Thread: Making chisels, the completely empirical, non-metalworker approach....

Originally Posted by D.W.

........62 is my personal lower limit as a maker, but no such condition for quick one use tools or purchased tools. i'd say 59 and below that I start to get annoyed in hardwood.....

David, I'm a very sporadic carver, what I've done is mostly low-relief stuff in woods that are considered "good" to carve so I speak from long, but very limited experience. My carving tools are a motley lot, mostly recognised brands picked up off bargain tables, or the very occasional flea-market find. In general, most of them are pretty hard as judged by the way they sharpen & comparing them with bench chisels. I've always assumed that was deliberate on the part of the manufacturers, an edge can be a bit harder & a little bit more brittle on a tool meant meant to be pushed, or at most struck lightly. Although that said, I have a large, solid sweep (a Pfeil iirc) that I bang into very hard wood occasionally to cut the tongue on a saw handle & it tolerates that very well. This handle is swamp-oak, which is a bone-hard wood, but my sweep cuts the tongue in a couple of sharp strikes without either chipping or curling-up:

Swamp oak handle.jpg

I've certainly not been too worried about leaving my carving gouges harder than I would think prudent for a bench chisel, and I tend to agree that a hardness south of 61 is probably not acceptable for a carving tool. Of any woodworking activity, I think carving requires the sharpest edges that last. It's difficult to impossible to control a cut finely when you are going blue in the face just pushing it into the wood!

Cheers,

At some point if you want to see what I did to shrink on bolsters and forge weld them, let me know. It's not the "right" way, but it doesn't blow up grain over much of the chisel and you can bring it back, and it requires a block or anvil with a hole about 1/2-5/8" and not too much else (drill maybe for the bolster blank).

It's kind of an annoying thing to get down without distorting a tang, but once you get success once, it seems like it's almost always afterward. I haven't yet had a bolster let go, but on a handle with ferrule, even if it did, it wouldn't matter.

Older carving tools definitely often hard tempered. George mentioned that he'd tempered back some addis chisels from time to time that people came across. Williamsburg no longer allows using vintage tools in general, so I don't know where that goes.

Pfeil's 80crv2 chisels are probably a good choice because they have to be retailed to everyone. 80crv2 is tough and resistant to bending type breakage - that's primary above edge holding, but they can hit 62 and be great carving tools. hard tempered carving tools would leave lines on work and be a bummer. I like pfeil's carving tools, and a friend has their bench chisels in euro style - the long thin ones. We sharpened them - his are probably closer to the carving tools - and back when we were both newer and reading fine woodworking, expected that because they weren't the "highest rated" but "best value" type, they'd be stymied by LN's bench chisels. They sharpened really easily, another important thing for carving tools, but showing up in those chisels, and then didn't take any damage when we were comparing them. I was smitten and at the time couldn't believe that for the at-the-time price of $20 each, they were sharpening much easier but at least matching the LN chisels.

didn't stop the buying of primo tools for a while.

Carving in good agreeable wood always comes out nicer than carving in nasty stuff. My ugliest plane eyes were early ones in cocobolo, and the way one cuts eyes in a beech plane, they'd take four times as long to get right. Sort of an "i get it" moment vs. my want to ramp up into the hardest and rarest to make the "best" stuff. Good on you for carving the stuff that carves nice. The same story is there in guitars - if you make a perfect guitar with mahogany and then use something weird and it has little chips on the edges that need to be accomodated (BTDT), it's hard to make a case for the difficult just to be different.

Swamp oak looks good, smooth!

we're sort of in an interesting complementary group of positions, Ian. I don't have any "real" metalworking equipment. just an induction forge, a propane forge (that I almost never use) a can forge, an anvil and a bunch of freehand grinders.

No mill, no good drill press, no shaper or surface grinder. All of those things could be useful. I don't even have jigs. So if you're not doing it "the right way", neither am I!

When I wanted to forge weld, the reality was that the propane forge wasn't going to make the heat needed, so I ended up heating the bolster with propane and then zapping the juncture with a brazing torch right up against melting temp. Works great - aside from not even having good torches. I was spending $2 a chisel on oxygen for the brazing torch and burning up tips. that's an expense I could tolerate and it's easier to deal with the spot heat making one critical point.

