First, the mortise chisel. The big one that I posted made from O1 works better than I could’ve guessed, but I wouldn’t want to make smaller mortise chisels out of O1 and sell them to general population in this jail we call middle age life.
The reason for that is that I think they will break easily by bending. So does D2, and so would V11. A2 is some more tough than O1 as far as bending tests go, so it’s probably not a bad choice for a solid steel chisel. Cryo treating it actually improves the edge stability but reduces the amount of force an A2 chisel will tolerate.
I won’t drive Volkswagen products again in my life, and I won’t buy A2, though. Just two personal rules.
So, it seems reasonable to see if 52100 will harden in a 3/8″ square cross section because at least that and below could be made of a steel that’s known for toughness. Well, it does. 69 out of the quench and 64 after a long double temper at 400F. I think even at that fairly strong tempering schedule, it could probably use a little more, but we’ll see in use. Steel is interesting in that what makes 52100 really tough (able to withstand a lot of lateral force before breaking) is at odds with hardness. Difficulty with it for amateur knife makers is getting the steel into something that can be quenched and will result in high hardness. Larrin Thomas has a nice article on it.
I don’t care for the way it behaves when it’s tough, because the characteristics aren’t what we like in edges, which is for them not to move at all.
But you can “cook it a little harder” hand and eye and get past that. I don’t have a furnace, but it looks like a bit of a nuisance time wise to get flat stock and do what needs to be done.
Larrin’s best result with a fairly technical bunch of stuff is 67.4 hardness with an oil quench and a relatively low furnace cook. That’s actually pretty impressive. With more temp and a faster quench, it’s probably similar to my result. His charts are two points shy of my finish hardness, and elsewhere, you can see that the toughness falls off after a certain point. The actual deal with that is it starts to feel like something else, except at 64, it’s sluggish on sharpening stones, but we can live with that. It’s about as abrasion resistant as O1, but slightly more slick on stones.
So, short story long, this chisel may be ideal for a bench chisel but a little too much of the characteristic toughness is traded for hardness in my heat treatment. Pictures of the chisel, the bolster, a little more square – left it like that just to see how it looks, and you can see that the cross section is slightly relieved (trapezoidal). This is essential for mortises that aren’t shallow. 
For an idea on size, here is this chisel with the bigger O1 chisel and an older “pigsticker”. 
These are not small. The pigsticker is a little longer in comparison, but being at the back of the photo makes the phone sort suggest something closer is bigger, for the same reason people hold out fish in front of them to get them closer to the camera.
the handle is a touch longer than I’d put on a bench chisel, but it’s nice to have some room to work. Short handles on mortise chisels make no sense to me at all.
If these need to be 62 hardness after temper to be tougher, I have another 50 degrees of tempering room and that would just about do it.
Here’s the Gripe
There was an interesting thread on reddit last week or early this week. Some guy snapped a ray iles D2 mortise chisel in two places. I did what I usually do, which was start pondering answers in type and drowining the people there. I don’t often post on reddit and don’t read it regularly – google brought it to me – but I usually drown everyone in pondering regardless of the venue. I thought those chisels were CPM D2 steel (about as tough as A2), but I think they are just D2 (about 1/3rd as tough as A2). Like V11 would be in a normal sash mortise profile or one like mine above, they’re not resistant to lateral forces breaking the. This is yet again a point where I’ve mentioned that V11 (XHP) makes little sense in chisels, and it’s attribute for Veritas buyers is that LV pushes the hardness up reasonably high. if they made a 62 hardness A2 chisel for mortising, it would be a much better idea.
So, I said something to Steve (or typed it) that I’d not consider making mortise chisels for sale in the future because they’re a pain to make. Only the large one was. This second one was already no more work than a bench chisel. And because they could be made reasonably elsewhere and you’re giving people something that they think they can pull on like a drawbridge lever, because instruction about cutting mortises is pretty poor and so is ad copy.
And then I went and looked at what’s available.
IBC (Cosman pushes them, but maybe others do) makes an ugly straight sided chisel for $145. This is appalling not because it’s $145, but because of what it is for $145. A2 is not expensive, and it’s just a flat sided slab of A2 with a short handle and a screw thingy through the handle. The handle is cherry, I guess because of a metal threaded gadget that goes through it, but it’s short and fat. I think what we see with this and others is the loss of skill and insight. It’s probably harder to create side relief on these chisels. If you’re working freehand, you just create it by eye and then work to width. To get perfectly square would be a pain, but you could get close. But the chisel, as well as the cheap looking flat stock bench chisels for moon price, I don’t get it. They are garden variety A2 in a spec that A2 lands if you heat treat it – there’s no substance there.
