The Finished Mortise Chisel

Finishing the chisel after the prior pictures was uneventful. As dumb as it sounds, even when you work freehand, you have to come up with routines on how you’ll do something. Which contact wheel, where on the flat belt sander, how to avoid overheating anything.

Yeah, not great pictures with the mess in the background. it’s bigger than it looks, about 13 1/2 or 14″ total. The handle is pretty but the feel of it is forgettable. It’s large and more figured than the picture show – london plane tree again, but indistinguishable to the average person vs. hard maple.

When I tested this chisel after tempering, it’s 61 hardness at the tip and 63 an inch back. I harden with forges and temper usually with a toaster oven. Toaster ovens are wildly accurate on average, but the temperature swings around, so I put chisels and plane irons in an aluminum sandwich. I think this chisel may help me figure something out, though. The plates are stable, but I think the ends might be slightly warmer than the middle, and I’ll drill a second hole in one of the plates to get a measure of the stack temperature on the end vs. the middle. if it’s different, then I’ll need to engineer something slightly different.

The functional difference won’t be anything on a mortise chisel – better this than a paring chisel. Bench chisels don’t experience this because they are short enough that the business end is near the thermocouple. if you have a choice with most steels, full hardness halfway up and tempered a little further beyond that would be lovely.

A theme here probably starts to show. All of my chisels look the same. This one has an extra fat and longer handle, it’s more like a shovel handle in size, but you can’t tell that so easily online because proportion is observable. I have somehow ended up with larger than average arms and forearms and teeny little hands, so my dainty fingers are no help.

I’ll cut a mortise at some point and post the picture at the end of this. It’s nice to have made something different here, but I can already see areas for visual improvement, and that’s kind of annoying. It’s the kind of annoying, though, that makes you do more, not less. So that’s not that bad. I suffered the other kind long enough when first starting out – the one where you don’t know what you want to build, how you want to build it and when you’re done, it looks just OK and you haven’t the slightest clue how you’ll make the next one look better.

Edit: Mortise picture added. I did this first with dry SYP. Which is marshmallow and glass. SYP works like it’s greased when it’s wet. When it’s got some age, the rings are crap, and so is the stuff between them. I’m at a loss for scraps because I’ve got an over-full shop and I decided a while ago if I have scraps that could maybe potentially possibly sort of kind of be useful at some point in the future, I would burn them. I’m not poor enough to hassle myself. And so, here we are, I’ve got nothing but good FAS wood and a gaggle of exotics that I don’t want to cut test mortises in.

And after 15 minutes of looking, I finally found a piece of cherry that I received in a lumber lot , and it’s shockingly worthless and this is the rough size of it!!

I’m sitting here thinking about all of the ways O1 might fail and completely failing to remember that I’m not a hard core chisel prying guy. I don’t think the pigstickers were actually intended to be pulled on like someone pumping a jack lifting three tons, either. the tall cross section is to rotate in the bottom of the cut. The more you get away from that and the more you try to be stronger and faster, the slower you’ll mortise.

And so, I’ll never break this chisel. The first edge *should* be sacrificial, but even it holds up fine before the marks are even out of the back, and with nothing more than setup using an india stone.

Too, the sides of this chisel are sharp and crisp on the bottom. scotchbrite belted the tops to take off their tooth, but leaving the edges alone on the bottom is important. This chisel has a pretty good bit of trapezoidal relief, and the bottoms are sharp and crisp. it works better than I expected, creating a clean mortise without any real effort.

Iv’e got thoughts on cutting mortises, too. I’ll post about them sometime. I despise anything other than cutting mortises by hand with no drilling, no machines, no routers, etc, and I cut them in a way that is probably common but doesn’t resemble much taught now. Some of the methods taught show the instructor has no idea why there is a tall cross section on these chisels in the first place, and the idea that it’s there to make it strong so you can put both feet on the end of the bench and lean back is no way true. Just like the idea that the top curvature on tall mortise chisels (rounding at the top of the bevel) is to protect the ends of the mortise.

I’ll save actually discussing cutting mortises easily point and shoot for another day. If you have a thicker cross section chisel like this and you try it, you’ll think 20 lightbulbs just lit when you see how the chisel works in your own hands.