Industrially or on a large scale - zero merit. Bar stock and dies would be cheap enough that any solution where the bolster area is squished, spun in a fixture and then what's left shaped to look hand made if needed (and mostly in jigs).

That would be the right away.

Along with hiring heat treatment. Except you will find and we all will when it gets down to really wanting to make things just so, we can't hire it out. the skill really isn't there and the file type steel ends up less tough with a commercial process and maybe to the point of being detrimental. We are losing the ability to get O1 knife blanks commercially treated at this point because they need adjusting just after quench and sometimes they crack. On the biggest knife forum here, one of the knife makers claimed that they had all of their blanks waterjetted, sent to peters and then the heat treat tech at peters adjusted the spine on each knife and cracked all of them.

And I got kicked off for touting "doing it yourself". Actually, they thought I was trolling and I am persistent and sometimes like a culvert when a faucet is all that's needed. I didn't speak up, but at some point, if you hire someone to waterjet knife blanks, and then have the blanks sent by the water jetter to peters and you expect to sell knives with someone else doing all of the work and then claim you're a boutique maker, you deserve what you get. Making our own tools and learning these things is about us being makers and doing the making when we choose to. We will often find ourselves doing things "the right way" in a 150 years ago way.

Derek once tagged me as a re-enactor. I find that a little offensive, but not because I'm necessarily offended or concerned much, but it devalues the idea as being a charade. the idea is that we do what is stimulating to us and take it into our own hands and push on our own to the level we want to go rather than touting other peoples' way or fitting in with the club parroting what is deemed to be the best.

i don't know enough to be a metallurgist, but I suspected that the surplus carbon steels end up being to our benefit when we're a little more experienced because they seem to experience less grain growth than 1084 and we can manipulate the carbon that remains in solution to get high hardness and better toughness than the furnace schedule. I proposed that to larrin and he wasn't interested in it - it's on the periphery and probably against everything he learned being a metallurgist in terms of specifying controls and monitoring them. it's "dangerous" from a scientific standpoint because perhaps half can repeat what I do, and the others can't. if we all have an evenheat, we do the same things and get the same result. And as my dad always lets me know, there will be some group of the hand doers doing it better than me ("there isn't a horse in the race that won't be outrun at some point"). and then just this week, i saw larrin advise someone else that he thinks the equations and charts that suggest all of the carbon dissolves on schedule into solution may be errant and the assumptions they make probably aren't the full truth, and he's going to etch some samples to see if all of the carbon is gone or if it's pinning the grain.

And that makes me cheer a little - the little guy in the garage can examine the outcome and improve (in easy ways, all of my ways are easy) and find their toughness and hardness results aren't anomaly. I just won't cheer to larrin

Originally Posted by D.W.

... Derek once tagged me as a re-enactor. I find that a little offensive, but not because I'm necessarily offended or concerned much, but it devalues the idea as being a charade. the idea is that we do what is stimulating to us and take it into our own hands and push on our own to the level we want to go rather than touting other peoples' way or fitting in with the club parroting what is deemed to be the best ...

David, for some years your insistence on emulating woodworkers of the very distant past was what presented you as a re-enactor. My take on this is different from yours. Emulating the distant past is not a criticism, but the insistence that others follow this lead is. There are many ways to skin a cat, and some modern ways are worth including into the skill set. Some time has passed, and you have shown great insights about the essence of the skills used back them, and brought just those to the fore. These (such as the chipbreaker) have been a game changer for many, including myself. I thank you for this. In more recent times I have seen your focus narrow - perhaps overly so, but that is not a criticism, just a recognition of your passion. I think that you demonstrate much metallurgical knowledge (for someone untrained in this area ... but reflects your mathematical brain), and there is a great deal of original thought here (another example, the Unicorn method). Just to be clear, I have never criticised what you do, only how much you write.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Derek, there's nothing re-enacting about it. I can see how someone might think that, but it doesn't reflect reality. I've walked into what I do in reverse, getting to a point where I stop improving and then comparing it to old literature, or sometimes referencing old literature when something doesn't make sense. A convex primary bevel makes no sense to me because if you actually work a significant amount by hand, you notice a shortened interval in use no matter how careful you are, whereas a slimmer primary grind and honing just the tip of the iron is relatively care free and not fiddly.