I had LN’s chisels. they have no side relief and I couldn’t tolerate it, but they were pretty and well made. Again, though, socket mortise chisels with short handles, I don’t really get it. At the time, they were $60. They’re $115 or something now, which is hard to swallow because they are not ideal for even small cabinet mortises with square sides. Is it the case of something that could be relatively good isn’t because the trapezoidal cross section is harder to machine? I don’t know. The whole bit of the sides being flat to aid in alignment sounds good, but it doesn’t work in practice. Instead, they work like a drill bit that’s wandering and there’s no way to stop it, and they bind tight and someone reading this will at some point break out the side of cabinet parts fighting these chisels out of a binding mortise, especially if the wood isn’t perfect. Not that this is hypothetical – I’ve done it. I like LN. the price doubling is a surprise, but they may be replacing production tooling like LN is. There’s the stick for CNC – it’s expensive and it doesn’t last and wear/replace like more crude but harder to engineer production solutions. Again, some art has been lost. These could be forged and ground probably for less cost.
That leads us to LV’s chisels. They’re infrequently available, the cross section is horribly tall for a cabinet size chisel, they’re made of a steel that has poor toughness (but good abrasion resistance and hardness – just an application mismatch here), and the steel is expensive. It is legitimately expensive, they’re not running a shell game charging more for it. Height of a mortise chisel should correspond to mortise depth. Pigsticker height is a deep mortise production thing, they were not a cabinet chisel. There is at least some side relief on the LV chisels based on the ad copy, but the cross section is a nuisance if you’re making face frames or cabinet doors. They could be 2/3rds as tall made out of A2 and be a better chisel.
I’ve described what I like here in something for, for example, 1 1/2″ long mortises 5/16ths wide and maybe 1 1/4″ or 1 1/2″ deep. If you make furniture or cabinets, you’re going to be making a lot of those, and some smaller and some about like that but longer in length of the mortise. Flat sided firmer type chisels are fairly common and probably met a lot of this need. Sash mortise chisels are often long and have square sides, and most of us aren’t making sash, but for someone with deep pockets, something like what I’ve made above is a pleasure to use. You ride the bevel cutting mortises and at the bottom of the cut, lift the chisel just lightly and rotate it a little bit (“levering it”) to pull break the bottom and sides of the little bit unbroken at the bottom. The lift is needed so that you don’t have the tip completely buried in virgin wood – if you do, you’ll probably find yourself breaking tips off.
This rotation is a combination of elegant and a little bit of force. You don’t want straight sided chisels interfering with the force you’re applying so that you can’t feel what you’re doing. It makes no sense, you can’t maneuver them. And you need some depth to do this rotation relative to the length of the bevel. The taller the chisel cross section, the longer the primary bevel becomes and the rotation point is out of the cut on shallow mortises. It should be obvious to someone designing tools, but maybe it only becomes so when you do get the chance to cut a deep mortise and see why pigstickers are so good at doing that.
It took me about 2 hours to make the mortise chisel above. I could profitably make that as a guy in a garage and it’s better than any of the offerings above. It is alarming that I can say that without guilt or reservation – that I am just working in a garage freehand and the commercial offerings don’t make sense compared to what I’m making with about $15-$20 in materials and consumables.
The one unknown variable is warrantying things. I’d never consider taking returns and I wouldn’t replace chisels broken from abuse, which would garner loud complaints.
And I’m also not in a position where I could just start making chisels in quantity, so this part, at least, is hypothetical.
What would I do if I were buying at this point? I’d get imported mortise chisels that are square ash type and grind them into a trapezoidal shape.
Maybe I missed a chisel being out there with what I showed above. I have some older chisels with those attributes, so it isn’t like I’m inventing anything.
The state of things is awful for the white collar buyer who may actually enjoy cutting mortises by hand, though. It’s wonderful to do after you get through the steep part of the learning curve, but can be made seemingly much harder than it is by tools that are just not designed well for the task.
Of Making by Hand with Wood and Steel 
Wouldn’t the Narex mortise chisels be relatively close to the right shape, on the low-end side of things? I had the impression they were basically square sash-height with proper trapezoidal relief. I haven’t tried them, but I’d sort of like to because they seem like the only new-made mortise chisel on the market that isn’t a trainwreck in terms of value-for-money. Then again I know they are not spec’d terribly hard, so maybe that’s a dealbreaker for people.
