The mention of Wright talking about zen-wu chisels moving the needle, so to speak, really gives people who are into the whole influencer thing the idea that something odd – like a titanium backed chisel – is really going to move the needle. It doesn’t, of course. As much as I love making chisels, a good drop forged chisel at 62 hardness with relatively plain steel is going to be super – if you can find it.
I despise the kind of “secret steel” thing, as I mentioned in a previous post, and think that it would be a public service for someone to have the chisels XRFed, and then point out the actual or likely alloy in each offering. Most PMs are going to be biased toward carbide volume, which is antithetical to good chisel performance. Carbide volume in harder carbides adds edge life, if you can manage to avoid damaging edges. I think for anyone with experience, a plain steel edge that’s appropriate hardness and stable is going to be a better fit due to the damage/wear balance. If you’re doing more than planing pine that’s already clean and completely free of knots, you’re going to end up with edge damage. If you’re competent, effort sharpening is a pretty much linear association with the upper limit of time you’ll get with a plane. With a chisel, that doesn’t exist. If O1 lasts half as long in a planing test as V11, you’ll potentially get your time back unless you are not very good at sharpening.
That’s a good motivation to get better (faster, neater, sharper) at sharpening and figure out where you’re wasting time.
When you incur damage, you get to abrade the steel instead of the wood. Most carbide volume steels have some edge stability issues, or at least can, and some don’t wear very nicely. And some steels (like 52100) that don’t have that much carbide volume just don’t pick up a shaving as easily while they wear as something like O1, despite having similar edge life. You’ll work harder using 52100, which has always flummoxed me. Why? I don’t know. The things that show up on the microscope for 52100 are similar to XHP (V11), but in smaller volume. XHP picks up a shaving well if you can avoid chipping it – 52100 doesn’t. Sometimes knowing what is easy and why isn’t as easy and you just have to accept what and avoid getting stuck in the trap of reasoning that what you experience is just bad data. It probably isn’t – don’t try to outsmart yourself.
In the end, it’s nice to use an edge with less damage and avoid the scenarios where you just need extreme abrasion resistance. And hint, it’s not hard wood, silica or anything of the sort – it’s inability to understand that you don’t have to do most of your planing with the thinnest shavings you can make. Doing that doesn’t even give you better accuracy -it’s worse if you’re doing more than smoothing and probably worse if you’re just smoothing. That involves seeking edge stability, something you can sharpen in a minute with confidence and maybe that even points toward something where if you come up short sharpening, the uniformity of the edge is so good you’ve just accidentally done the smartest thing you can do with straight razors – you’ve left the original edge but improved the clearance behind it.
For cold woodwork (laning and chiseling, for example) I don’t see the point of anything CPM, but some of the stuff can be interesting. The lone high toughness steels that I can think of are 1V and 3V. I don’t think you’re going to find CPM 1V – literally a CPM version of a plain steel with a small vanadium addition, but it is fantastically tough. The market itself doesn’t seem to be that interested in super tough steels that may not have that great of an abrasive wear life. if you’re making dies, for example, it would have to be very difficult to find a situation where there are arises so acute that 3V doesn’t handle the situation. 3V can be super tough, but at 59 hardness, it would be a bung to use in a chisel. The 3V iron I tested, mistakenly hardened at 59 instead of 61 by Bos would form a burr on 1 micron diamonds and it never felt as sharp as V11 or really anything else. I kept having to look at it under the microscope. CPM M4 also offered fantastic resistance (not in a good way) at same sharpness, and none of this may have been as obvious if I weren’t using one plane, one board, and rotating six irons through. The differences were very stark doing that, and I’m glad to have done it, even if an intermittently employed CPA would say it’s not a good use of time.
That test made me fall in love with V11 irons. I quickly bought $400 of CTS-XHP steel, duplicated the results from V11, then went to work in wood and learned the lesson about nicking and running a test. Confirming with your style of real work is always worthwhile.
