Thread: Chisel Hardness Study, the first step.

Originally Posted by truckjohn

Rob my friend - I think what you are "discovering" has to do with the seedy underbelly of undisclosed paid sponsorship and paid promotion..

The reality is that often as not - many of these "Articles" are actually created by PR and Marketing firms and then "Edited" by the magazine/web "Editors"... Another strategy is that a Marketing or PR firm hires the magazine "Author" to pen the "Article" as a way to maintain the air of objectivity and authority of the familiar and well known name... And of course last - nobody wants to make their best advertizers mad (and lose ad/product placement/sponsorship revenue) by panning their products or allowing big $$$$ advertizers to place mid/bottom of the pack....

And so we often see "First look" reviews which feature unboxing and holding it in your hand - and of course talking a lot about it without using it.... Or we see "Shootouts" with several categories which are slushed together or separated out to highlight certain features of the tool.. Or perhaps we see the tools prepared in a way which ensures a lot of fall out of otherwise strong competitors...

For example - I see magazine "Shootouts" sharpening LN A2 chisels at 30 degrees with a 35 degree microbevel (oh - because A2) and then running them against Marples and Two Cherries ground at 20 with a 25 degree microbevel - then claiming the "Edge lasted longer" - look at your own tests with the four Buck chisels for what happens there.. The $10 Buck sharpened at 30 degrees outperforms the LN at the same bevel angle according to the raw data .. But the magazine runs full page LN ads every month - they are not dumb... They know which side their bread is buttered on... So they just take care of it with a bit higher bevel on the LN and a nice low bevel on the Buck... The LN performs well and the Buck gets a nice low ranking due to early edge failure....

Marketers writing articles is probably something more for the car magazine crowd. I think what happens is two things:
* some guy who makes furniture with routers is asked to do an article about chisels, and offered pay. Most of the readers have no idea he doesn't know anything about tools or relevant tests. You get some strange results. The magazines usually pay someone to write an article and the people writing like to see their name on an article, and figure maybe it will open the door to something else. It never occurs to them to say "here's 12 people who know this topic better than I do, and have much more experience. Why not ask them?"
* perhaps a competent tester comes out and actually something that they feel is relevant. It's still abbreviated, and the subtleties (dry feeling steel that doesn't hold a wire edge, etc) aren't communicated because most readers will have no idea what that means. The editing department comes back and tells the reviewer that comments about difference from real use aren't necessary, and that another page needs to come off of the article because people prefer additional pictures with catchy sayings (how many more times do we need to see the phrase "___ is a real workhorse in the shop"....what a stupid saying). The meaning of the article is fractured and it's useless. Readers see the "recommended choice" and have no clue about limitations.

How do I know that a lot of the writers have honest intentions? I know some of them. I have also been approached about writing magazine articles.

I'm sure there are unfavorable results once in a while that have an editor taking out parts of an article or pulling it all together because it threatens advertising, but I don't think the advertisers write the articles. Why bother? It doesn't really pay anything to do it (a couple of thousand dollars for a few weeks of your time?), and the editor will save you from something really bad being published, anyway.

When the dust settles, the magazine editors will probably say "a useful long technical article will put people to sleep, and 95% of the people won't care, anyway".

i remember when stu tierney was really going ape analyzing every stone and blogging about it. he sold only individual stones. I told him to put a set of three together with an accessory or two, because 90% of the people coming to buy something are coming to buy something. They don't want to think about it, they want you to tell them what they should buy. Most magazine readers are the same. They don't want to know the details, they just want you to tell them what to buy (so that they can carefully put it in their shelves and check it for rust every few months to make sure that just because they're not doing more than reading magazines, that their tools aren't corroding).

The true makers and curious aren't buying anything, anyway, and if they are, it's usually down some rabbit hole. I talk to george wilson all the time. He's not buying chisels or planes, he's trying to find oddball files for some diefiler that he's got that was made in switzerland in the 1910s.

Originally Posted by rob streeper

I've been on the receiving end of too many shoddy to substandard products of the woodworking tool Renaissance makers. I mentioned above my experience with the product of a boutique saw maker that was so bad that it motivated me to take up saw making. Likewise with chisels, I have a good bit of money wrapped up in expensive chisels that don't perform well. There are some good chisels out there but they're in the minority.

I think it high time that the community moved into it's own version of the Enlightenment and left the mythology behind.