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You’re right, the shape of the narex is just about right. I’ve had narex chisels only once in the past and I think they may struggle to get to their 59 rating due to the hardening process they use, but they should be very resistant to breaking. I’d buy them over any of the three I complained about and accommodate the lack of hardness.
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I have the set of 4 Naraex mortise chisels. The sharpen fairly easy and I’ve beat the snot out of them and the keep trucking. Everyone expects chisels to.hold the edge forever, but I think I’d rather sharpen more often than have the super hard steels that take forever to abrade. Just my 2 cents. I like sharpening now that I know how to do it.
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Those chisels are wonderful. You are making some beautiful and highly functional tools. It is sad and unfortunate what’s available today.
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In one of Rob Cosman’s videos, he mentioned that he worked closely with LN while designing their mortise chisels, and the square cross section was his suggestion.
As long as one is strong enough and constantly levering/prying the chisel with the tip deep in the wood, any chisel will probably break at some point eventually.
David, I know that you watched a Chinese master making something(one of your old smc posts), if you pay attention to his technique, he just slightly rocks the chisel to get it free from the wood after each axe strike, no levering action at all.
One thing that is rarely mentioned why laminated chisels/irons are so popular in Eastern woodworkers; other than it is easier to sharpen; is that high carbon steel is quite rare/expensive back then for various reasons. It is a compromise between raw materials and labor cost.
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yes – I don’t know that guy’s name, but the account posting on youtube was GE Wong or something (maybe GE Hong). That wasn’t the guy as far as I know – but probably the channel owner posting videos.
I noticed a couple of things – the mortising was generally done on a lower bench, essential if you’re mortising a lot and doing it every day – the shoulder position above a bench is no good – sitting on work and mortising is more like hammer position at an anvil. The second thing was flinging the waste out of the mortise with the chisel, which I’ve seen japanese users (legitimate ones, not people in the states teaching about japanese tools) do, to keep waste out of the way. that assumes you can place the chisel quickly with your off hand without letting go of the handle. Probably won’t be popular with beginners sellers or cosman students, though. The wobbling probably had some to do with preventing binding, but a lot to do also with walking the chisel to the cut quickly. It was pretty nifty.
Laminated is tradition in japan. The chinese and other asian chisels that were laminated, I don’t know as much about, but it’s probably a whole lot easier and cheaper not just for the cost of steel, but in working the rest of the chisel if you’re forging a chisel to shape. You have only a small part that will refuse to be filed or scraped – the hard lamination, and nothing to warp during heat treatment when using a water hardening steel.
I would bet the Hong/Wong chisels were older water hardening steel tools – his translated language said something about buying good older tools when he saw them and that they were inexpensive.
Differentially heat treated solid steel probably is a better chisel than laminated, and it certainly allows for less fat designs, but it’s also incompatible with modern manufacturing. Forging and then finishing (shaping, filing) clean up work even with O1 is an enormous pain, as O1 partially hardens, and in parts like bolsters, can destroy files. I’m guessing a little bit at labor involved, but imagine the iron or mild steel component laminated to a hard bit greatly lowers the cost of hand forged or man-at-power-hammer forged stuff.
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Yeah, but look at the type of a chisel Xin Quansheng is using (it’s his real name, here’s his channel: https://www.youtube.com/@user-lk8ui4cs4q) – it’s a big, stout socket chisel, a lot like a pig sticker. That might be a separate topic probably, he isn’t fussy about the tools and often uses this hardware store chisels with rubber handles. If you watch more of the Chinese woodworking videos you will notice that their tools are crude by our standards, I think it’s because their woods are way way harder than what we’re used to. Usually it’s younger people that use Japanese chisels and such and do more westernized type of projects. Also note that in most videos where Xin does mortises he is using some soft to medium density wood, with really hard woods like “Chinese mahogany” he does less levering, e.g. plane making videos. At the same time he demoes country furniture where mortises doesn’t have to be super nice and tight, and where it’s often traded for speed.
With Japanese tools it also depends on type of work. Look at the YT account of the Tokyo tategu association, and their demo video (with English subs btw): https://youtu.be/h9K9Lme4qIs?si=dRTYMrHDCI_6JRDD&t=314 Note there’s no levering at all, he barely wiggles a chisel. Also note how he positions a chisel – something David mentioned before. Keep in mind this is a very specific job being demostrated, it’s in a very soft and abrasive cedar, must be done very quickly and the result must be superb. Therefore for them maintaining a cutting edge is a must, also they avoiding even a slightest chance of bruising an edge (they often don’t have a shoulder on a tenon that would have hidden it). Mortising something like red or white oak is a totally different thing, we want heavy blows, big bites, levering and all that. Japanese carpenters mortising is also different from either of this – they lever a chip almost the length of a mortise.
