Author: D.W.

I’ve unlisted videos on youtube, but that’s just what this is, unlisted and referenced here. I’m decided that as long as rumble allows it, I’m going to slowly start putting my videos there.

someone I horse traded with gave me this dandy blower motor with a forward, off, reverse switch. It just doesn’t have the torque for this and the workaround until a better motor arrives in the mail is to lift the hammer part of the way, but I feel like the bones in my left arm are smashed from this – no kidding!

Two woodworking clamps on the anvil get rid of the ring and the thud and stuff dropping, i think I have solved by folding over a gel floor mat and folding an old bath towel in between like a cheese steak in a roll.

It’s not fast, but it will be faster than I could draw out steel by hand and it’s gentle. The gentle part is important. I have never had a forged item crack other than absurdly over heated steel that was sparking – it can be liquid inside of a rod and literally squirt out (dangerous!), but even if it doesn’t, steel that hot cracks easily. I wanted to find the limit early on – lessons learned.

Anyway, the reason I don’t have “forged in fire” cracks, at least I believe, is when it’s me and a four pound hammer, the steel doesn’t move much when getting cold. It doesn’t move much with this hammer once it’s cold and that’s a good thing. On the TV show, the contestants are getting greedy with a real power hammer that will continue to move cold steel.

With the replacement motor installed when it arrives, it’ll run a little faster and the carrier on the hammer handle can be set back further for a higher strike. The spring adding tension is the purple resistance band – the higher the hammer goes, the higher the tension and moving the carrier back several inches is plenty. Last thing I want to see is plaster upstairs starting to show small hairline cracks.

In this case, a makeshift power hammer of sorts.

I really like hammering chisels out of round rod. I can’t, however, do more than two a day a couple of days in a row, and just judging based on feel, I think trying to push past that in the long term would lead to disability. I’ve seen blacksmiths talk about spending full work days at the anvil, but I doubt they are rough forging steel by hand, and rather are doing decorative work. Moving a 5/8-7/8 bar of high carbon steel takes a heavy hammer and a lot of heat. it’s a safe way to forge because you’re not tempted to hammer into a situation where cracks will occur – it’s too much physical effort to move steel as it’s cooling and your arm will be burning suggesting that holding the steel in the induction forge is a nice break.

So, at this point, I’m using hammer that’s a little over 4 pounds, and the hickory handle gave up on it a while ago, so the handle is gombeira, perhaps the stiffest wood in the world, and very much a bundle of straws rather than cracking hard brittle kind of wood. it took a wedge made of Macassar ebony to even get the handle wedged in. Anything like hickory hardness was literally shaved by the saw cut in the handle top. Unreal stuff, and I’ll find something else next time.

Anyway, you would think you could be an average person and swing a 4 pound cross pein hammer, but the position is good and you will get a stiff shoulder, but it’s nothing like having a hammer above your head.

So, what’s the solution? I can forge two chisels a day and call it good, but what if I have the financial means to get out of the rat race early? A power hammer of traditional type isn’t out of the question, but it’s not practical in a garage with the pad connected to the house. They are also unbelievably loud and I’d be outed to the township in a hurry as this is the burbs and nobody is that far away.

what you see in the foreground is not immediately apparent. It’s my older anvil, the one really not large enough for a 4 or 5 pound hammer, and it’s on a contraption that lifts the hammer. The clamp and wood on the anvil are just waiting.

I’ve seen this type of hammer called davinci, but don’t know for sure that’s what it’s called. they have a reputation for lifting a hammer and dropping it a short distance and being good for planishing but not rough forging. I have seen these sprung before to increase the speed of the hammer dropping, which means the wheel can increase and strike more often.

I post this thing as it is so far as encouragement. it is just cobbled together yellow pine. There’s no reason to make it out of anything better without confirming it’s useful. Instead of springs for now, the tension is put on the hammer with a hefty exercise band. the drive shaft is just maple and the top pulley is apparently for a swamp cooler. 3 strikes a second. If I can get it to work well, I will probably actually build another one in the future, both to reduce the noise level and to avoid some of the quirks of the mock up.

It’s spontaneous junk, like Terry Cross (sawyer) on YT said about his enormous mill made partially out of junk tractor trailer parts.

The sledge will be hard on the anvil, but I won’t care about that if it moves metal at least as fast as I can hammer – it’ll be a rough work machine so that I can finish hammering blanks to near final dimension on the anvil. Well, it turns out if I can solve its issues, it moves metal far faster than I can hand hammer without resorting to things that are unsavory for chisels, like drawing steel out on the the corner of an anvil – we want the steel grain to be very consistent. If it’s not generally the same shape as the chisel and not smooth on the surface and even, the grain of the forged piece is like runout in wood.

The has two problems to solve yet – a 5 amp split phase motor is not enough power for it. The exercise band on it is the right match for the speed – and it’s surprisingly difficult to get the speed to match so that the hammer falls back to the low diameter part of the wheel fast enough. No tension, and the machine will throw the hammer out of time and it will land hitting all kinds of things and go almost vertical. with the bands, it only lifts about 10 inches. So, I’ve ordered a 10 amp TEFC motor that could potentially give it a dangerous level of power (split phase seems to equate to poor power and no torque – these blower motors, I guess, are designed for a constant load and nothing high torque).

