Thread: Economical HSS chisels

that one is identical to mine (actually, I have the set of 5).

https://ofhandmaking.files.wordpress...9742131472.jpg

Same chisel, same maker, same "W" mark. I thought maybe the W would signify tungsten HSS, but that's way way pipe dream (tungsten high speed steels were generally replaced by M2, which does a similar job and is less costly).

be warned that the tang that goes up into the handle is but like a fingernail, so in your future may be figuring out how to create some kind of fixture inside of a chisel that will hold it, or something that will go down over the side clips that make the makeshift bolster.

I can't vouch for more than mine, but I've used a few heavily and repurposed one to scrape metal. the one shown in the picture is 64.5 hardness and surprisingly will take a nice finished edge off of a japanese (natural) stone, and really not have any untoward behavior when the tip is just addressed with a fine oilstone. the oilstone can't do much with it, but the result is very fine.

If these guys would make a flat version of this for double the price in a more western shape, they'd really have something.

if they make one set 60 and the next 66, then my advice suddenly isn't that great. the brazed irons they make are generally high hardness, but I've gotten some close to 61 and others seem untempered and are in the 67/68 range. Untempered isn't the right word- I don't think M2 is like heat treating a file or 1095 where it starts hard and tempers softer - M2 and some stainless steels actually start about where they land at a hard temper and can cain a point or two with the first few hundred degrees of tempering.

The taper in width on these is significant and for hogging wood out of a plane body, it is a real asset. the sides of the mortised area are sloppy because there is no chisel kind of rubbing a clean side, but when making a plane, you come back later and clean that up, anyway. the sudden evidence of how much deep mortising energy is just friction from the sides of a chisel is striking. to the point that I now only use chisels with some width relief along their length for deep stock removal. And it's suddenly evident why long ago, the early chisels had a lot of width taper. it mattered for productivity and avoiding things like binding and bending tools.

10 years later or so now, thanks to the magic of aliexpress, it actually costs a little less to get them. Adjusted for inflation, a lot less.

I just have so much stuff or I'd order three just as a public service to forums to confirm that they are similar to my early one. With a hardness tester behind my desk, there isn't much guessing or supposing involved.

Tempting to get a set to try.

At 23 cm total length they might work well, the other pictures make them look small.

Originally Posted by raffo

Tempting to get a set to try.

At 23 cm total length they might work well, the other pictures make them look small.

1/3rd of the way between a japanese chisel and a proper carver handled vintage english chisel, more or less.

Hi David

In hypothetical world you happen to have 4 chisel sitting on your bench all sharp and ready to go and the same size.
One of these is the HSS chisel and the other 3 are respectively a Lie Nelson, Veritas and a Ashley Iles.

Which one do you pick ups ? For work, not asthetics.

Iles, without a doubt.

I should add - I doubt the iles are quite as good at edge holding as M2 at 64.5, but they're good enough.

Whether the LN chisels would be better (by shape, definitely not) would depend on whether or not they were kind of a little high and hard for A2. A2 at 61 hardness is kind of obnoxious. it's got pretty good toughness, but enough that it's a pain. I have one LN spokeshave iron that's 64 hardness, I've dented it (hardness test) about 10 times just to be sure, and it returns the same figure over and over. Surprising.

at that hardness, A2 takes about half of the energy to break prying that it would at a lower hardness, but there shouldn't be any.

V11 is kind of the same thing except there is no point where it's tough and it's got a large volume of carbides that don't fare that well when it's high hardness. It will look good compared to early 1900s chisels that were intended for job sites (swan, witherby, stanley 750s), but bad compared to an A2 chisel at 64 or the M2 mentioned above. M2 has a fair amount of carbides - I'd expect it to be worse. It's also not that tough all things considered - not much different than V11 maybe, but it seems to do better in chisels.

That leaves Iles, which in my chisels (now gone) was probably about 62 hardness or maybe a click higher - they were harder than the 61 claimed - also not tough, they could be pried and broken -that's the nature of O1 - it has to be softer than you could stand to have any toughness and tolerate bending.

It grinds and hones twice as fast as V11 and in the chisels I had, held up better in a controlled test. M2 is also slow grinding, and it gets hot, but it doesn't mind it. you just have to remember if you're in a rush refreshing a chisel that has been away from the grinder for too long that you can't put your fingers on the end of it to sharpen for a little bit.