Oh and Japanese “cabinetmaker” mortising chisels are square in section, BUT they are hollow on three sides and arrises are usually left sharp. Not as sharp as a cutting edge, but enough to slice a finger.
And then there are German woodworkers that were traditionally trained and they mortise in yet another way and who swear by trapezoidal chisels.
I guess what I’m trying to say it’s all nuanced.
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You’re right – they’re all different ways. Xin (thanks for IDing the real channel!!) sometimes has chisels with relatively elegant proportions, and others – I remember him saying (because he got bombarded with “where do I get that?” questions) that he just picked up decent tools for cheap when he found them. Others may have been more tubby. His frame saws always had very workman like preparation, but at the time, i did a lot of tool work in a metal vise for little stuff because it was so stable. I loved that in his first video, he was doing a bunch of work (probably still is) in a machinists vise.
yes on the mortising in cedar there – that guy is skilled – but the quality of the mortise edges is obviously extremely important to him. I don’t encounter that much, and am leaning toward more like getting as much mechanically out of the chisel as possible in terms of volume removal.
there’s a lot more showing off through mortises in furniture now than I’d have an interest in. For a while, the whole double wedged through tenon thing was popular and showing up on sides of dressers and shelves – it’s just weird looking to me. But I don’t like to tell other people what they should like, I just don’t like it. I like long grain showing on everything if possible, so that tempers how I’d make mortises. It’s my opinion that if someone wants to do a lot of mortises where the border of the mortise matters (like mission style) they should just get a machine mortiser.
My kind of narrow view is that most people in the US are trying to do some offshoot of English tradition if working by hand. I guess my wants for most of the tools are sort of English in nature and there’s nothing at all English about my background (almost entirely german with a little german swiss – but my relatives grew up working hard and took advantage of convenience when they could afford it – whatever tools ancestors had would’ve been thrown out).
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WP doesn’t allow for the third-level replies, so I’m not sure where this comment is going to show up, but I’m replying to the mortising methods thread. Also full disclosure: I don’t speak a word in any of Chinese languages, but with some help of those who do I found Xin Quansheng channels on Chinese social media before he began re-uploading some(!) of his content to YT.
The metalworking vises isn’t the way Chinese people do woodworking, he says he started using them because of his sight worsening from age. Metalworking vises just bring pieces closer to eyes. He has a few videos where he shows how mortise and tenon is done traditionally and there he complains the jobs isn’t good enough because he can’t see lines well. He still does a good job though. Keep in mind that they didn’t use glue at all until very recently (like, really recently, probably 1950ies) – all the joints must be so tight they can only be assembled with a hammer (a big one). Other people on YT using metalworking vises for woodworking seems to be his pupil or his viewers.
Another thing worth mentioning is their woods. There’s a reason why their planes must be pushed with both hands: most of their cabinet woods have a density of brass or aluminum. This is why their ox yoke chairs are built up from pieces rather than steam bent – hard oily woods don’t steam bend well, they don’t glue well or even at all, so it must be a lot of interlocking wedging joinery. Their primary hand tool isn’t a plane, it’s a scraper. And a thin, slender, elegant chisel won’t stand up for the task, that’s why they’re big and stout and you were right – they’re laminated. We don’t see paper thin shavings either, shavings from most tame woods on his channel are thick and ragged and Xin specifically talks about it on several occassions. I’d be happy to join up forces with anyone to help with the translation btw, I feel there are troves knowledge.
The Japanese mortising: now compare it to this — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=romYKQpfXyc
Now how about that for levering? Note the chisel is what we would call a firmer chisel, they might or might not have a chamfer – I don’t think I have to explain it since you know their chisels way better than me. I’m selecting particular videos mostly of elder people assuming they were trained before advent of machines, so chances are they show a method that’s 100% by hand, and isn’t an adaptation to chain mortisers and such.
Yeah, the tateguya is performing a very specific job, mostly defined by the same constraints as Chinese — not using glue traditionally plus a very high expectations of speed and quality of work. I mean, Japan didn’t have animal glue, they used rice paste which dries very hard, but gives up on a sharp blows and isn’t water resistant. So they had to compensate for it with the same tight joints as in Chinese woodworking with a caveat that they can’t dry fit, or the wood will compress and a joint won’t hold. It must go together on the first try and I’d probably split 9 joints out of 10 if I’d tried that today.