My friend - unfortunately that takes time and money... There is no shortcut... We as "Consumers" must foot the bill for the testing as you are doing with this fantastic chisel test... And that means sponsors and advertizers who have a dog in the fight can't be allowed to buy their way in...

I have seen this succeed in one specific magazine (for another hobby) that was completely and 100% paid for by subscribers... There were no ads and no sponsorships... The writers bought the stuff with their own money through "normal" retail channels and tested it using a fairly rigorous set of standardized criteria.. And it included a standard ranking criteria..

For example - if said product did not work out of the gate as received when it was bought - it automatically received an F. And a LOT of top name makers received "F" grades because their products did not work without being returned to the factory for warranty work.... The magazine did allow authors to do a follow up review once the unit was returned from the factory - and many of these items often fared well as they were otherwise well made... But some very notable brands functioned quite poorly - and received rankings which showed the unvarnished truth....

As you might imagine - manufacturers and PR firms are none too happy about this.. Ironically - they are very unhappy about having to do the ONE thing that will actually improve their ratings - make better products... Luckily for us - there isn't much those fellows can do to varnish over their current poor product as the magazine owners refuse to be "Bought off".... But how long will that last? Till the magazine owners decide to retire - if they want to sell it instead of closing the business...

There's big risk for a manufacturer, too. I'm not a manufacturer, but I believe I make wooden bench planes that function as well as any wooden bench planes ever made. So could anyone else if they made them the same way I make them.

I could send my planes to a user who has "used bench planes for 40 years", but never learned to set a cap iron and never used anything other than stanley planes and get a pretty negative review.

If the setting changes, and you give me, a student and the expert who tested planes 100 board feet of lumber to prepare, they would have lumber near finish using my planes - and they'd switch to mine in less than 10 minutes, but they'd have to understand why in context (and that's missing).

I remember a gun magazine (of course, the australians will be alarmed by this, but this is the states!) that was subscription funded and posted only unbiased reviews. Of course, they used horrible reviews of common products as a hook to get you to subscribe (makes sense). I don't know if it still exist - if it does, it's probably website based. Being that honest is a good way to get sued.

I prefer the end-around. I remember asking George at one point what chisels he uses (this was about 8 years ago), and he said "I have a set of marples chisels that I bought in the 1960s with boxwood handles that I've made everything with that I've made in the last 50 years". I said "aren't marples chisels kind of soft?", and he said "not mine - one of mine that was harder than the others broke, probably due to a manufacturing fault, but none are soft".

Well, I just bought slightly later set of marples, and I'd bet none is above saw temper. They do as rob said with paring, create a wire edge on the first paring stroke. Either one of those could land in the hand of a tester, perhaps even made in the same week, and all will determine the fate based on whatever the magazine reviewer has. If the manufacturer doesn't know they're being tested and they make 19 out of 20 sets perfectly, and the 20th is unevenly hardened, they could have a bad stroke of luck and end up losing their ability to make chisels.

Lee Valley comes to mind, too, with specs. They make things to an extremely tight spec. Sometimes something that doesn't meet spec gets out (often not in a significant way, but it's still out of spec). When I used to talk on SMC, there were three users who became irate about this. One who bought a plane that ended up being three thousandths out of square on the cheek. "how could this have happened?". LV saw this immediately, of course, and said "please send it back, we'd like to take a look at it and we'll replace it" (they're probably just trying to figure out if it went out out of spec or if it moved later, etc, and whether or not there is a problem). The user was still irate "I shouldn't have to!". Then, the two trolls started hypothesizing all kinds of possible explanations that involved LV making money hand over fist and intentionally sending out duds.

You just never know how people are going to run with info they get, and it might not be accurately portrayed when they run with it. I've bought a lot of LV tools, and none has been out of spec that I could tell, and if they were, it must've been insignificant. I can only wonder (from a maker's standpoint) how they can make enough money doing what they're doing to pay people to work in the western world. I can only assume they make nothing on their tools, and perhaps fare better with the overseas products that get sold in the catalogs.

(side comment about LN - same thing. People assume there is a secret group making millions on the planes. Probably 8 years ago, they were thinking about expanding their production, and I remember TLN saying it would depend on whether or not they would qualify for financing. The expansion they were doing wasn't particularly large. if they were really making that much money (presuming private ownership), they wouldn't be sitting around wondering whether or not they'd qualify for a loan).

In terms of scam marketing, let's not even get into the term "swiss made" for watches. It's largely meaningless.

Originally Posted by D.W.

