Thread: Comfortable Chisel

Quoting from the article: "The age old method of hand forging high carbon steel produces a chisel that is softer (55 HRC)".

I think some of David W's recent testing puts this theory to bed.

I also had the opportunity to handle Derek's Veritas chisels. It would be hard to image a more comfortable chisel to hold.

I have mostly vintage chisels although some sizes are rehandled Narex. The old chisels are comfortable to hold / use, not I think because they have softer steel but because all the sharp edges have been 'worn in' and the balance between handle and blade is better.

Cheers, Zac.

That Eckert post is bizarre. Way out there.

To begin with, the chisels given as examples are drop forged, i. e. machine made.

19th century chisels are certainly hand forged, with the steel forge welded to the body. I would guess all steel chisels started to be manufactured early 20th century, even late 19th, when drop forging manufacturing began.

The claim that hand forged chisels here hardened to 55 Rc is highly dubious. In any case, the body of those chisels was made of wrought iron, not steel. Only the laminated steel was hardened.

These idea of comfort seems to me highly subjective. I attribute the ease of use and comfort of my chisels to the shape of the handle above anything else.

On the other hand, some of my socket chisels, like the Stanley 750s, have small handles and the rim of the socket is exposed and can be felt when holding them. Those are not comfortable chisels.

Raf

not that it's that important, but there were all steel chisels in the seaton chest. They were thin, though.

Most of the chisels were laminated, though some of those that were referred to as firmers had very thin laminations and the rest was wrought. oval bolstered mortise chisels in the chest look little different vs. what we're used to.

I've had a keen interest in hardness in combination with alloy (mostly carbon level) for a long time and I've never seen a chisel under 59 or so that holds up well in hardwoods, and not sure how much below that for softwoods. Maybe 55.

All of my older chisels are forged, and if there's a curiously soft one, it never holds up in hardwoods.

I'm wondering what the angle is for this blog post - what is it leading to? Hopefully it won't be an attempt to sell 55 hardness forged chisels, or people will learn a hard lesson.

it's hard to argue that experienced woodworkers would've found any of the modern chisel setups more comfortable than a 10-11" chisel with a handle style that marples calls "carver" because they were by far the most common.

I don't think most people now do enough to get to that, though. I didn't favor the LV style, and definitely not the stanley 750, which will pinch your hands and leave you holding metal if you're gripping the handle to mallet the chisel.

There were no old chisels just made out of flat stock either like you can find now (some of the blue spruce types) for the convenience of the maker at the expense of really even being a real chisel.

The good cabinet chisels kept a strong tang/bolster tapered down to several inches of thin end for a very long time - fatter chisels (that aren't huge) seem to coincide with furniture work moving to factories, and a decline in hardness (to 58-60) happens at the same time, presumably to prevent site workers from returning broken chisels. Lower carbon steel hardened to 58 is hard to break without showing that it was really bent to abuse first.

separately - there are a lot of rumors attributed to what forging does for tools. There is no difference at the grain level if steel is forged well and then thermally dealt with to prevent brittleness problems (normalized or annealed) and then heat treated...vs rolled material of good quality getting the same treatment (rolled stock is already forged, just directionally).

I would have difficulty finding something in my forge shaped chisels vs. ground if they get the same thermal treatment.

some of the preference for forging after it was no longer needed for purifying is probably related to not dealing properly with bar stock, or getting low quality bar or buying steel in ingot form (not rolled).

One of the virtues of the simple steels used in older english tools isn't softness - they're not - it's that their forging temperatures are fairly low and they won't crack if forged until they're relatively cool. As soon as you get into steels that can be forged but that have alloying for hardenability, that's not as simple. The alloying that's added for easier hardening changes the properties of the steel in terms of how it sharpens and feels and once hardening follows dealing with it, the skill to deal with fast transition steels is lost.

one last comment - i reread this post on a real screen instead of a phone. I'm a terrible reader no matter what, but the phone is a no go.

the discussion of cushioning is a myth, but it's an attractive seeming myth. If one wants cushion, there are clues in popular handle woods. Beech is a dead wood, and also common for handles. It's also tough. same with birch.

both of those were common in planes for various reasons (good wear properties vs. hardness and workability), but one of those was probably that they're a dead wood that retains that deadness even as they get older (fir and yellow pine are good examples of woods that are dull and dead, but the rings become super hard and the wood is more musical with age).

the 55 figure is puzzling - I don't dabble in giant tools made for use in wet wood (timber framing chisels, for example). they could maybe be soft. I've found moulding plane irons so far to be softer and the more complex the profile, the softer the steel.

but old buck chisels at 58 hardness (already known to be soft) are the softest I've found, and they are generally alone at that.

the style of chisels in the post are registered chisels (they look recently made and crude compared to older english factory made chisels). there's no real use for those in cabinetmaking - they're designed by catalogue description to be a heavier version of firmers that can be pried with. You can spot the type because the tang isn't delicate, the cross section of the chisels is heavier, and the bolster is often integral and tubby looking or round - not forged on and filed into an octagon.