So, what does this have to do with Zen Wu – I get the kind of gas station knife goes upscale to google software engineering manager draw of the Zen Wu stuff. I think i could have Warren Mickley over, and I think Warren would never use something I made and just unconditionally say he’d like it, but he has used some of my stuff and told me the things he didn’t like about it and the things that confused him. That’s an A+. I don’t think you could give Warren a CPM chisel for production work and have him come back with any compliments. Even if you gave him free diamonds. And the reason Warren’s opinion is more important than mine or a software engineering manager’s is simple for anyone other than the chisel seller who is appealing to the engineering manager – Warren is encyclopedic, he’s accomplished and he actually does things day to day that people claim nobody does (make a living working a volume of wood by hand, and at a high standard). It’s not frequent that he visits, but I enjoy when he does – it’s like being a star trek nerd in a house full of Barbie enthusiasts when someone you know reasonably well but doesn’t show up often pops out of the car dressed like Spock. You can talk, and without saying “well, I guess I’d have to explain what that is and I don’t know how it relates to Barbie”.
The What are you Getting Part – Chinese White Steel?
I don’t expect anyone to remember this, but I’ve pipped off more than once about if someone had a desire to make a drop forged thermally cycled 62/63 hardness chisel in china with a nice profile and plain steel for a $5 unit cost instead of 75 cents per for the Aldi chisels, I would have no hope of making any chisels in retirement.
Zen Wu could maybe be that company? I don’t know, maybe they don’t work that way. The mention of them with Wright caused me to peruse the site and find these:
That is not an affiliate link, by the way!! For posterity, because the link could go dead, it claims to be a set of chisels that are White Paper Steel. For the price, it’s possible they could be Hitachi white paper steel, but here’s where the critical may be valuable for you if you just assumed that. Sometimes people are honest, and sometimes they are misleading. It could be either, but if i were spending the dosh on Hitachi White #1, I would call it exactly that. I have a bar of it, still haven’t used it. It’s expensive beyond its usefulness because it has that kind of aura around it. It would be possible to make a four chisel set like this for $200+US – probably $50 worth of white #1 steel. I can only get white and blue 1, and not #2, so i don’t know what #2 would be.
White steel is not that kind to modern heat treatment process. We’ll just skip that. The part of me that is always a cynic immediately sees this and looks for the incontrovertible proof that it’s Japanese white steel and then assumes it’s not if it’s not there. I would imagine it’s not, but the way the ad copy reads, I can almost guarantee 90% or more of the market will think it’s the same steel.
Here’s the stuff that doesn’t make sense. 1.2% carbon and 0.04% sulfur. First, White 1 and White 2 Hitachi steel don’t come in 1.2% carbon – they come in a range for white 2 that ends at 1.15% and white 1 ranges from 1.25%-1.35%. 1.2% is an odd number.
White #1 in this case also has a sulfur limit of .004% (ten times less). Even the lowly 125cr1 from Buderus that I got has a melt certification sheet of 0.001% sulfur. Why is sulfur important? One of the more common faults in plain steels and probably in others is manganese sulfide inclusions. These occur, confirm for me if you’re a chemist, when manganese and sulfur get together. Rolling stock then takes those inclusions and stretches them from a ball shape to a linear shape.
What do they do? Since they are not part of the stable steel structure, they act as points where cracks start. if you already have excess carbon, or any carbide, you have points where cracks should start before the matrix of steel around them – and the less uniformity there is, the bigger the problem can be. I am not a historical metallurgist or even a metallurgist, but I would bet these kinds of things – inclusions – have a lot to do with why it’s hard for me to find a surplus carbon vintage plane iron or chisel, and it’s also probably why you will find stories about a camp razor from 150 years ago that the entire combat camp wanted to use instead of their own.
Hitachi White #1 is often touted as being able to achieve higher hardness due to purity. These inclusions are an example why. if you have 2% carbide volume, you don’t need to add some surplus more in sulfide inclusions – especially if the carbides are iron carbides – which still have pretty good toughness. harder carbides less so, but iron carbides still confuse me a little.