Well, if you want to equal (The performance of hard Japanese chisels) , you use the same steel and make them the same way. That means laminating, and nobody over here seems to like to do it.

Everything in the western world generally comes up short (one might find an old ward chisel here or there that stacks up favorably, but they're made of plain steel that no "lean" manufacturer would tolerate these days due to the waste rate and hand skill required to finish them properly. Plus, buyers are dumb in general. If you give them a CNC chisel and an elegant hand finished chisel for the same price, they'll say that the hand finished chisel looks sloppy.

The trouble is that if you want to market and label something as a "Wood Chisel" for sale in the USA, Europe, Germany, India, or England - they must pass the applicable ANSI B107.4/ISO 2729/DIN 5139/TS 531/whatever spec in order to limit your liability for injuries if they fail from abuse.... Most of these are basically identical - calling for a minimum hardness and a "cutting performance equivalent" to some standard 1% C super low alloy steel at Rc59... But the bulk of these specs are concerned with tests for prying, impact shock, and bending tests - which a sufficiently hard chisel will fail miserably. A Rc58 1.3%C medium/low alloy steel chisel will sail through with flying colors where the same chisel hardened to Rc 62 probably will not pass because of breaking/shattering under the specified impacts..... I would expect a typical hard Japanese chisel to do poorly if clamped into a vise and them whacked with a 10kg lead mallet or whatever.

It definitely will fail that!!

I was thinking about that in terms of magazine reviews, too. If you made a 62 hardness chisel and a bunch of guys in the local carpenters union got them and started prying bits off of doors with them, they'd find them to not be so great.

There's really no great answer. It seems like someone with a die forge method and inexpensive steel could make great chisels in the spirit of the old wards. They could offer them in several finish ranges and two hardness ranges. No idea if that would still subject the maker to legal requirements, and no clue if the buying public (hobby woodworkers) is even educated enough to know what was good about something like a 125 year-old ward chisel.

Someone might make a chisel like that at some point, but it sure won't be me with a coffee can forge, a hammer and an anvil followed by car body files and metal files.

Originally Posted by D.W.

Well, if you want to equal them, you use the same steel and make them the same way. That means laminating, and nobody over here seems to like to do it.

little giant flywheel.jpg

Originally Posted by rob streeper

little giant flywheel.jpg

Oooooooooooooooo. Sweet!

The bigger problem I am seeing just looking around is finding suitable low alloy steel in the 1.2%-1.3% C range required... It's just not out there in the "normal" hobby retail channels.... Everything out there seems to top out around 1% C because that's the demand from the hobby knife guys.... And there are too many videos out there of some fellow making a "fine wood chisel" by laminating 1084 onto cold rolled 1018....

I would be curious to know if Western Forge had any chisel blade forgings left over from the Craftsman runs... Or if they could point us to whoever is now getting them....

Originally Posted by truckjohn

Oooooooooooooooo. Sweet!

The bigger problem I am seeing just looking around is finding suitable low alloy steel in the 1.2%-1.3% C range required... It's just not out there in the "normal" hobby retail channels.... Everything out there seems to top out around 1% C because that's the demand from the hobby knife guys.... And there are too many videos out there of some fellow making a "fine wood chisel" by laminating 1084 onto cold rolled 1018....

I would be curious to know if Western Forge had any chisel blade forgings left over from the Craftsman runs... Or if they could point us to whoever is now getting them....

You're probably already aware, but George told me that the CW blacksmiths had trouble hand forging anything like that on wrought. They decided on 1070 or something similar to that to get a clean weld, and he'd make irons out of A2 in the toolmaker's shop and slip them to the coopers because 1070 doesn't hold up very long planing oak. This would've been in the mid 80s, before anyone else was using A2 in planes (predating holtey, too, who claims to be the first). I guess we should call george a visionary!!!

At any rate, I'm sure you've seen that it's easy to get small amounts of prelaminated white 2. It's usually 2 or 3 layers, but you wouldn't want the "extra stuff" that it has on it outside of the hagane layer. The only other thing you could do is go up the list of japanese steels (and steels made specifically for them) like kawasaki and Assab and see if you can find those anywhere else. Either that, or try to befriend someone in japan with tool connections.

Originally Posted by truckjohn

The bigger problem I am seeing just looking around is finding suitable low alloy steel in the 1.2%-1.3% C range required...

I'm thinking to try 1018 backing on a 1095 blade to see how it works. I could in principle make some blister steel. Or I could just call Online Metals or some other supplier, it's out there somewhere.