The other issue is as yet, the hammer comes down in a lateral range of about 3 inches. You can’t hit what you can’t see, but you can’t hit what you can see if the hammer comes down somewhere other than where it landed last time. How fast it can move metal compared to hand hammer, though, makes it worth figuring everything out.

And later if I actually prove that I’ll use it to make things, I can get more substantial raw timber and make a more stout version.

Oh, and there’s always a rumor that you can’t make anything by hand entirely and get it done. The bulk of the sawing and sizing up, including the snail shell style wheel, of course done by hand, and between that and fastening and gluing things, took about 3-4 hours. I never generally use screws, but this thing has a lot of them in it!!

One thing that I think I owe Stan Covington and Stu Tierney after telling you to stay away from Japanese sellers who can speak English – it’s wider than that.

…what do I owe. First, I’ve never seen Stan Covington say anything he doesn’t mean and I haven’t dealt with Stan since he started selling tools as a small business or side business, but Stan did something for me few people would do.

I asked him about Kiyotada. Stan found an old stock Kiyotada mortise chisel (tataki nomi) from probably the best part of Shimamura’s (the best master under the Kiyotada mark – I think there may have been one after him) work. It was a chisel still with a tag on it, but kept in the back room at a dealer in Tokyo. This concept may be a bit foreign to us, but there are things you can’t walk in off of the street and get. Sort of a character test that you have to pass. if I were in Tokyo and I asked if there was old stock Kiyotada, I don’t know if I could talk about heat treatment and talk my way into it. Stan had rapport with a dealer who did the “what’s the sticker say thing” and had some hard to get stuff like that. In this case, a Kiyotada chisel. What’s the sticker say means that the sticker that was on the chisel remained on it. the dealer wasn’t interested in hammering someone for $600 for a chisel, but rather about a third of that. it didn’t take long for me to find later on that an unused Kiyotada chisel can be bonkers expensive. if the chisels are used, you can get a better deal, but to get something like Stan got me is not like ordering something off of amazon.

At another time, I mentioned in frustration with the “All Japanese Tools are Better” club that nobody could show me a japanese saw that was legitimately good for ripping hardwoods. I don’t mean 20 inches, I mean like if you might have to rip 100 feet of length in a given day. From all of the disposable stuff, that’s true. My hands ache thinking about using lightweight kataba style saws and having them rattle my hands, and practically my teeth, trying to rip white oak.

Stan saw this challenge and said “I think I know a guy” who can make a saw that will work for hardwoods. Like heat treatment, when you run into a saw guy, suddenly there isn’t any “all Japanese saws are”. The challenge was to make a saw that would rip as well or better than a typical Disston 5 point D8. Of course, I didn’t think we’d see any such thing. Stan had two custom saws made by a guy who makes about 2 or 3 saws a month. He gave the guy a disston #12, and in honesty you won’t see any of the more woo type folks say, the sawsmith kind of bent the #12 around and inspected it and said “It’s a very good saw”. No nose wrinkling, no mythical “those american scam artists”.

What Stan returned was a mule tough rip saw that you me and nobody else was ever going to damage. The teeth were more stout and the back of the saw plate was forge welded to a heavy tang and the saw ripped saw like a japanese version of the best of rip saws. The maker knew exactly what he was doing not just to make the saw hard to damage, but to make it so that the proportions and orientation would just make the saw work. Of course, it was pulling and the assumption would generally be you’re standing on the work and it made me sore. Big time. It was also $1500 for the pair. I couldn’t justify buying one of the two – Stan was keeping the other. There was a level of connection to the maker in that saw – not a woo thing, but the fact that someone hand made this saw and it wasn’t a pretty piece of delicate art and nobody gave me any crap about how this saw was only for skilled users. It was a very attractive saw, but it was all business and would’ve done a lifetime of ripping hardwoods comfortably.

Before I try to guess why there’s no much cheaper production version of that saw, someone can tell me of the production rip saw that matches a disston D-8. There isn’t one.

And Tools from Japan

Stu Tierney is a high character guy. I’m fairly sure he was appalled by what he saw being sold to people in the US and when he started carrying Tsunesaburo planes even during a period of bad exchange rates, and they were half of Japan Woodworker’s price. And you could specify whatever you wanted.

Stu also helped me get a stranded Tokai guitar out of japan. The proxy service decided the guitar could be shipped in japan, and that’s it, because it was a customs risk. Technically it was, practically it wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t and couldn’t convince the proxy service that had allowed me to make the purchase “unrestricted” and then changed their mind.

They offered me that i could store it to figure it out, and pay storage rent after at temporary period, or I could “have it destroyed for free”. The cost of the guitar and fees was $1550. As a matter of last resort, I got a hold of Stu (who I knew since before Tools from Japan ever existed) and Stu shipped it to me. At the cost, the guitar was opened and inspected in customs (anything over about $900 was by mandate). Not only did customs not care at all about madagascar rosewood on the fingerboard, they also made no attempt to collect the 9% tax that’s supposed to be assessed on Japanese guitar imports.

Thanks, Stu.