I hate to say good things about A2 - it's the toolmaking version of using a drum machine on recorded tracks - mailing it in. And if it's in that 63/64 range, it's really being pushed and on the border of being worthless. The only A2 I've tested that was actually really noticeably better was LN's (vs. the stuff IBC sells and the veritas), but it's still A2. it's still offered from LN in construction chisel format, and so that's the background.

There's one irk for iles - the narrow chisel is like a little spring. it should be taller, but it isn't. it's springy in a steel that doesn't really tolerate a lot of bending, so maybe if someone gets lucky and breaks the first third off instead of the first two thirds, they'd have a chisel that's a little more practical.

When you're buying premium chisels, there's a whole lot of talk about alloys, but you're really rooting for the maker of the chisels to get the hardness in the sweet spot for the alloy.

almost forgot - before I started making chisels, and kind of was just curious about one chisel to the next and really just early on holding the handle of a chisel rather than the tip, I bought the iles set mentioned.

pinching the tip of the chisel, it certainly seemed to long, but grabbing the handle instead and never touching the tip or blade of the chisel, it suddenly made sense why there were so many chisels of the English style that seemed long - they're great once you learn to coordinate setting the tip in a cut.

At the time, I had enormous numbers of different sets of chisels I found cheap - if I could find something 20% below the going rate, I knew I could dump it on ebay later. That was before ebay charged 14%, bloated shipping costs and sales taxes were collected. In the US in my state, you could either pay actual sales tax or use an estimated manual rate that represented about 1/20th of what I'd spend in a given year online. Those days are over.

back to the chisels - they were always out in one size or another at tools for working wood, and then I found them in England. they're marked up a lot in the US compared to England, or were at the time. A set of 6 was $170 or something including shipping from England, cheaper than the price in the UK by lots (no vat for foreign purchases) and inexpensive shipping back then.

All gone!

The current price looks like it's about $45 equivalent per chisel or something like that after the vat is taken away.

sorby's "gilt edge" cost more (!!!!...those are the butter soft chisels in a nicer shape - in person, they were that great in terms of finish and it's really something the way they'd ask for a good bit more than iles - back then, too).

If money counts in the comparison above - no average person is going to figure out how to get the chinese chisels to not break out of a handle, and just because mine were 64/65 doesn't mean they all will be.

LV didn't have chisels at the time, I don't care too much for the V11 in chisels - it's misplaced, and the O1 is underhardened. LN had their chisels for $55 each or something. I think they're double that now. They are good chisels, but the dinky hornbeam handles and the socket design, no thanks. $95-$100 per now, too - which is probably just what it costs to make chisels like that if you can only operate a CNC machine and not forge anything. they are accurately made, though - and the LV chisels are, too.

Iles chisels are as good as any of them and still half the price, and better suited for someone who grips the handle and would want a 10-11 inch long chisel (just did the conversion - about $225 from classic hand tools supposing they will still sell them into Tools for Working Wood's territory like they did when I bought them. hell of a nice chisel for $225 for 6)

Yairs, it's all about 'horses for courses' and finding the compromises that suit you. I'll make a bald statement that the perfect chisel or plane blade doesn't exist, a blade that is 'perfect' for one application may be quite impractical for another.

I've bought quite a bit of (what is said to be) M2 from McJing's to use for plane blades in small, single-iron planes of various types. I'm not absolutely sure it is M2 but it is certainly a HSS, you can't soften it with a grinder or cutoff wheel. It's fine for plane blades, it can tolerate being honed to less than 30* without being too brittle, the edge off an 8k grit stone is very acceptable, and stands up well on she-oak & other edge-killing woods. I've also made chisels from it, a couple of sizes skews for cleaning out half-blind dovetail sockets etc. The steel is not good for that, it's too brittle & too easy to break off corners if I get too physical with them. The good news is that it's relatively easy to re-grind them, I don't have to be anywhere near as careful about cooking that sharp leading corner as I would be with a non-HSS steel. But I wouldn't attempt to make bench chisels from this stuff!

