was HSS - I was wrong it's only tools steel)

Pic one can be seen by the colour that the tool is at about 500 F. It's important to heat the tool reasonably slowly and evenly or it can bend into all sorts of useless shapes.

Pic two the important part when hardening. It took me a while to see it when I first started out making tools but can now easily see the subtle changes that take place as the tool reaches around 1500 F. can't remember the proper terminology but but as the tool reaches it's critical temperature of about 1500 F there is a point were it actually seems to go from orange to a dull dark colour instead of turning a bright orange at the temp increases. There are shades of darker colours that move through the tool as it heats up

What's happening is, as the steel approaches 1500 F the carbon molecules in the steel start to form bonds with other carbon molecules. To do this though it takes a great deal of energy input, 1500 F of energy. So as the carbon molecules absorb the heat energy to form the new bonds the temperature (apparently) drops slightly as the molecular change takes place. Once the bonding process has been achieved the tool suddenly turns a consistent bright orange and stays that way. This state is held for about 5 mins and then it's quenched in oil to "freeze" the molecular bonds made by the carbon in the steel. If it were allowed to cool slowly the carbon molecules in the steel would break their bonds and the steel would return to it's "soft" (annealed) state.

As can be seen by pic four there is no flames as would be expected when you dump a 1500 F piece of steel in oil just a lot of smoke. I used motor oil but raw linseed oil is suppose to be the best.

The smaller chisels were easy to harden with the open flame but I needed to build a makeshift kiln for the last three. The heat has to be contained so an even orange colour can be obtained and maintained for about five mins. So again there are bricks in the backyard laying around from a previous job.

Pic one
My tiger torch and makeshift kiln. I wasn't sure how these bricks would take to 2000 F so I heated them up very sloooowly.

Pic two
It would be impossible to hold the chisel with the vise grips like I could on the others because the "blow back" out the top of the kiln and radiant heat would cause some very serious burns. I used a 3 foot long ally handle I have for my turning tools. Even then I wasn't at what I would call was a comfortable distance.

Pic three
A dull red can be seen as the tool heats up.

Pick four
Holding at a nice bright orange almost time for an oil bath.