Blacksmiths now like to make chisels tubbier in cross section like that. Nicholson describes all steel chisels that were firmers, and those being heavier at the shoulder down to the last few inches being nearly parallel and relatively thin by our standards (.1" or slightly above). At the time, the thinness for a firmer ("former" in french or "to form") at the business end would've allowed full through hardness, and hardness further up the chisel would've been surface without full hardness at the center, and few of those chisels are every broken above the first few inches. the art of making chisels like that is mostly lost. I hope to revive it.

not I hope to revive it and sell them, I hope to revive it and get people to make chisels like that again because it's not that difficult of you get away from CNC machines and educate customers.

nonetheless, anything used at the bench in a combination of hardwoods and softwoods will not be that soft, and there isn't that much all out bashing in good work vs. pace and neatness even in rough work - a skilled worker will have one hand on the mallet, one on the chisel handle and little else, and they will not have a white knuckled grip. All of the old plates show this. They will also have the skill to stand up and look at more than just the chisel tip and line - so that joinery work isn't fatiguing.

There's no question some chisels, carving chisels, planes... become your favourites and the go to's. Whether that has to do with how they're forged... This article has no information to even remotely support it. To be honest it's written as it's more a passing thought. Just something to fill space and/or attract clicks me thinks.

To me, the simplest answer to "Why were they more comfortable?" Is...

They were professional tradesman's and factory worker's tools. Men made money off them, so they cared. Each maker offered a dozen or more handle patterns, graduated to the chisel size, to suit the tradesman.

There's a pretty good chance that somewhere within the ocean of handle profiles you'll find something you like.

Not so much now. Chisels aren't what professional tradesmen or factory workers make their money off of. Those fellows all use power tools which are only occasionally supplemented by whatever chisel shaped object happens to show up on the hardware store shelf for clean up duty.

Consider these days that if you just deign to sharpen a chisel, you're far and away the minority. Most online chisel reviews test the edge straight out of the box like it was a circular saw blade or sandpaper.... I suppose sharpening them before comparing them opens a whole new can of worms, and it's one professional reviewers aren't interested in.

I would imagine most people held chisels similarly, used them similarly, and so on in the past. It took a pretty significant level of skill just to be economically viable, and the market to sell tools to people who weren't going to buy 10 sets was probably pretty competitive.

Contrast that to once chisels were economically valuable on sites, but less so in shops (probably started around turn of the century) and things went toward a tool that could be struck on site with sometimes the wrong hammer, and that would survive being used to pry things or whatever else sometimes the best tool in the mind of the user is the tool at hand.

Suddenly, it's a lot easier for advisors, who are far less skilled than the typical *user* in the past to come up with all kinds of weird things, and you get a result along the lines of $100 for a V11 chisel that can't hang with an Iles Mk2 chisel that costs less than half as much.

But it probably sells as well or better.

Interestingly, I found that comparison to be a surprise when I did my unicorn article - I assumed the achievement of the four chisels used would probably follow price, as well as hardness. but the V11 chisel struggled to match an O1 chisel that's probably a little harder than the Iles spec said it was. I tested the japanese chisel that topped both (that chisel is no better than the ones that I make, but that's plenty good enough) and it's about 63 hardness. the Iles chisel wasn't far off of that, and the V11 chisel wouldn't have been.

Long story short, we go from a boxwood or beech handle and a chisel with good balance and very compact grain and minimal carbides (to initiate tracks) to a "premium" chisel now that's about $100 per that can't match a chisel made out of inexpensive ingot bar, and even beyond that, the handle is made of a wood that's been thermally treated - it's an odd wood choice in the first place (maple) and thermal treatment of maple does improve seasonal movement, but makes the wood substantially more likely to break and cleave. this is something well known in the world of guitars where thermally treated wood is popular - stiffness improves but the wood is more brittle.

Some of the other stuff, like the Blue Spruce chisels is just boggling and a sign of how far down things have gone because there isn't a good back and forth flow of information between skilled makers and skilled users, and the making itself has to be something that can come out of a CNC lathe and mill, and be heat treated without any hand correction.