Lee Valley eventually screwed Stu by starting to sell the Sigma Power stones. I don’t know that it ever meant anything to Lee Valley, but it meant something to a one man business putting food on the table in Japan. There haven’t been many things that Lee Valley did that I think are a real turd move, but that’s one of them. Stu did a lot of leg work to educate people on some of the stones in Japan, was the only source, and Lee Valley just didn’t seem to care about that at all.

For everyone else, what’s “further”

There aren’t Japanese tool sellers in the US I’d bother with. The residual value of tools is poor and the typical white collar buyer can’t do much more than google to see if they can find a comparable price. If that price is what’s being sold now, maybe you get stuck for $950 for a plane that sells for $450 new in japan, but you can find someone else here who thinks 25% off of the $950 is a good deal. It’s a false dilemma.

But you could sometimes in the past find English translated links to Japanese sellers. Maybe they’ve gone out of business by now, but these were legitimate in country tool sellers. if you entered the front of the site saying you were in Japan, the prices were 2/3rds of what the prices were if you wanted to read the site in English. A stupidity charge, I guess. Never liked that kind of thing.

This isn’t something I’m currently doing, but I see enough used items for sale, and questions about this or that new retailer doubling the price of tools and selling them to Americans and Europeans that I think it’s worth noting.

I gather in the early 80s, there were a few enterprising American tool sellers who realized they could go to Japan and buy a bunch of Japanese style tools, and sell the woo. The woo is the hook, and a horrible yen value at the time made casting that hook worthwhile. I wasn’t woodworking then, so I’m speculating having seen the Mahogany Masterpieces video regarding makers. Every maker that the tool flipper who made the video sold was of course “the best made”. Ouchi, and I already can’t remember anyone else other than Hisao making what look like macassar ebony plane dais (but his work rate was spectacular and he was mortising the plane bodies with a stub handle 6 pound hammer!!!)

I will be 50 in a few years, and I remember the pre-internet days well. If you’re 30, you may not. Even if you’re 35, you may not. You may not remember how many times you’d read an interesting catalogue if you got such a thing in paper and had it to reference. How else would you get info? I see the whole Japanese culture thing in the west as a bit of an oppositional thing. People looking to escape Reagan or Carter and wanting to imagine another set of ideals is better. That’s a time-neutral thing. That and the desire to have something different or be different or feel like you know something exclusive. It gets really tacky when someone who has been woodworking for 1 year starts using very specific Japanese terms mixed in with English. I never really cared for that no matter the language, and where I grew up, we had a German themed gift shop called “Das Gift Haus” in town. “Gift” in German translates to poison or toxin.

I’m getting a little off track – when things are seen as being more than they literally are and you have to be the cool person knowing all of the right names in foreign languages, I’m out.

But the tools are fine.

There is less of a transitory nature from one generation of the tools to the next other than the Western influenced push for the very neatest of neat work or the flashy dragon or decorative stuff. That doesn’t look very Japanese and it probably isn’t. When you see boasts about Kiyohisa, I doubt that Kiyohisa’s waiting lists has much of a share of customers outside of a bunch of “old white guys”. There may be exceptions, but much as someone in Japan on the shaving forums said in response to a shaver hoping to find Kamisori (japanese razors) on the ground – “it’s hard to find them on the ground, they are mostly made for export”.

I grew up in Gettysburg, PA. I guess you didn’t find too many kids wearing civil war hats and shooting pop guns if the kids were local, too. Plenty of other kids not from there did. It’s weird to me when a tradition becomes profitable mostly based on outside customers.

So what?

I’ll say it flatly. I don’t think any dealer who sells mostly to westerners or sells in the US is worth patronizing. You get things like Z saw blades that are $5 each in japan selling for $20 here. You get Tsunesaburo planes selling for more than twice the going rate in Japan, and the narratives about the steels beyond the typical Yasuki/Hitachi White is outdated and the flaws of some of the steels aren’t well described. You want super blue? Better like a chipping edge or one with disparate carbides.

Do you lust after Togo Reigo? I think if you do, you’d regret having it as a daily user. Steel alloys are not hard to make in custom melts if they are ingot types. Andrews didn’t keep selling Togo Reigo to Japan, or license it or whatever was done, not because it was a secret that was kept away from society by unusual circumstances – it’s gone because there is no market demand for it. What’s so special about it? I don’t really know – it’s a very high carbon steel with Tungsten chromium added. A recipe not too far off from Blue 1. I don’t care for the blue steels, either – Tungsten was added to steels as the “it” carbide in the early 1900s because it improved wear resistance and in theory, will be broken up and dispersed at typical forging temperatures. In most of the micrographs I’ve seen, the dispersion doesn’t actually happen, and tungsten carbides exist in varying bands or large disparate carbides – exactly what we don’t want. I saw this when testing plane irons with the Blue steel Tsunesaburo replacement plane irons. They look like they are cut and blanked out of prelaminated material, but I saw the same edge behavior in traditional Japanese irons.

The woo will be pushed at you further with suggestions of just needing to find the right smith. Well, the odds aren’t great for someone actually putting anything like that into practice. White 1 and White 2 will be easier, and they’re overpriced for what they are in bar stock, but there’s not much in tools and if there is demand for them, Hitachi can make more.