How useful is it to ask a maker of chisels like this if the steel is Hitachi white 1? I don’t know, because if they don’t tell you the truth – something we have no reason to believe they’d avoid doing – but if they didn’t, you’d have no way to tell short of XRF analysis and then even if sulfur was in low form, it doesn’t necessarily mean the steel is Hitachi white 1.
If it is the case that it’s not, I can’t deny that it’s much more valuable for the retailer to say it’s white paper steel than it is to say it’s a Chinese origin or even European origin file steel. 125cr1 seems to be pretty good – but it wouldn’t sell chisels like the words “white paper” will.
The same thing here – the court numbers case. “Your honor, they said it’s 1.2% carbon and here is Hitachi’s product list”. That and the sulfur limit – could just be typos. They may not even be shown on this page – I didn’t double check. Dictum states those amounts. they could be really good, but I can make a 26c3 chisel with a beech handle for about $15, and with a nicer handle for $20. it’ll take me two hours, but I kind of like that part. I probably wouldn’t sell them for less than $100 per, and if these were just as good for $70, which they might be, how could I look in the mirror if I recommended you just pay more to make me feel special.
The Dude wouldn’t do that.
No worries on the recent crabbiness, it’ll subside. My next post will be about making things, and probably so will some after that, even if there is some delay between posts while I’m doing stuff and it’s busy season at the day job.
Of Making by Hand with Wood and Steel 
I have one of those Y-1 chisels I would be happy to send you to mess around with. Just let me know!
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Sure. Just make sure you’re OK with it having two or three small dents in the back from a hardness tester. Those will probably be honed out before you get to them, and maybe never gotten to, but they’ll be a diamond cone dent that is about the size of a grain of sand. No chance they’ll damage the chisel, though.
What do you think of them? If they’re even made of file steel and 64 hardness, they should be pretty good, and a big departure from most of what’s available.
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Are you able to access my email without me having to post it?
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I can only see emails of subscribers
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Oh. They sell a hatchet for $1300!! Who is it marketed toward? To paraphrase Dolly Parton, it obviously cost a lot of money to look that cheap. For that money you could get 3-5 axes from Gränsfors, Julia Kalthoff, Svante Djärv, Hans Karlsson or another smith that makes beautiful, no nonsense tools that are meant to be used.
It is obviously not a tool for any serious user. I would like to see someone market high quality, no nonsense, traditional chinese tools. Because the ones that sometimes turn up look fascinating.
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I listen to a guy who was a pro wrestling booker on a podcast – Jim Cornette (he’s not for the meek – and i’m not a pro wrestling fan. I watched it as a kid and am fascinated with how the business worked as well as the characters back then who had to curate their own gimmicks – kind of fell off watching in around age 13 or 14, but it was fun as a little kid). Anyway, when someone puts out something that’s crap – when his cohost says who would like that? He’ll say something along the lines of “it’s just the kind of thing that people will like if they like that sort of thing”.
The hatchets are definitely for a select few. you just have to define what that means. PM steel in a hatchet is pretty far out there for me, though – I see no purpose. the strange artificial etch work on top of the one you mention is also pretty weird – like someone with a die grinder just added it by hand – and it goes down the bevel – very odd. There’s someone who has flipped a company to venture capitalists who is at heart a ham and egger just with really deep pockets – that’s the person. Designer sneakers, embroidered jeans and maybe hair color and TRT treatments. I’ve never found something that an older plumb or kelly hatchet or axe here (too bad they’re not as inexpensive as they used to be) won’t deal with, and you can stone them or file them.
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Despite the overengineering and tacky design I don’t find Zen-Wu any more offensive than Blue Spruce or similar. Expensive tools that don’t offer any real advantages over lets say a MHG or Pfeil chisel. If it makes someone happy though, no harm done. It only gets sad when internet people makes someone who have nerver held a chisel believe that you have to spend at least $50 to buy a single chisel.
I am a bit curious on why american hatches and axes were made to be filable while all Swedish axes are harder. Older axes are usually made with the head soft enough to filed with the edge (heard an old timberman refer it to as “the bite”) made of an harder steel forge welded in place.