Originally Posted by D.W.

You're probably already aware, but George told me that the CW blacksmiths had trouble hand forging anything like that on wrought. They decided on 1070 or something similar to that to get a clean weld.......

Interesting that the Japanese have been doing it for over 400 years (as were the Europeans and British prior to about 1850)... And even Stanley was doing this around WWII... Surprising to me that a couple of those fellows didn't visit one of those Japanese festivals where the blacksmiths forge tools out in public the old way and then made friends with a Japanese blacksmith over a couple bottles of sake and just learned from them... I mean to my untrained non-blacksmith eyes - it looks pretty straight forward for those guys...

But to circle back around to the notion of marketing concerns making sure test results come out "favorable"....

I didn't have the chisels in my hands for test - so I can only go by the published results.....

But I am honestly not sure what to make of the Buck chisels... Which at 30 degree bevel "Soft", 30 degree "Hard" and 25 degree Hard - by the numbers - all outperform Lie Nielsen chisels paring oak... Yes - I do understand that anecdotally Rob indicated that the Buck chisels performance was maybe falling off vs the LN.. And my interpretation is that the Bucks would probably degrade a bunch after another 20-30 grams of oak... But that was not captured within the data...

Or perhaps I don't really know what to think of LN chisels - as all the Magazine tests I have read put them towards the "Top of the Heap" performance wise... Yet in this test - they are adequate but not fantastic.... But honestly may not have distinguished themselves against the other failed challengers had those also received 30 degree bevels....

By this I am not trying to question the test results here - but rather tryng to wrap my head around so many (sponsored) magazine articles which would have me believe they were forged by the hands of Vulcan himself.

Originally Posted by truckjohn

but rather tryng to wrap my head around so many (sponsored) magazine articles which would have me believe they were forged by the hands of Vulcan himself.

Me too. Better to test and let the chips fall where they may IMO. If somebody gets their feelings hurt then maybe they need to up their game.

Originally Posted by truckjohn

Interesting that the Japanese have been doing it for over 400 years (as were the Europeans and British prior to about 1850)... And even Stanley was doing this around WWII... Surprising to me that a couple of those fellows didn't visit one of those Japanese festivals where the blacksmiths forge tools out in public the old way and then made friends with a Japanese blacksmith over a couple bottles of sake and just learned from them... I mean to my untrained non-blacksmith eyes - it looks pretty straight forward for those guys...

I don't know that japanese have been economically doing it until the days of the power hammer. Hammers and presses do it without issue, but colonial williamsburg's blacksmiths were limited to two guys with hammers.

I know little about japanese history expect for semi-documentaries about swords, but figure that we had lineshaft driven power hammers on the ends of wooden beams and they probably did, too. Either lineshaft or serf-powered, so they may have been doing it for a while.

Someone with a hydraulic press these days should be able to do it with relatively little trouble and without much overhead.

I asked george about that "if the japanese have been laminating 1.2% steel at relatively low temperatures, why can't the CW blacksmiths do it". He joked "maybe they're not as good!!", which is just a joke - Peter Ross is a true master. It seems likely to me that the issue is force, and there just isn't enough with humans swinging hammers.

Stu tierney put a video of current japanese smiths up, trying to make a chisel with an anvil and hammers at some get-together. It's pretty painful to watch (but it's unreasonable to expect the makers to make chisels by hand when they're doing it each day with presses and power hammers, which make a better chisel, anyway).

Originally Posted by truckjohn

But I am honestly not sure what to make of the Buck chisels... Which at 30 degree bevel "Soft", 30 degree "Hard" and 25 degree Hard - by the numbers - all outperform Lie Nielsen chisels paring oak... Yes - I do understand that anecdotally Rob indicated that the Buck chisels performance was maybe falling off vs the LN.. And my interpretation is that the Bucks would probably degrade a bunch after another 20-30 grams of oak... But that was not captured within the data...

A chopping test with 30 degree bevels and something similar to an actual use force will settle it. If they match or beat the LN chisels at that, then they're just better at it. what else can you say?

A2 is a funny choice for a chisel, but it is tough in abuse (not at the edge, but in terms of not breaking structurally, like big chunks off of a bevel) and it's stable which makes it easy for LN to finish after heat treat. (Plus, they said their heat treat guy only works with it, and the O1 option that they used to have disappeared because the guy who was doing the heat treat for them quit doing it - I believe it was subcontracted and not in house).