White steel doesn’t need much. it needs to be normalized, grain shrunk and heat treated properly. It comes in bars, doesn’t need a special forging process and probably would gain nothing from such a thing no matter what. You use it, if it’s heat treated properly, the edge wears evenly with no surprises and it sharpens well.

But I guess it’s boring – and there is truth that the edge doesn’t wear long. Less long than O1. This is a problem only for beginners.

But you’ll see a dizzying array of various “special blade steels” and whatever else that you really can’t get a grasp on. There’s nothing special about any of them.

A Case Example

First, before the real example – I have had tsunesaburo’s super blue plane, or one of them. Someone on ebay years ago was selling stock for a hardware store and at the cost of $400, I couldn’t resist. New plane, presentation box, nice red oak dai. Disparate carbides, chippy edge. No good.

At the time, I bought a $200 plane from Alex Gilmore, and then a matched blade and subblade from Ogata. One of the things people will say is that a maker can make steel very hard and very easy to sharpen. The trick is, the steel’s not actually that hard if sharpening is easier than anything else. Alloying and hardness control sharpness. One guy’s plain carbon steel doesn’t sharpen twice as fast as another’s without a big difference in hardness. the Ogata blade that I got was somewhat soft – I’d guess 61 if I still had it. It was about $250.

Alex sells nothing cheap. You can think about the cost, and get the idea that it likely didn’t cost much in Japan. At the time, you could find Ogata’s planes for not much or you could buy them from Iida (who is now out of business) for about $500, which was probably a cushy flip for Iida, and there was scuzzle (short for scuttlebutt) about whether or not Ogata was still in business. Either way, the underlying issue here is that almost all of the makers can make blades faster than they can sell them, and the cost of materials in a blade or blade set isn’t much. The constant flow of unused planes under the radar for both Ogata and Takeo Nakano made it clear -the issue isn’t rarity, it’s demand.

The Ogata blade was fine, but the unknown make plane that I got for $200 at the same time had a much thinner hard lamination and was at least as easy or earlier to sharpen, but the lamination was harder. It was a better iron for actual use. That ended my desire to find a blade from a specific maker, but rather find one with characteristics. Relatively neatly made, visual evidence of wrought iron backing as the wrought iron hones easily, and a thin hardened layer (or hagane – if someone forces you to use words that aren’t in English). I guess I’ve bought maybe four planes since then, sold a lot of what I had, but on average, the blades with a dai were about $150 and varied from 70-80mm in width. Buying older planes lowered the chance of getting a dippy alloy. I don’t think any of the four were something other than a plain carbon steel, and probably all were yasuki/hitachi white because they weren’t new enough for westerners to dominate the customer list.

The same was true for chisels. Buy chisels relatively neatly made as a set for about 1/6th of the cost of new, and make sure they are neatly made enough that they’re not hardware store fodder. there isn’t anything that looks like Kiyohisa but there are a lot of nicely made chisels for inexpensive amounts and the edge quality being just what you want is at least 50% chance. This is no worse than buying new sets from a dealer who tells you that you’re getting something special, but you get the tools and you can’t figure out how to set them up so that you can just use them. If Japanese chisel are hardened and tempered properly, they aren’t picky about which stones are used, they aren’t hard tempered and chippy, and they’re not soft, either. You just sharpen them and use them.

Here’s where Ogata comes back around. I don’t order things from Japan woodworker, but for a while, I guess I fit their demographic. I did order a few things when I was a beginner but when Stu Tierney started selling to-order Tsunesaburo planes for half of Japan Woodworker’s price. Same for Iyoroi tools – you could get them from a Japanese seller for half as much if you wanted to climb up the ranks a little bit and get something other than the blocky entry level chisels sold at woodcraft (who now owns JWW)….I was out. but somehow, I got an email or a catalogue (can’t remember which) that advertised that Japan Woodworker was now going to sell Ogata planes and that Ogata retired and you couldn’t get them anywhere else.

What am I supposing? maybe Ogata did actually retire, or the shop closed if there was Ogata + employee(s). Of course, you could see that Tomohito Iida also had them for just under $500. His relatively high cost of everything didn’t meet Japan Woodworker’s standard and the Ogata planes were listed for $780 (!!!!). I have no idea what it cost to get the old blade stock and have dais made, but I’m going to stick my neck out and guess that it was less than $200 per plane total. If Japan Woodworker wants to tell us their actual cost, I’ll gladly post it. I figure that Alex doubled the cost of whatever he sold me, because other things (like Atoma plates) were double the cost of retail in Japan. But Alex is a small business specializing in person to person sales and he travels back and forth. You don’t get amazon drop ship service prices for that.

Does Japan woodworker still exist in its original form? I don’t know – it looks like the items listed on Woodcraft’s page have declined and I see only one sort of commodity grade plane.

Iida’s probably response to Japan Woodworker was humorous. he took his website down for “redesign” and when it came back up, the Ogata planes were about the same price as Japan Woodworker, and a maker who I appreciate, Takeo Nakano, also up from $500 to about $800. Nakano was sort of a straight forward make that was sold based on the maker’s claim that the price of planes should be something that an actual craftsman could afford. they went from being $300 to $800 in a hurry, but Iida would also sell them back door on ebay on straight up auctions and sometimes they would bring $150-$200. I got one, nothing wrong with it.

