A Set for Me

I don’t really take orders, though comfort level with things being marketable is high enough now that I’d sell chisels if I had time to make them. Past selling of knives to people has created some small backlog to finish a few knives for people who want them as gifts for relatives – not from a crafty sense, but because relatives of the recipients have gotten hands on some stainless knives – which are thin, and more like finer Japanese knives but even thinner at the bevel yet. Knives are not difficult to make, at least not the way I’m making them.

In the time making chisels, I’ve never kept anything but the rejects. The rejects are pretty good, but it could be something cosmetic, or in the case of a set of early heller file chisels, when chisels were ground to clean metal, a set of chisels I kept resulted in tangs that were only about 0.2″ thick – I kept those and they work fine.

Everything else in 26c3 or whatever else has gone out of the door except for the rejects.

I plan to make a set of chisels in eighths out of W1. W1 isn’t my first choice for chisels, but no clean higher carbon steel is available in rounds here and switching to brine to quench W1 has really brought the hardness both up, and more even than trying to use a fast oil. The rumor is that brine will crack everything. I’ve cracked tools quenching in plain water, but I think even though brine is even faster than water, the quench is even and water is turbulent and a poor choice other than for waterfalls of large items that cool too slow to crack.

These are the first two tapered and hardened blanks from the set. they now need finish grinding. At this point, I will probably hardness test everything because it takes no more than a minute to do and data is always useful, as is confirming an individual chisel is good. The top curvature on my chisels generally offers the ability to test a chisel and then grind the diamond cone mark out later.

The turn with W1 is an interesting one. Parks 50 is the fastest oil I know of, and it just struggles to get any part of the chisels more than an inch up to full hardness. Variance can be two points and the need to move the tool in the quench results in warp. Lots of other things can create a warp issue beyond that, but I have those ironed out.

These chisels both test 68.5 hardness out of the quench, and 63-63.5 after tempering at 400F twice. This is off of the charts for W1, but we’re not limited to those charts – the lack of a prescribed soak and brine make for a nice combination – preventing too much carbon in solution (brittle) but finishing the job in the quench efficiently, which results in better edge stability. the obvious issue you can see is that there is a layer of brine induced corrosion. I do two quenches in brine during the process, one in the middle and then one at the end. normal grinding and finishing should get rid of all of this, though.

So far, I have not cracked or significantly warped a single item quenched in brine. So much for the oft made suggestion that you have to quench in as slow of a media as will get the job done.

When I finish this set, I’ll post it. Between the knives and other things I said I’d make, it’ll probably be more than a week or two.