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Yeah, I don’t know if offensive is the right word for me. It’s the influencers. Blue Spruce and Zen Wu being kind of the same thing – yes. Are they a little different from each other? Yes. But compare them to stanley and Ward and so on, and they’re kind of nearly identical when looking at the whole universe.
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By the way, Chinese tools – no clue on that, but I’m sure there is a market selling the tools used somewhere. Kind of like Japan, it was hard for us to search until proxy services came along. I’ve never examined the whole proxy thing in china. Buyee and other services from Japan are like magic if the item being sold is marked up 5 times when it’s resold used in the US, but not sure if anyone runs something similar in china.
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Chinese markets don’t need an agent service — they will ship everywhere and will accept any currency. I, however, couldn’t find a reliable retailer that would sell traditional Chinese chisels – and that’s with a help of a Chinese native. There’s of course AliExpress that sells something, but this time I read your post about things nobody should be doing and have withdrawn from the lottery. The guy who was helping even reached to his relatives in the mainland. The answer was it’s unlikely there will be any online market because tools aren’t that valuable to begin with. They also added that if there is such a market then chisels will be sold by pounds. Chinese traditional tools are very coarse (because of the timbers they prefer), expect something like early American tool in terms of finish and huge quality swings even within a single batch. That Chinese woodworker that we discussed previously switches easily between Japanese, traditional Chinese and modern chisels, and in one of the interviews he has mentioned he doesn’t care, but modern chisels is his first choice because he can do whatever he wants to them. His students (at least those who are internet-savy) are mostly using Japanese chisels and LubanWoodriver planes – that should tell us something. So in terms of traditional Chinese tools we shouldn’t expect much, I guess.
Chinese markets don’t need an agent service — they will ship everywhere and will accept any currency. I, however, couldn’t find a reliable retailer that would sell traditional Chinese chisels – and that’s with a help of a Chinese native. There’s of course AliExpress that sells something, but this time I read your post about things nobody should be doing and have withdrawn from the lottery. The guy who was helping even reached to his relatives in the mainland. The answer was it’s unlikely there will be any online market because tools aren’t that valuable to begin with. They also added that if there is such a market then chisels will be sold by pounds. Chinese traditional tools are very coarse (because of the timbers they prefer), expect something like early American tool in terms of finish and huge quality swings even within a single batch. That Chinese woodworker that we discussed previously switches easily between Japanese, traditional Chinese and modern chisels, and in one of the interviews he has mentioned he doesn’t care, but modern chisels is his first choice because he can do whatever he wants to them. His students (at least those who are internet-savy) are mostly using Japanese chisels and LubanWoodriver planes – that should tell us something. So in terms of traditional Chinese tools we shouldn’t expect much, I guess.
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This is more or a less traditional way of making tools in China – remember that when West was enjoying the Golden Age of hand tools and the industrial revolution, China was torn by all sorts of wars and conflicts that settled only in late 1950es. Knowing a few anecdotes one might conclude it’s common across all SEA can you name any other culture that developed tools matching WesternJapanese in terms of function and looks? I personally can’t). They just couldn’t develop a traditional mass-manufactured tool making. Traditionally they worked woods only slightly less dense than brass (most of their traditional woods sink in water), so a tool must be hefty and it will be crude an rough. There isn’t much demand for them these days too, so asking a high quality Chinese chisel is a little bit like wanting a mahogany baseball bat with a claw and a foot.
They’re perfectly functional though (when free from defects). They remind a set of socket chisels from the Seaton’s tool chest.
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that’s an excellent video. There’s not a whole lot technically between the chisel made there and one made more neatly that would probably be desirable.
But the market would be saturated pretty quickly, too, I’d bet. You can make things that are nice and kind of unusual, but they’re like the scion XB or any other odd cars – the value in selling them is uniqueness. Once they’re not unique or new seeming, then different isn’t a selling point.
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That a really neat video! I’d love to buy a chisel from that guy! Thanks!
It even inspired me to look through aliexpress and eBay and I found a few sellers of that type of chisels. If I had more time to spend woodworking right now I would buy one.