Thus, after doing that for years, I finally went and looked last year (puzzled why this wouldn't have been the traditional method) to find the three texts I referenced all said the same thing - shallow primary grind, hone the tip. Holtzappfel even gives numbers (25 and 30 for softwoods, 25 and 35 for hardwoods).

Planing was the same thing - I have no need to emulate history, but I found that what I'm doing does - but not always. There is one thing that I learned from old texts, and that's to not walk with the jack plane. Warren pointed that out to me, and he was right. I thought I was saving my arms by doing that, but it's more efficient to work sectionally with a jack.

The old texts say to strike long edges rather than match plane them (i don't do that - not sure if I will). What this looks like if you are not in very deep in hand tools is that I'm doing things that history shows to be true, but I am doing some things that history shows to be true. I found the metallurgical stuff on my own, and am only somewhat curious as to why the older plane irons look a certain way when they wear. It's not critical to figure out. I'm not making laminated tools, not curving cap irons to match irons, and so on.

Where your comments about me being a reenactor devalue someone else's experience is when someone proposes that I'm doing something, and you propose I'm doing it because I'm a re-enactor and your advice comes up short of what I'm doing. It's unintentional gaslighting but it gives people a false sense of what they can expect.

10 years ago when there was more interest, this might have mattered, but the ship has pretty much sailed at this point- even on the power tool side. It doesn't change what i'm doing, nor do old texts (though I did reference old texts quite a bit for varnishing, even there I strayed - there are conscientious folks who can read and perfect what they read. I need information but I cannot copy things well and get the same results).

My obsession with surplus carbon steels also has no historical precedent that I can find. Surplus creates carbides in worn edges, and I find none of that under the scope in older tools. I just find much harder tools of the old stuff than people expect, and academically, one would guess that the high hardness of slightly hypereutectoid steel would result in a chippy edge. It doesn't. The drive to examine that isn't historical, it's to try to figure out why an iron that has a short edge life - those older water hardening irons all come up short of even O1) managed to easily outwork LV's custom work in volume of wood planed and then later after I was so happy with the V11/XHP test results, still found the older steel less effort to use for an experienced user.

Similarly, the English pattern tools are trim, but can be malleted as hard as you care to, they don't suffer the same shortcomings XHP/V11 have in being just OK, they are lighter and they are long enough to keep you in the work without searching for specialty anything. I was drawn to them expecting them to be subpar, but because I liked the look of old ward chisels. I found out later that the pattern I like most matches the proportions of a firmer in old literature. You or anyone else can't tell whether or not I just read something and then did it, and that certain can create a credibility problem, but whether someone thinks I have slowly just read stuff (because that's what they do - charlie likes to believe that because he seems to have a problem figuring things out even after he's read them, and mistakes having read about something for being well educated in it like a maker would be), it's not really on my agenda to get wrapped up in trying to figure out things in a way that it's provable that I never read anything else. That would seem kind of dumb.

Lastly, the thing that has always irritated me on the forums - and not just for my own making, but for others - is when someone comes along and they make something well and they talk about it, it's typically "the way you're doing that is a waste of time". Folks get advice they're not looking for and they generally move on, leaving us with a shrinking pool of folks who "know how everyone else should do something" without tuning themselves in to the fact that almost nobody on the forums is doing anything but spending money for leisure. It makes no real difference if I make chisels and sell them to people or give them to people. It makes no real difference if you make furniture - it's satisfying to you, but if your family and friends had nobody making them furniture, they'd solve their issues another way. None of us are that serious. It may seem like I'm more serious about my hobby than i am because the part that gives me pleasure is being in the middle of it and differentiating what works and what doesn't. Talking about it helps me get some iteration and think things through and compare, but it's not vital.

Adam Cherubini is a re-enactor. I find that kind of thing offputting, personally, and would never want to walk up to my induction forge and say "you know, I just have to get away from this because it looks bad".