Slow Progress

I often make a comment that I’m going to make or build something, and that I won’t have much time, and then beg borrow or steal time from just about everything around me. Never abandoning kids’ events or anything but popping my head up upstairs to find if the kids have finished their evening routine. If not and I’m not working late, I sneak to the shop.

I mentioned about two weeks ago that I was going to build a set of chisels for myself. The shop is sort of rearranged to have most of the metalworking junk in one corner now and I hung a furniture blanket. Those are flammable, by the way! So anywhere hot tools could touch them, I’m hanging a welding blanket. Fortunately, the moving blankets aren’t nitrocellulose guitar pick flammable, and my shop now has several buckets of water in the area, a garden hose and a fire extinguisher right on the other side of the shop door.

I want a set of 8 bench chisels. They’re this far:

Actually, they’re a bit further along- this picture is from a few days ago. All but the thin chisel have the bolsters ground and are heat treated. Scope creep brings three parers into the equation, something I don’t need, and doing these all at once lets me see some differences that I wouldn’t have noticed. For example, the 7/8 and 1″ chisels wanted to come up a little short on hardness. They’re in the range of 61/62 after hardening, so far from being unusable. the full hardness length is a little shorter in them, probably 1 1/2 inches, which most people would never get through – one would have to build a very joinery heavy group of about 100 hand made pieces to get there, or maybe 200 or 400.

I have to think about what I’m intending to do – sell the odd set in the future at a legitimate full price to a target market. I think I posted that already.

The quirk with the wider chisels hardening a little less comes to mind because I could see the center of the chisels staying orange in the brine longer. This first part of the hardening – the first two seconds or so, is critical. Then there’s another part to complete in about two minutes. It’s not a question of making a useable chisel, but rather one of ego, I guess. Can I get full hardness to be identical within less than a point across the range, and to the same length on a chisel. if the chisels are made more thinly than these just below the shoulder, the answer is an easy yes.

For the longer term, I haven’t made too much of a decision yet. Earlier firmer chisels were fairly thin with Nicholson describing what I prefer, anyway in older texts – a relatively flat stretch of chisel with only slight curvature and then increasing past the midpoint up to the shoulder of the tool. This curvature is obviously missing from tools made now, and somewhat uncommon even on tools in the late 1800s.

But slow progress it is – still better than using the “too busy” excuse and not going into the shop at all. That’s a disease of inertia that people get into once they think they have their shop built out, making it seem like a monumental task to get in the shop and do anything at all, whereas at least doing something makes keeping things going pretty effortless. I started with the inertia just like a lot of people do – it’s part not knowing what you want to make and part work demand and whatever else, and also a big part of everything seeming difficult with icing on the cake sometimes being the realization that all you worked on for a full Saturday morning is crap and has to be binned or burned.

I still have a hole in the door transitioning from garage shop to basement from those days. the door is a skinned entry door and not solid and guess what will go through the outer veneer – rigid shop vac parts if you throw them hard enough.

I expect, and hope that through the end of the year, I’ll get three knives made and about 15 chisels. That’s about a month and a half’s worth of spare time stuff starting from the last post, and it seems like not enough. There are lots of underlying reasons, but some of them are work related and I’ve got some decisions to make in life. If one of those being viable was making tools full time, I’d already be doing it. Unfortunately, as a primary earner, that’s probably far off.