The price is “what will you pay”, and the market for “let me see what the max I can tolerate” is generally not in Japan. I think this revival has been good for the small makers in Japan, though – the outlook was probably pretty bleak supplying only customers in country, and reliance on a few makers being designated of historical significance (and subsidized by the government) would’ve been the thread keeping things going.

So far, as you will note, nobody has run out of anchor chain, old bridge wrought iron, or even Andrews Togo Reigo, which was never needed in a fresh melt because the original supply is still being used.

What Brought this Up?

I saw a listing of an unfortunate individual who had bought a few expensive planes, and was hoping to sell them on a woodworking forum for $900 per or something. They are planes that I’d expect to pay a quality equivalent of about $300 in Japan.

The whole time this Ogata debacle was going on, the yen was weakening. At the worst, I paid for tools at 77 yen per dollar or so. As of today, it’s 149. That’s easy math – if you’re paying in dollars or buying in dollars as Iida was charging, the impact of the price is bolstered even further. At the time that I saw Iida declared bankruptcy (a mystery, but you never know what’s going on behind the scenes – one high margin business can be brought down by personal habits or another part of a business eating cash – ask farmers who loved International Harvester tractors). Anyway, at that time, the yen had long been 120 or above and I thought maybe at some point, Iida would adjust his prices downward.

Let’s put this a little differently – I bought an Ogata blade and subblade from Alex Gilmore for what would’ve been about 20k yen. When Japan Woodworker decided to tell everyone they were the only source – despite easily searching and finding Iida also was selling the planes as a stock item – the equivalent yen price was about 100k yen. If you can make a market, either distributor or retailer is doing well there.

Seeing people in europe or the USA try to sell unused planes for $900 makes my heart hurt a little bit. They’ve been had. Just as I bought a green finishing stone from a US seller for $425 eons ago and you can find the same green ohira tomae in japan for $165 now. It wasn’t a great stone – it was available because Ohira mine is open, and sold as a “chosen and selected” stone to people who didn’t know any better. Including me.

I traveled to buyee, which is a proxy service. They translate japanese auctions, take in the goods, make sure they match the auction when you buy and then ship them to America.

It’s still the case that a lovely unused 70mm plane can be had with a subblade, neatly made ledged dai and box for about $200. It’s still the case that for the average set of 10 chisels, you’re looking at a cost of $100-$200.

My advice is if you want to dabble with Japanese tools, read the stuff about them in English, and buy them from someone who only speaks Japanese. Your chance of using the planes and saws for long and to make much is very low against the chance that you’ll spend a lot of money buying.

They’re tools in japan, not presentation items where you boast you had to wait 7 years to get them. they are used like tools there, and stuck in shadowboxes in the US with bogus information about 220F tempering temperatures.

The one thing that remains true in all of it is the hitachi white is good stuff. It really does have the potential to be a couple of points harder than fine western steels and not be chippy, but someone has to put in the effort to heat treat it so that it’s all it can be.

Well, this is actually still here in the present and may be an indication of how little I look at what’s around me.

A friend of mine got me into woodworking, either in 2005 or 2006. I was working at a desk job and it was a more than full time job and I was visibly unhappy. She asked if I would like to try woodworking with her husband because he was as twisted as I am with the same sense of humor and lack of obligation in regard to some of society’s meaningless rules, like being nice to people who don’t deserve it and who try to take advantage of your manners.

So, she called him at work, while we were at work, put him on the speaker phone, and he proceeded to say something that would get you canceled these days. Said “you are on speaker phone!!!” and he responded with an “OK” sort of response to that and they were both over it quickly. Let’s call him The Englishman, though he’s lived in the US for a long time.

You may recognize these pictures to some extent – they are from 2007 when I was starting to acquire hand tool knowledge, and I’m fairly sure they were drawn with Autocad. The Englishman had some LN planes, but was wildly interested in working wood like a machinist would work it. Accurate, spartan of compound curves or anything like that, and….did I say accurate? Accurate on top of that, and with machines if possible. Hand tools vexed him, and on the other side of things, I felt like I couldn’t tell what we were doing most of the time because the Englishman is an accomplished mechanical engineer, and test pieces and autocad-laid-out plans were the norm. When you work entirely by hand, there really aren’t any test pieces. But i didn’t know that at the time.

More than 16 years later, these pieces of paper remain on the wall behind my bench not more than about 6 feet from where I stand when working wood, and sometimes metal. And every several years, I see that it’s there and never give it a fully conscious thought.

The chart outlines David Charlesworth’s sharpening method. I had nobody to learn hand tools from, at least not who was competent, and I realize now most people who talk about hand tools and build mostly with power tools aren’t competent. It’s a different universe when learning to get good at sharpening, or cut a dovetail vs. using hand tools entirely. All of those separate things, cutting joints, mortises, etc, all melds together if you rely on hand tools for everything. There is marking, cutting and adjusting and that’s about it.