My article disappeared from woodcentral after I left, which is humorous given that LV is an advertiser there. it's possible it got lost in a "conversion" but that seems like an even odds thing to me at this point.

I suspect if most people spent enough time at the bench, they'd begin to have little use for most modern tools in a fair comparison, but there's more talk about tools and what to buy these days than there is proof of using them. And that's OK - the market is what it is. Mostly imaginers just seeking a little bit of escape. there's enough old stuff around for the rest of us if we get that far.

George Wilson pointed out that A2 steel plane irons were welcome among the reenactors at Colonial Williamsburg when he worked there in the 1970's. The thing is, industrial woodwork was largely mechanized by the 1940's when A2 showed up. By then, doors, windows, and moulding/trim was being made in mills on huge machines. That's where all the high carbide volume steel cutters ended up. The only chisels and planes in the shop would be used for final fitting and rework.

I have run into some Chinese chisels that perform surprisingly well. My suspicion is that they changed to some sort of high speed steel, not because of tool performance on wood, but because of returns from fellows drawing the temper when sharpening them on belt sanders and bench grinders. A soft-ish M2 chisel would rule that world because its rubberized plastic handle will melt long before the temper draws.

there is a hidden variable in what you're saying in that the irons that the coopers and others had to deal with weren't the quality of a vintage mathieson or p. law iron.

The blacksmith shop had difficulty forge welding steel to wrought, probably because there is a temperature mismatch between materials of differing carbon levels, so the williamsburg planes were using irons made out of something like 1070.

A2, on the other hand, is hard to screw up and very insensitive to tempering temperature, so if you get it heated properly and then let it air quench, it will differ little if your tempering is off 50 degrees.

steels like 5160 and 1070 could make plane irons, but they can't make good ones.

Even on planes, though, V11 would have some merit in plane irons if you have something that won't challenge it with chipping, but when you move to chisels, the volume and size of carbides starts to count. V11 has a relatively tough type of carbide (chromium in huge volume), A2, same , though less uniform than a PM, the volume is lower and the biggest A2 carbides in good A2 are about the same size as the touching groups of round carbides in V11.

The point of this is failure starts in carbides, and the cracks then move to the matrix that the carbides are affixed in. Chromium carbides are OK as far as fragility goes, but they're not as good as not having them there when it comes to chiseling.

Everything seems to be trade offs. Vanadium carbides can in theory wear a lot longer than chromium carbides in the same volume, but they crack even easier.

I hardness tested a huge glom of good quality older irons a month or two ago and found that in general, the good makes (mathieson, ward) are for the most part about 62 average hardness (some are a little harder or a little softer), and the chisels are about the same. Something like a V11 chisel or an A2 chisel is not a match for a ward chisel that's 62 or 63. Use of a plane iron will depend on the skill of the user and how pleasant the task. If you're planing saw marks out of a rough board with a try plane, V11 and A2 lose a whole lot of their wear interval and the interrupted cut impact threatens the smoothness of the edge.

we are a little bit in luck here because I have a CW bench plane iron (laminated, made by the blacksmiths - not George). I also did not get it from George, I found it elsewhere and have never at this point discussed the plane that I have with him so I don't know any background other than that it was made at CW and is stamped with the year. I never had occasion to bring it up because he'd already told me that the blacksmiths had trouble forge welding higher carbon steel and the coopers were on the butt end of the deficiency because they were planing white oak staves.

I struck my CW laminated iron in two different places with a hardness tester. It tests 36 and 38.

Those are not typos. It's possible that there's a very very thin layer on the iron that's a little harder due to shallow hardening, and I was going to make a joke that they don't have a person on site there who could match me heat treating carbon steels. if there is such a superficial layer, it won't last long enough to be worthwhile.

My statement about heat treatment is probably true if for no other reason, nobody seems to want to do it and really get down to the beans as far as results and testing. The conveyed info if you're going to get serious results is that you have to resort to a furnace, and I'd bet the toolmaker's shop at CW has an electric furnace, even if the blacksmiths didn't use it.

that sort of solves why things were difficult for the coopers planing white oak. The other part of this that's true is even if the 1070 were perfectly done, it would land in the high 50s but lack the edge stability of something with a couple of tenths more carbon, so it would plane white oak, but it would fare a lot better in softwoods.

I wouldn't personally make an iron out of 1070, and I don't know of anyone who is better at heat treating steels like that hand and eye than I am (especially in squeezing every last bit of hardness out of an alloy without growing grain). 1084 and 80crv2 are about the reasonable lower limit to get an iron that will work well in hardwoods - well meaning you won't just go "well, it works, but it's noticeably not as good as....".