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They actually claim it’s “made with Zen-Wu white-paper carbon steel (ZW-C1)” – “Zen Wu” doing all the heavy lifting here. In other words we don’t know the actual steel, but we can be 99% sure it’s NOT shirogami – or that would have been advertised in 48pt bold blinking red on every page. I think analysis would show it’s A2 or M2. Besides, don’t you think these chisels look oddly familiar? Compare the last image with the set of Zen Wu chisels to this or to this – I’d swear I saw identical looking chisels a while back when browsing EU shops and manufacturers. So they might be regular CrV even, who knows.
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Can’t reply in the thread, so gonna post it here. The video stood out because he is obviously not a FAANG-PM-turned-blacksmith-influencer, it’s somebody who probably had limited choice in terms of occupation. The guy seems to despise tongs or maybe he has already burned all nerve endings. He’s really about function rather than the looks – so preoccupied with the process he forgot to lit his cigarette, you know this type, right? I’m itching to postulate that guys is a Chinese equivalent of a Japanese “cottage” blacksmith.
There’s a few things I don’t understand. Welding the lamination doesn’t show flux usage, was that just the operator missing that part? Hardening isn’t shown, and tempering with a wet rag is what I don’t understand in a slightest. Also wondering whether he attempted differential hardening? Although logically it doesn’t make too much sense when the lamination is only a couple of inches long.
But speaking about the form: they seem to be where West was in 16th century — perfectly functional tools, but no more than that. There’s an interesting passage about woodworkers tools in “English church woodwork” (available at archive.org, good read actually) – the looks is a much later phenomena. There are some other blacksmiths from Chine who try to promote their items among Westerners (Rong Ai, – about the same aesthetics, some don’t even bother to weld a socket shut. Or their cutlery. And it’s deliberate, because other categories, like jewelry, weapons and such are highly refined, so they could if they wanted to.
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Some of the work was spectacular and there may have been something like the japanese had eons ago where work connected to royalty and staff connected to royalty was high quality, and everyone else got nothing on purpose. If the writings about the sharpening stones are accurate, even withholding good quality sharpening stones from the public was a thing.
I didn’t see the smith fluxing the chisel in this case, but when he sets the lamination, the stuff that squirts out is flux – kind of shower of sparks looking stuff. You can actually weld without flux, but it’d be difficult to make the case that the result would be consistently as good and it’s easy to get an oxidized joint that’s completely uncooperative. I don’t follow the smithing stuff as much – borax is just easier to find and use, but the smiths talk about things you *could* do often or what is done elsewhere, like using crushed glass as flux or fluxing the fire instead of the steel. At any rate, the stuff squirting out here in a shower of sparkler like stuff is probably borax and they just didn’t record applying it.
I think close to the end where the guy takes the chisel and then dunks in it water, he’s possibly attempting to do a quench only and no temper. The part where he’s dabbing the tip of the tool before quenching the rest, not sure, but it may be an attempt to limit warping during the quench. You can take steel when it’s transitioning phases and quench to a hardness rather than quenching and tempering separately. The tool that you get is not quite as stable as one where all of the material is converted to martensite, or as much as possible, and then tempered. When he brings the tool out into daylight along with the effect of the camera showing us something that may not look the same way color wise, it sort of obscures things, but he’s probably allowing the tool to cool some and then quenching it to get a specific result.
Early on, I accidentally did this underheating steel a little – you get a hardness that’s matched to natural stones, for example, but the edge itself has a little less stability and the burr doesn’t come off as nicely.
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David, I think WP broke the comments again. I had to post one of the comments twice, another one got duplicated, a third one disappeared completely. This is a comment number 5, are they getting screened?
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Definitely not curating comments or screening them. The default is that someone who hasn’t commented before will need approval, but after that it just goes on its own. If they aren’t paying much attention to the database software that works the comments, I wouldn’t be surprised. One exception – if someone puts an email address or something up, I’ll change the comment to be invisible.
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Oh that was probably links to arbitrary websites and my usage of parenthesis and a backslash.
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