I have a few A2 plane blades and a set of LN A2 chisels. The plane blades are ok, harder to get truly sharp than my O1 (Hock) blades and maybe slightly more durable on our hardwoods if I keep the honing angle >30*, but often I feel like the O1 is so much easier to sharpen that they are ahead on a time-for-work-done basis!. The chisels are lovely things to behold, beautifully made & finished, but I find they need very steep edges if they are to be banged into she-oak or gidgee. At a 'low' 30* they are a pain if I'm working softer woods like Hoop pine or Aus. cedar - the high edge angle tends to crush rather than cut (& yes, they are 'sharp' enough to bisect an arm hair! ). Grinding one back to a more appropriate angle for the softer woods would be a disaster if I used it on blue-gum.

For years I had a set of Berg BE socket chisels that I occasionally cursed because I found them a bit too soft if they were used on very hard woods, but you could hone them to 25* or even finer & they did a grand job in Hoop pine. The LNs were bought as a retirement present for myself & the Bergs went off to my brother, but in retrospect, they were possibly a better compromise than the LNs for handling the wide variety of woods I play around with!

I've spent my life (well, my 'woodworking life') chasing harder blades to save myself a few sharpening sessions a week. It's slowly dawning on me that all blade steels come with their own set of 'problems' and the sort of steel that folks like me crave simply doesn't exist. What I need to do is change my mindset & realise that sharpening time can be time well-spent - not only do I get to work with nice, fresh edges more often, I have a bit of extra thinking time & maybe I'll avoid some of the stupid blunders I seem to be making lately....

Cheers,

sounds like the LN chisels were probably in spec - 61 or so.

61 in really hard woods is just sucking wind, and A2 is "tough" at 61 - 3 times as tough vs. something like V11, as in 3 times as hard to break in a side strike, which is what the toughness tests generally are.

What I've found with chisels is if they have a lot of toughness and you do something that makes them fail, they are hell on wheels because now you're not just pushing an edge with a nick, but rather a bunch of deflected foils that won't let go.

I was looking at chisels early this evening and once again ran across LV's original claim, the implication that there is something special in V11 that makes it head and shoulders above other stuff and it can be used at 20 degrees. I set one up at 25, and it failed catastrophically, but edges only fail so far before they get thick enough that it's sort of like unicorning. I would guess the lack of toughness (there is no foil held, it just breaks off) gave the illusion that the edge was still decent -but rather the low bevel angle is still thin enough to cut. Can't say I favor that strategy.

I'm in agreement on O1 vs. A2. In a shaving test years ago, I got 1 to 1.25 - as in, two irons same hardness, O1 lasts 80% as long. But it just sort of stays uniform and then loses clearance and that's it. A2 rather wears kind of crudely and that last 20% is something you wouldn't want to plane with, anyway, and then the honing is a pain disproportionally. your experience with a fine edge even at high hardness will be a roll of the dice with the carbides. They are disparate compared to V11 where there is a big dense array of chromium carbides - 21 or 22% or something of the volume of the steel is carbides. It's probably more like 5 for A2. But it's sort of like a pond with a turtle here or there rather than a pond packed densely with little fish.

Honing to 35 degrees with a small microbevel handles the issue, though. But most folks seem averse to a 35 degree final bevel. Still, to me, a rubbery steel. O1 is almost crisp. Steels like 1095 and 26c3 are very crisp, but they have less edge life than O1. Boy are they a delight to hone, though. 1095, not so sure on the edge stability, but 26c3 is rock solid.

As much as I think an 1800s ward is about as perfect as anything will ever get, a user has to hold on to the handle. and I guess, good luck putting together a set. I was never able to do it. I have a later set of ward tang chisels - who knows what era - i'd sa 1925.

I have to add one last thing in here - all of the gushing about the berg chisels and eskilstuna, and I was encouraged by the legend to get heljestrand and berg razors, and probably had four of them total, maybe 6. None of them was as good as the early 1900s german razors, and some of the american razors were better. What a let down. I don't know what the issue was, but the edges just did not take to a linen and leather as well - they were kind of coarse feeling by the end of the first shave and never got back to where you'd expect. I guess if I still had one, I'd break it and look at the grain. That's not necessarily an error of bad manufacturing, it could just be that straight razors are super sensitive to alloying and carbon level. 26c3 makes a great razor. O1 makes a very mediocre one, even if it's near perfect. There is something about the iron carbide array that is in file steel that also makes a great razor. maybe it's what makes file teeth hold up so well.

(and what makes a great razor steel makes a great chisel, too).