I also get what you’re saying about through mortises. Probably it was a way to save on labor since a good through mortise is easier to chop than a blind mortise. I’ve been told by Japanese craftsmen that uninterrupted grain pattern is a very desired effect, but once machines become widespread in some trades craftsmen opted for open joinery to show it was made by hand. But in some crafts like tategu most mortises are still technically blind because endgrain sucks moisture in and a piece starts to rot in their humid climate. So they make it as deep as they can, leaving about 3mm of material to keep endgrain closed and making a tenon maybe just under 1mm shorter than the depth. Note that in the final stages in that video the tateguya uses a bottom scraping chisel and a special punch to compress the bottom and to ensure it’s flat and level. Those types of chisels aren’t easy to come by btw, not the type he uses. I have one which is pretty much worn off and new ones are for carpentry size mortises. They don’t look very hard to make (neither they look like somebody put much effort into making them), they’re not laminated, maybe just differentially hardened. I’m thinking that I could make a mori-nomi myself from 1/4″ O1 flat stock, some day.
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I bought a bunch of chinese planes at one point. their shungee reminds me of purpleheart, and some of their oaks are stringy and hard. For a little while, woodwell was making ebony planes, though, and whatever the ebony was, it was quite nice.
I can guess on the laminated tools that they have to be thick not so much to withstand working in hard woods, but because a laminated tool in theory shouldn’t break at a weld, but in practice, breaking at the back of the weld is common. As soon as that weld breaks, failure is imminent. If I made a chisel .15″ thick, it would tolerate prying and malleting (typically, the business end on mine is .1-.12 or so – it’s just a nicer chisel when made like that), but I don’t know the history of the socketed tools that Xin has on the wall. If they would make it to a job site, then more than just prying wood is needed for survival. Surviving the unskilled guy opening or levering boards and such is there.
we’re conditioned now to accept that to work something like shungee, a $20 chisel won’t do it, but there’s no reason one wouldn’t be able to if it were properly made – there just isn’t a niche for someone making drop forged drill rod chisels to make them at 63 hardness and import them.
I wonder how much of the aldi type chisels and stanley fat max ever end up in a woodworking shop – same with HF- I’d bet all of those chisels have about a 10% chance of landing with a woodworker rather than as a gift for a new homeowner.
When I first saw Xin, he said he was slowing down. I figured the metal vise was a “him” thing, just like the radiant heater he uses, and the cigarettes. He’s a character, but not a foolish or made up character, he’s interesting and real. I’m kind of surprised he’s going at it, as usually someone “georges” it when they wind down. george showed up on the forum, I think (he didn’t say) because he was full of piss still from more than full time work as a maker all his life. I guess it took about 5 or 6 years before he transitioned into really being retired and got worn out on the forums. Not like he left in a huff, he communicated to me that it just isn’t a medium where you give advice and people actually take it, so why bother giving it.
japanese guy doing the timber mortise is excellent – people should take note of the splitting as well as the notching trick to sever the ends of fibers straight without needing to locate an incannel gouge (gouge is a fabulous way to do that though, if more than one cut is needed).
The chisel looks like tataki size. the style of them, as you know, is all over the board. Some look more like a mortising chisels, and some just look like a plus sized oire. I’ve had a few – for what we do in hardwoods, cutting 1″+ mortises just isn’t really a thing. if someone has nice straight grained softwoods, suddenly it’s a reasonable thing – another good example of – in my case – buying a large tataki nomi and then really not having something to use it on. Mortising beech wasn’t really the right landing spot – the chisel I’d bought was Imai and it just wasn’t very impressive in terms of practical usability.
all of this sort of points back to what I’m really doing, I guess, without thinking too much, is using and making tools in the style of 1850 england and america.
By the way, I found Xin on Weibo way back when he first showed up on YT with someone else posting the videos on his behalf, but not on his own channel “GE Wong” or something”? The chinese text that was on a couple of the videos made it possible cut and paste to find weibo on google. That’s so long ago now that I don’t even know if weibo is still accessible here.