It took a while for me to get away from power tools as the main means of working. In the shop, the power tools were OK – an 18 inch jet bandsaw similar to what’s available now, and a large hybrid table saw. I just hated it, anyway. The bandsaw was risky to use for critical work, and the table saw as a delta hybrid – just not a very good saw with a ton of runout at the arbor. I could fix both of the issues now, just not the way people would think you should. The bandsaw had a wheel that was almost a hundredth out of round. I really don’t get how this happens on a round cast iron wheel that is machined on the outside, but I guess it could’ve been seasoning afterward instead of before machining – which violates the laws of maker’s nature.

At any rate, I was sort of in limbo – it was easy to do some things but hard to figure out how to do most things that weren’t those “some”. It doesn’t seem as hard now, but I’m not viewing through the lens of a router table, a couple of saws and a whole bunch of template jigs and test pieces.

In 2010 or 2011, I started making tools, trying to acquire and make foolproof hand tools to work entirely by hand. Of course, one of those was a steep single iron infill smoother, and the jointer that I found was an early 1800s pearl made by JT Brown. I used them while making the infill (which took 80 hours!) and by late 2011, was making a shelf and dabbling with freehand sharpening – perhaps that was a little bit before – but the shelf was cherry. And single iron planes were terrible, even with it. The middle plane I had was a panel plane with a mouth of .012″, and the infill smoother .004″. That was my foolproof method. The jointer had never been used, at least not to any extent as there wasn’t noticeable wear on the sole. How big is the mouth? i don’t know for sure, but probably not a whole lot bigger than the panel plane.

Glue two panels together, and those planes were still crap. The jointer and infill plane both skipped through cuts, tore out and needed constant sharpening, and repairing whatever tearout there was with the infill smoother was a pain, too. The iron didn’t seem to stay sharp long and it could only take a 2 thousandth thick shaving or so before the resistance of the shaving at the mouth was a problem.

In january 2012 or something, i was about to give up the idea of ever doing more than tinkering, but had a pair of wrong ideas about what Warren Mickley had done, and I, like some others, didn’t know whether Warren was “real” or not, but he won a bunch of WIA contests, which was relayed on the forums, and I thought one was with a stanley 3 (turns out that was a BUS – he managed to beat people planing with a plane he wasn’t famliar with – it wasn’t his). And an argument from Todd Hughes also stuck in my mind – why would someone in the late 1700s go to the trouble of making a double iron plane at such increased cost and complexity. That part, what history chose, I just couldn’t ignore. I gave myself two weeks to learn to use the cap iron or stop and it only took 1 before every single operation that I did before was bettered a much cheaper set of planes. And soon by far.

I’m in the throes of tool making now, but will get back to working wood more sometime in the next year or two. I don’t feel like I have to figure much out other than what it is I want to build and what it should look like.

The measurements on those printouts have experienced lack of use probably since about 2010, but at least for my shop, the paper remains fantastically clean because it’s hanging vertically and no airflow goes in that direction with much wood or metal dust. It’s humorous looking at that – when calculating how much projection is needed with an eclipse style jig, you have to account for the thickness of the iron until you wise up and make a wedge shaped jig that you just shove the iron and guide into and forgo the projection measurements entirely.

I still have the infill smoother, and the mouth is still tight – it might be even a hair tighter due to creep or movement of some sort. The mystery was solved on the iron last year thinks to the new hardness tester. The iron was one that Brese offered as parts, if I recall, made by Hock. Somehow, it’s 56 hardness. Single iron planes need sharpening after a fraction of the wood volume that a double iron plane will get through, but 56 hardness really puts it to you a step further.

Two days ago, I clicked on a link from someone, and didn’t think about it. What occurred was a popup from youtube and a threat “disable adblockers or your video viewing privileges’ will be frozen”.

Of course, I haven’t forgotten about youtube’s now complete shift from alternative media with original and creative content to scientific censoring machine with little non-contrived media and a huge appetite – well, an appetite that is greed. Of course, it’s their platform, but it is not one of a typical media setup where the content is purchased and conveyed to the customer. We are no longer the customer for youtube, we are the product. We’re the product of seemingly nice but piggish presenters of material who had an idea of the formula they’d follow before their channel started. I’ve watched some of them who were very apparently beginners never become accomplished at anything but sucking in throngs of people and selling to them no real knowledge, and tons of information worse than what was already in the public domain.

Why? Because the platform from every perspective but the viewers has become one of greed. Even accomplished makers can’t resist telling you about ” the tools they use ” with a revenue token link so that you’re tagged for a block-out period where they get a commission on anything you purchase. Even if you wait a while.

It’s not the same dynamic of someone trying to sell you something they made, it’s more antisocial. It’s someone coming up with a way to get you to spend money and give them some of it for things they had nothing to do with. it’s parasitic, and widely accepted now.

So, I quickly downloaded all of my videos yet not backed up and unlisted them. Once I have a chance to make sure I have them stored securely, they’ll be completely deleted from youtube.

Does it really matter? No. In a decade or so, I had 720k views on videos. I’ve never looked at view totals because I just don’t care, but it’s certainly the case that some of the videos were shit from a long term perspective. The information may have been news of some sort when they were new, but the info isn’t new now and getting through the videos was cumbersome because they were just blurted out on the spot.

