Thread: Chisel Hardness Study, the first step.

Here's an interesting article about something along these lines. 2 nearly identical alloy 1% water hardening carbon steels. 1 would through harden fairly reliably while the other would not. They seem to have attributed it to initial crystal structure starting out... But they stopped without being able to make them switch places...

But it does illustrate that steels that ought to be able to do some task quite reliably sometimes don't for a very indeterminate "reason".... Such as these chisels not through hardening...

https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/jr...n4p385_A1b.pdf

that supports my idea (which I haven't had all along) that the stock preparation long before heat treatment (or subsequent forging) is important.

In the old days, as I understand it, a tradesman would've snapped samples, examined the grains and sorted them. When you go to old tool steels, you find them extremely fine grained, partially due to the composition - but in my estimation, also partially due to hand checking. I don't know what the lower quality steel went to - maybe garden tools or something.

I used to think you could probably hammer crappy steel into good steel if the composition was right, but I've gathered that it's not practical (and would probably be a lot more complex than just guessing at temperature and hammering), and it's better to be brand loyal if you're going to make something that needs to be consistent, and avoid all variability and quality issues.

So far, Starrett and Precision's products have made really good 01 irons for me. I've got plain (w1) drill rod, but haven't tried to make anything out of it and am afraid that it may not harden deep enough to satisfy in the long term (and it might crack, too).

The hammered files have been fine, but they are definitely not as hard as the O1 irons that I've made (which isn't too much of an issue, because I sharpen the knives made from hammered files on a gray deburring wheel followed by a buff - they come off of the buff incredibly sharp and with no wire edge).

This is an interesting patent dealing with grain refinement through rapid heating and qenching cycles. Basically - the idea is to very rapidly heat and then quench the steel a number of times to produce successively finer grain... Very interesting work - and that may explain some of the trouble that folks like you and I have when conventionally furnace heating and normalizing or quenching steels - and ending up with larger grain size....

I know that personally - I have no way to heat that fast....

https://patentimages.storage.googlea.../US3178324.pdf

I believe that Joe Calton claims to do that. Successive quenching. His knives get a lot of acclaim for ability to slice (they're almost untempered, so not sure what else they can do).

it confuses me, but I don't know much more than repeating things I've done before and not taking too many risks at this point.

You guys are a bad influence!!!

I was over poking around at the flea market and what should I stumble upon? A couple Craftsman WF marked chisels. I picked out what looked to be the most useful/least abused of them and brought them home.

And I never would have considered this had it not been for this study.....

1st impressions:
1. Wow that's a short cutting blade.

2. The blade - while too short and stubby - appears to be well thought out... Like somebody who had used a wood chisel was involved in the design.... For example - the tang is very nicely relieved so it doesn't interfere with the blade while sharpening... That's only something that somebody who uses wood chisels on wood for a hobby would notice and incorporate into the design...

3. Steel wise - these don't have that shiny chrome white patina look of a higher alloy steel... They have the gray gunmetal patina look of a more plain steel. That's a good sign in my book.

4. Prep. Not really impressed - as the 1st one has a nice hump in the back which is slow to remove....

Interesting that the bevel on all 3 of these came to me at 35 degrees - and it sure looks like a factory grind - not somebody's work chasing up the bevels while honing them on a stone, though I could be wrong... I would expect excellent edge durability if simply resharpened/maintained at this same angle.

I am going to take them down to 25 degrees per the prior WF Craftsman chisels in this test to see how they do in my hands.

So... 25 degrees doesn't really hold up long with my sharpening routine. It takes edge damage on plywood end grain. 30 degrees holds up a lot better in my very brief test.

Next. It takes a wicked and persistent wire edge... Not like the typical feather edge I am used to seeing likd with two cherries or similar which falls off very easily... So these Craftsman chisels will have to be carefully sharpened to deal the edge and not fall into the trap of "playing with the burr" rather than honing the edge.

I think the short and fat profile of those chisels is due to their intended work. Construction and door work - they're like big butt chisels.

I have a set, but haven't honed them yet.

In terms of 25 degrees, I don't think anything holds up universally well at 25 degrees, but a 25 degree primary with a small secondary edge around 30 is just about ideal for most chisels where you don't ride the bevel.

Ultimately, the difference between those chisels (in profile and weight) and something like an old inexpensive mifer set makes the mifer chisels a much better choice for something other than construction. The mifer chisels are also not that flat/accurate, but once they're prepared, they're as good as any other modern chisels that I've gotten (and the ones that I snagged off of ebay were unused with boxwood handles at the princely sum of $35).

Stepping back and having the choice of anything, though, and the better older chisels before steel was tailored to manufacture instead of use would still be my choice.