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Shungee is probably one of the tames woods they have by their standards. I could look it up in my books if you’re interested, but on top of my head — their cabinetmaking woods were imported from colonies in Indonesia and Philippines and were described as very dense, hard (but not brittle) and having a crazy interlocked grain that didn’t really had short grain areas. Like, they could cut a square spiral decor piece from a single block and it wouldn’t break, even though it had walls about 1/4″ thick. Or at least these were the woods used during their peak of cabinet making in 15-16 centuries. I don’t think there’s a name for those woods in English, but there are latin names, so we could look their actual physical properties up. Xin often uses something that Google translates as “camphor wood” and species that look similar to our domestic hardwoods, so that’s different.
Spot on on the character, Xin is genuine. I too found him on Weibo through that poster he had in early videos. He had not one, but several “channels” (?) there, because there was a 100k users limit and he had like 500k followers by that time. He’s quite a star – some national TV channels did more than a few interviews with him, they also did a full feature piece (it’s somewhere on his YT, the one they throw little double splayed stools high in the air and let it drop on a pavement), he has been featured in several TV shows too. I’ve asked some of my colleagues who speak Chinese, they said they knew him even though they weren’t into woodworking at all. They also said Xin started doing this because he always wanted a school, and you can see how he stopped filming projects and switched to student’s work reviews at some point, probably when he’s got the school. GE Wong was one of his students, it was written in the channel description. I guess the guy just couldn’t keep up with the videos production, also at that time YT was really throttled in China (it was before Google struck the censoring deal with CPC), so he just quit, I think even the channel is gone now.
The Japanese mortising: what’s interesting is crazy effective (he’s going what, 2″ deep under a minute?) using a chisel only. I was involved in a few timberframing projects in New England, the material was all kinds of pine, but when we manually chopped mortises we drilled them out with a beam drill first. Looking back I think it didn’t make it any faster than just chopping, maybe helped in keeping a mortise plumb. Everyone I saw were chopping mortises like a cabinetmaker, no exceptions. I heard that in UK they often use green oaks for timberframing, but there isn’t a video where somebody would chop a mortise by hand in oak. I wonder whether that technique would work for oak: it’s straight grained and it’s still pretty green, so it should split out predictably.
On the chisels pricing: I honestly don’t see a reason why a 20$ chisel couldn’t be good if a manufacturer wanted it. Remember when you did a price comparison for early 1900ies planes? They were accessible to trades people, so those good vintage chisels should have been accessible too. I think today prices just reflect that there’s no market for good accessible chisels today. Hobbyists aren’t a huge group of people to warrant even a few millions good chisels for 20$, and trades don’t really need good chisels todays. So more or less good quality tools are made by a few boutique makers (good quality doesn’t imply good working properties though, not directly at least), with the rest of the market being saturated with non-hardening Aldi type chisels. Maybe with an occasional random aberration like the HF “grind yourself a chisel” kits.
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Shungee is actually pretty hard, but it’s straight, and not very pretty. Straight is important in a wood for planes. wood database has it at slightly more dense at ambient moisture than water, though hardness is in the ballpark of indian rosewood. Indian rosewood is sort of an aberration. It can be 95% as dense as water (0.8-0.85 is more typical) and plane wonderfully in the long grain.
it makes sense that for furniture, more interlocked would be needed given the sculptural nature.
and if you can get extra hardness and stiffness with bending failure strength at least as high or higher, that makes for nice handle/leg/furniture support.
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by the way, I think oak is too dense for a wide chisel to operate the way the japanese mortiser showed. I tried both 1″ and narrower chisels mortising beech plane bodies, and there just isn’t enough penetration with a 1″ chisel to make it faster than a narrower one.
turnscrews were common where I grew up – if you wanted an antique of some sort, you could get a turnscrew or something for horses to hang on the wall. I would guess it was just faster, and the little triangle tents of wood between the drill holes would’ve pared of wonderfully if the wood was still a little wet.
Here’s a good example of what’s premium now. https://www.heartwoodtools.com/harold-saxon/ultimax-chisel-set-of-six
These chisels are nicely made, but i’d hate to use them compared to a good vintage english chisel testing 62 hardness or so. the ad copy is humorous. These were all the rage in AU, you may recall hearing about them because the maker had some health issues and many folks are still waiting for chisels they paid for.
I haven’t used a richter, but if richters are a 0.9-1% carbon (:”chrome vanadium” steel and test 63, they are probably the equal of these. ).
the set of chisels that set me off down the road of wanting to make english style chisels is a set of 8, I think, maybe 7 from tyzack. They were $55 with a roll off of ebay because nobody seemed to notice them and that’s all the higher the auction went. if it was about making things with wood instead of tools for me , they would’ve been my lifetime set.
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