Others that are novel and useful and perhaps long, but with purpose, get about 500-1,500 views. Nobody is really viewing them, and they would never get promoted because I refused to sign up for adsense.

The direction on youtube and the real lack of any progress in the woodworking world for people who might like to go to a shop and actually work by hand, or just work with minimal tools and without being sold something else where “minimal tools” is the gimmick (pushing classes or website access like Sellers)….it’s just a battle that’s sort of over.

And kind of the little hook in my shoulder, every time I think about it – youtube drops an ad at the beginning of each of my videos, I don’t have the option to cut that out. How much do they make? Probably about $30 or $50 a month. It’s not an amount they’d ever notice, but it bothers me that as long as the “faucet is running” so to speak where they’re getting ad revenue off of my videos, it’s not resolved.

It’s resolved now, and I’m relieved. I have no idea how much of the video group will be reposted elsewhere – it will certainly be a small amount of the stuff that has longer term value. Perhaps the jack plane video, something about saw sharpening and a few of the stone and sharpening technique videos. The rest of it had its day.

I never intended to make videos good enough to expect someone to sit through an ad to watch them. This site has a 13 gig data limit and to host all of the videos would cost a few hundred dollars a month given the cost of expansion and serving. Not because anyone is actually going to use several residential fios customers’ worth of data viewing my videos, but because there just isn’t any service out there intended to serve low volume videos that are large in terms of size.

Rumble is an option, but it’s pretty sketchy!!

You may think I’m a bit nuts about all of this, but I’ve thought about it for a while. It hasn’t exactly been something that weighs me down every day – 720k total views is sort of like claiming to be the guy who had the 179th best video cassette idea behind betamax and still wanting to be heard. I operate on principle wherever possible. I wish all of us did. We’d all have a better workplace, a better and more honest market of goods when we went out of the door, and a more honest media and alternative media setup. The incentives all go the other way, so it’s not that I won’t make a difference, it’s that I can’t. I can just determine what fits my principles and other than stating them, layoff and let people make their own choice without trying to turn my irk into group think.

My gripes about what we get from three boutique sources for big money sort of reminds me of something. Do I think that nobody at any of those three tool retailers can design something better, or if making something substandard, make such a thing more efficiently?

I don’t think that’s the case.

Do I think they’re bad conniving people? Of course not. If you want to make money for doing little and dragging in big margins, you need to do something like misleading people, especially by doing nothing other than bringing things in from overseas and branding your junk with your name. The biggest layer of fluff that comes out of our wallet doesn’t happen at manufacture – it happens by manipulation or relationship leverage after that.

But what about agreeability – I have no burden for it here. I learned a long time ago online that if you want to be nice and make everyone feel good, it’s really hard to get anything across. I get things across like the complaining about the three mortise chisels partially becomes they come to mind, and also because I think it’s fair. Fairness is a big thing to me, but nobody will have a universal view of it.

For example, I was looking for something via google search yesterday and google took me to lumberjocks. Someone reviewed an IBC (which may give you IBS given the price) bench chisel against a veritas chisel and the implication is that the two are the top of the market. Neither of these chisels is a match for the admittedly rare middle production Ward and Payne bevel edge firmer. Not just in edge holding alone, but for all kinds of things. you may be able to get those W&P chisels for $100-$125 per if you could find them. In fact, I’d be surprised if they were that expensive.

However, the test shown and the statement about one being better than the other was then contradicted by someone in the following posts saying they had the opposite experience. I looked at both and though “wouldn’t want either”, but if someone else does, no real problem from my front door.

One of the first responses suggested that the test looked like an advertisement. This is actually not that far from reality as when IBC and Veritas had some rift in the past, the IBC rep or president showed up on the blue forum and went full on pitch man all the way to saying that they were jointly responsible for awards LV received. it was offputting.

Nonetheless, what happened next was hilarious – Stumpy Nubs showed up and berated the poster for questioning whether or not the test was in fact veiled advertising. Of all people who could’ve showed up, for Stumpy Nubs to berate someone else about ethics is something I found worth laughing audibly in a room by myself. Whatever he said beyond that was edited out by moderators, and he’s lucky I wasn’t a poster on lumberjocks at that point. Because my version of fairness involves the original poster disclaiming involvement and answering a question others may have wanted to know. I’ve never observed Stumpy Nubs to offer anything useful – certainly not anything I could run with – but he spends great amounts of time pretending that reviews or commentary are something other than link farming sponsorship.

There was little other response – people are agreeable inherently when they’re in a group.

Back to the Mortise Chisels

It’s not like I go off half cocked on a post like the prior one about the mortise chisels. I thought about it yesterday. I thought about it again today – is it fair when there are groups of folks trying to do the right thing in most cases. At least as much as they can.

I think it is. It’s objective – I have no personal issue with any of the three makers and there’s nothing else provided other than my genuine surprise yesterday – surprise that someone doesn’t make an 80crv2 chisel in Europe drop forged and ground for about $50. I don’t get it.