I think they did what they could do with respect to manufacturability.... That's probably why they had so many guys cracking ingots and inspecting microstructure, test forging samples, water hardening test bars to check for thru-hardening and such....

Going away from the old laid steel chisels to solid high carbon cast steel construction was clearly a move made due to manufacturability, lower labor costs, and much lower QC reject rates.....

But the other side is that society did not necessarily have the same passion for "Efficiency" as we do now... Employing people to do necessary work was considered a good thing - not a bad thing.... And men were often paid piece-rates for their work - so they nominally had some control of their earnings potential..

There are also things which were done then that we now lampoon as witchcraft (ha ha ha ha... How foolish those oafs were for mixing various types of dung, hair, green plants, and urine into steel treatment batches) that may have actually done something useful - which the "science" of the day ignored or simply did not understand..... Carbo-nitriding for example can increase the case depth 4x by hitting the steel with a strong dose of ammonia during the heat-up cycle... And "nitro-steels" exhibit far more strength and wear resistance then you would expect otherwise... But that was not understood then - so it was lampooned as foolishness...

Another interesting bit that ties in with Rob's study.... We have seen that Hardness correlates well with edge life... Well - Colonial Williamsburg allowed a University to study several old laid steel chisels.... And quite a few of those tested had cutting edges hardened to Rc64-66. Well within the range of Japanese white steel chisels... I bet they would cut very well in Rob's tests - and because the cutting edges were fairly thin laid on a wrought iron body - sharpening was not arduous.. It's not uncommon to find solid "Cast steel" chisels from the mid 1800's running 62-63 hardness - and they cut fantastic... But not up higher probably because of brittleness and difficulty sharpening the larger hard sections. No doubt the craftsmen of that day lamented the loss of those fine laid steel chisels in the name of "Progress" just like we lament the loss of fine cast steel chisels today....

Now roll forward to oil and air hardening alloys.... Softer yet due to difficulty sharpening (I do not relish the thought of trying to sharpen those Craftsman chisels hardened 3 points harder... And the one factory hard Buck I received really is a beast to sharpen)...

Yes on the efficiency, though, though you'd get worked like a dog if you were dumb labor and worked for someone else. My grandfather ran that tradition up until the 1960s at least, expecting anyone who worked for him to show their stuff every single day, and he worked himself to death trying to outdo them at the same time (in reality, I believe he had serious problems with anxiety, and that was relief).

I think we get confused now with folks who knew how to make something really good without knowing they why of it, and folks who know why things are good but fail to make them that way.

We also get stuck in false dilemmas like "well, if you get eight chisels and 6 are fantastic and two that you don't use are soft, then they're terrible chisels, so we'll take 8 completely uniform 58 hardness chisels that have a tenacious wire edge".

We did some of that here, right? I didn't, but I did that when I first started out, because i did as you and bought a bunch of vintage chisels - socket, firmer, US, UK, etc, and they varied a lot between brands and styles. People said only socket chisels were good and tang chisels were cheap "not as strong, and you can't change handles on them all the time". Like we expect our chisels to work like a leatherman and a rubber hammer all in one or something. I fell for that stuff.

It was only through excessive purchasing (that I do regret to some extent) that I learned the truth. I've also given up on the paint by number people "just tell me which set to get, the ones that are guaranteed to all be good...and make them heavy, because they have to be heavy to be tough".

Lastly, the water hardening thing. Those steels make better chisels for an experienced user. O-1 gets very close if it's kept in reasonable hardness (60-62, etc). Even O1 is considered by some to be too poorly behaved. We've gotten really lazy in manufacturing. Really really lazy. I guess someone needs to invent a CNC machine that can water harden, test, reject old, and "hand" finish the warpage out of the chisels that turn out OK.

I'll take the guy who snapped the steel and sorted it out. He and his company weren't in a catalog war for highest Rc hardness, he was just trying to make chisels that experienced users preferred, because that was the only market.

Originally Posted by D.W.

I think we get confused now with folks who knew how to make something really good without knowing they why of it, and folks who know why things are good but fail to make them that way.

Lol. It's just something we have to accept.... That's just how brains are wired....

A simple test of this.... Explain to me how you recognize your mother out of a crowd or your favorite pet out of 50 others..... You can't put it to words - but you can do it 100% of the time...

The science can probably explain how your brain knows - but the science hasn't got the slightest chance at picking your mother out of a crowd..... In reality, the way that People who need to do it pick your mother out of a crowd is by looking at a picture of her and then holding up a sign with her name on it - and hope she notices "The guy with a sign with your name on it".....