But as easy as it is for me to point out the things that would improve those chisels, I’m not a wizard. What I am is unhindered. I can buy about 50 mortise chisels (probably accurate over the years) and try various chisels and think while cutting mortises “what would make this better is “. Nobody is stopping me and I’m not at work with someone I have to work with tomorrow and month trying to accommodate anyone. I’m also not making chisels for pay tomorrow, at least not in the traditional sense of that. This isn’t some grand plan to create a trail showing myself as some kind of expert with a big product line rolling out by a “surprise, I never planned this” fake message going along with the rollout. I can simply see a problem, try and solve it, and take no other suggestions unless I can see their value.

I could not work in a tool design group as an employee and make my best effort – there are too many things in the way that aren’t the final tool. In my day job, I don’t smash other opinions or point out how they’re dumb, and others don’t do it to me. I’m part of a team there, and there’s a dynamic. We can’t act like sole proprietor single employee entrepreneurs with the nimbleness and disregard of failure. Or in my case, just being a garage enthusiast who isn’t going to stop at assembling a tool kit and celebrate from there.

What if the boutique makers could do that? I think you’d end up with self promoters pushing their way to the top, the same way we see some small brands being relabeled stuff with exclusivity agreements. Remember someone named Ken selling a bunch of sharpening materials? I think whatever agreement was there between retailer and “specialist” may have gone away, but during the time, it just resulted in guruism and expense products linked to the guru.

Ten years from now if I can retire, how will it play out with me? I guess I’ll work by myself. The same burr that makes me want to improve things in front of me also would prevent working with anyone else where accommodating would be needed.

I haven’t made mortise chisels yet for a simple reason – I don’t need any and I like the ones that I already have.

Except for one.

But somehow this has translated into having three in process, but this post is just about one.

The one that I have that I sort of like but am lukewarm about is this one, a 1/2″ chisel that I call a “bed mortiser”, because I’ve only used it for bed mortises.

I showed this chisel wiht a typical 5″ long bench chisel bit just so that the scale can be seen. The bottom chisel doesn’t have any purpose other than that. The chisel on top is thicker than it looks because of its size. About a quarter inch thick at the tapered business end. It’s sort of a weird thing, because longer mortise chisels for furniture like oval bolstered type have a tall cross section to aid splitting out bigger thicknesses of material deep in a mortise, especially as you work toward the lower corners.

Someone gave me this one and another one just like it, but it’s soft and annoying in anything where there is a challenge. The solution is to ratchet up the edge support until it’s half dull.

So I’m going to make a chisel to replace it. However, a thick cross section in a long chisel like this probably is territory either for a laminated tool (not at this point) or O1 steel or something else more hardenable. More alloyed than O1 is undude for me, so O1 it is.

The chisel also doesn’t need to be as large , especially as long, as the one above, and I don’t care that much for socketed chisels, so it’ll get the typical bolster treatment.

There are several reasons I don’t use O1 more often for chisels, but among them are low toughness (breaks easily when levered compared to other steels) and the fact that when I’m grinding the chisel, even cooling it with water will cause partial hardening. Grinding the bolster area itself before filing also results in a thin cross section that air hardens enough on the surface to destroy files. I could probably figure this out, but mortise chisels are the only place I can think of that O1 has an advantage.

So, the bolster on this one is wonky – it’ll just remain dark like it is here – because it’s ground on a high speed wheel freehand with a fine belt. that certainly creates enough heat to soften it, but a trip over to the vise to file and it’s already destroying files again, so it’ll stay as it is.

O1 warps a little bit, but it’s within finish grinding for me, and rarely much trouble. This chisel is about 2 or 3 hundredths wider at the tip and tapers uniformly back toward the tang. More would be fine and maybe better, but it’s not going to be my life’s work, and the nuisance of grinding volume with these is enough for me to know I won’t be making any big mortise chisels in number.

After heat treating, and a somewhat shocking initial hardness before temper – 67 – the chisel looks like this:

I love the way the top line of the socket chisel looks with the elegant curve, for furniture mortises, it would actually be more useful if it’s taller. Anything shallow can just be done by a smaller chisel.

There’s a little rule mentioned in here for you to think about. For deeper mortises, a taller chisel is useful. For shallower small mortises, it generally isn’t. So, Paul Sellers type demos with the “ooh, look, a blue chip is a better mortise chisel than this pigsticker” completely ignores what the purpose of the larger chisel actually was. It was a production tool, not something for small cabinet mortises.

I already have ungodly tall vintage oval bolstered “pigstickers” so I guess I’ll add a little top curvature to this thing to make it look a little nicer, but it won’t need much loss of height, and if it’s improved by that, it can always be done later.

All of the finish grinding and curvature is introduced on a ceramic belt once a chisel is hard. That includes bevels on bench chisels – they’re incompatible with a fast quench, and with the right high speed really coarse equipment, it’s not that hard to do all of this grinding to a hard chisel without eliminating hardness.

Cross section of the chisel looks like this – taper on the sides is essential both for some relief, as well as cutting ability of the chisel sides to shear material:

This is forged from round stock, of course, all one piece, and ground freehand on a flat belt sander and an idler wheel.

This and two other smaller cabinet sizes in W1 and 52100 will let me see if it’s worth making more. The W1 and 52100 chisels won’t have the same unexpected hardening, and in more typical cabinet sizes, should through harden when introduced to a brine quench.