I'll take the guy who snapped the steel and sorted it out. He and his company weren't in a catalog war for highest Rc hardness, he was just trying to make chisels that experienced users preferred, because that was the only market

The thing is - there WAS intense competition in the edge tool market of that day because hundreds of thousands of chisels were being consumed in manufacturing stuff.... That's why they did all that stuff. Just like there is intense competition in the razor industry or the machine tool bit industry today... Not so much today in wood chisels because manufacturing stuff is mostly made using power tools instead of chisels...

As you point out - the "competition" in wood chisels today is selling to "Gentleman users"... And so they have to work in this strange universe where perception matters more than performance.... A world where you need awesome specifications and fantastic magazine reviews or the blessing of a fellow like Paul Sellers but nobody actually wears them out on wood in a production setting to see which one is really better as a total package....

Thanks

Yes, definitely intense competition in the old days, and I'm sure that helped create uniformity and standards.

All of this talk is just a pipe dream on my part. Someone using two king stones and a guide (or the more modern equivalent, I've read plenty of posts that suggest a king stone comes up short for sharpness) is never going to notice the subtlety of wiping off the wire edge with no effort.

Plus, in a world where half of the forum population talks about aldi chisels being nearly as good as ashley iles, or in some cases claiming they hold an edge longer....well, it's a lost cause.

(I have a set of those under another make - you can make things with them, but mine are a step softer than sorby's new stuff).

I wrecked an Aldi "For science"...
1. Grain is actually quite fine
2. I am not convinced they actually used high carbon content steel that would typically be seen in 1st quality chisels. Or at least the sets I have weren't made of it... No doubt some in the past were something similar to a 1% C W2 steel as their ad copy at one point claimed 100CrV steel.. It no longer does make that claim and they take a LOT of heat and a very hard quench to get them hard...

So.. They are good for what they are... But what they are is what they are - a $7/4 pack grocery store chisel....

Originally Posted by truckjohn

Neil,
I am very well aware that on some other forums - the mere mention of the possibility that a Craftsman chisel or a $12 hardware store Buck Bro's being able to go toe to toe with some premium name brands would start a war and would end up with the thread getting shut down

That's why I post here.

Originally Posted by truckjohn

I wrecked an Aldi "For science"...
1. Grain is actually quite fine
2. I am not convinced they actually used high carbon content steel that would typically be seen in 1st quality chisels. Or at least the sets I have weren't made of it... No doubt some in the past were something similar to a 1% C W2 steel as their ad copy at one point claimed 100CrV steel.. It no longer does make that claim and they take a LOT of heat and a very hard quench to get them hard...

So.. They are good for what they are... But what they are is what they are - a $7/4 pack grocery store chisel....

I wouldn't be surprised if it was a simple lower-carbon stainless. The grain should be fine on pretty much all cheap stainless these days - it's the more expensive parts (that make the steel good for diemaking) that make the larger grain, right? Not vanadium, but chromium and molybdenum.

Cliff Stamp did a video several years ago testing cheap stainless knives cutting. Not decapitating steel drums or chopping down trees, but cutting - the thing we actually do with our knives. He found the softer simple stainless cheap knives to work better at cutting (in terms of how the edge cuts in quality and resistance through the dulling cycle) than S30V until the edge angle was about 50 degrees. Who wants a 50 degree bevel on a knife? Otherwise, for practical purposes, the cheaper knives felt sharper and cut with less resistance, and then were easy to sharpen, to boot.

The same thing applies to some extent with woodworking tools, the uniformity of the edge through wear to prevent the edge from being a short but blunt wear bevel.

the problem for the Aldi tools and some others that may be labeled as 100crV without actually being that is that they're lacking in carbon. The woodworking gurus (and knife folks who insist that their favorite diemaking steel will make better chisels than those available 150 years ago), instead, will suggest that you need more other things instead of more carbon.

I'm still sort of stuck at my original point - a plainer steel with 1% carbon or so - it's hard to beat if you can do it well. We're so far away from plain steels that we refer to steels with 5% other stuff in them now as "plain" or "carbon steel".

It's been fun talking about all of this, but I expect we could have the same conversation 10 years from now. The magazine and blog crowd will be talking about novel solutions that dance around the fact that most people just need to learn to sharpen more quickly and use a simpler chisel, and the answer to a chisel abuser who thinks they need a really "tough" chisel that can handle prying is to learn to use the chisel properly. Lots of impatient posters talking about simple chisels not being tough enough, but they haven't gone through the "magic transition" where you work with the chisels for a hundred hours and all of the sudden they seem a lot better (despite the fact that the chisels aren't what changes over those hundred hours).

At least over on SMC (I read the thread about old chisel steels), there aren't dogpilers talking about Ashley Iles MkII chisels being deficient in one way or another (or a "low cost option" that doesn't hold its edge as well as LN chisels or some other such nonsense). At their price (purchased directly from England ex vat - when I did that, they were about $165 total for six), they are a marvel.