Of Making by Hand with Wood and Steel

A Blast from the Past

It’s not often these days there is much worthwhile on forums. Sawmillcreek is just one of the flavors, but in a decidedly fake egalitarian environment. That fakeness was to attract advertisers and the kind of traffic advertisers want. But, once in a while, there was some gold there.

I have a serious distaste for the forum for several reasons. One, it’s framed to look like it’s not for profit (with .org, and various “pens for soldiers” things, that the ownership gets surprisingly territorial about given that’s actually supposed to be a not for profit). You’ll find folks often willing to speak up if they mentioned any other pen charities on SMC or mentioned they couldn’t find where to send pens so they sent them to another one. They just won’t speak up on SMC. When you contribute, and especially in the past when people ran around everywhere with “please contribute” in their signature footers, you find your contribution goes to a for-profit entity, the forum owner’s sign company.

What set me off at the time was rudeness to George Wilson. George is the equivalent of running into a +7 (like below par average) golfer on a public golf course. Eventually, the shankers and wankers don’t want someone like that around, and they want to talk about some tip they learned and do it without someone who knows what they’re talking about squinting. If George said something in a definitive way, it drew heat. If he said something about one of the gurus, like Chris Schwarz, people would literally register or resurrect their old IDs to go there and try to get him in trouble. I suppose the unexposed person may not know the difference between carrying water for Schwarz and seeing a legitimate master who is selling nothing to anyone (unlike Schwarz, who is willing to sell you bloated price plans or get you to pay to see yet another iteration in his “the right way” sharpening nonsense).

Between that and the “everyones’ mileage varies” crap that was the norm there, and the fact that it appears to be a for profit site always complaining about people not giving enough to it, I was out. It sucks, at least in my opinion, and it’s pretty much dead as a doornail now.

But this is about XHP….

..and the fact that it’s V11 and so on, at least nominally by composition. It strikes me as even a little more interesting that the resident psychologist was so involved in this thread and later went on to tell everyone that it’s much the same as 10V or A11 is V11. These statements aren’t remotely close to true. The latter two are vanadium carbide steels and XHP is a high chromium carbide volume steel.

Lee Valley is an advertiser at SMC, which is why it’s odd that remains. All forums favor advertisers. SMC goes further by blocking out non-advertisers from answering questions from posters. I don’t think most posters know that, but more than one retailer or company person got a hold of me elsewhere and flatly stated that their IDs were ghosted because they wouldn’t sign on to advertise. The terms refer to it as a “non-competitive” advertising atmosphere. The slant there while I was posting in favor of Grizzly was humorous, but that was fortunately out of view in the hand tool section.

How did I get to posting about this? I still browse over there once in a while. I noticed yet another sharpening thread there browsing this morning very early morning, but it doesn’t have the same fervor it used to. It went from cold water to water bottle temperature, let alone to any smoke or fire, and quickly got to people who make one post a month threatening to leave. The same kind of people who would only make a post to complain about George. Notice there is useful information in the post I linked, but no such thing really appears at this point because people move on and there’s nothing attractive to bring a new Kees or Patrick Chase in, and both of those guys XRF-ed V11 to find that it was XHP. Someone else in the US mid-south also did the same thing.

One of the things that came up in the thread was that “the crystal structure of V11 is finer than older steels” or something along those lines, and “finer than O1 and A2”. I wonder why people believe this. Maybe it was said in ad copy or given as a platitude about powder steels. Powder metallurgy is fine. Very little of what’s made from it is as fine as the more plain ingot steels. The purpose of PM is to take something that makes a real turd of an ingot steel, like D2 or up from there, and spray out a zillion little tiny particle ingots so that the constituents don’t cool into gigantic apex killing poorly dispersed carbides. 154CM vs. CPM154 is a good example, but it goes up from there. XHP/V11 is “more” than D2 or 154CM, and 154CM is already as an ingot steel, something that will not even take an edge off of a stone without letting parts of its edge go. CPM 154, the powder version is kind of like XHP. Actually, PM D2, CPM 154 and XHP are sort of a family of increasing amounts of carbon and varying levels of chromium among them.

I found this old SMC thread because I googled “XHP micrograph grain boundary”. I didn’t find any grain boundary pictures. You can find pictures of XHP micrographs and compare them to O1 if you’d like and note how much finer O1 is. The discussion of what the micrographs tell you other than being able to see a much more coarse carbide structure in XHP is a little more nuanced, so we won’t get into it. But given XHP soaks in grain enlarging temperatures as part of its heat treatment process, I seriously doubt that the average grain size is less either. Important here if you’re not a steel person to see the carbides as kind of hard BBs and the grains as relative clods of compacted dirt, though the clods can be smaller than the BBs.

When I tested plane irons actually planing about 40,000 feet of wood in 2019, I came up with wear results about the same as the machine Kees made to abrade the steel. It sharpens more slowly than A2 or O1. This isn’t a surprise. We constantly hear about how it sharpens faster and is finer than other steels. Both of these are false.

I miss the days of useful information coming out of forums. To have a discussion like that on Reddit is gone. The woodworking psychologist may yet again forget about what XHP is and call it the same thing as some Vanadium high speed steel, but that’s just part of online life.

I know XHP and V11 are the same thing based on three people doing an XRF analysis, despite Lee Valley’s desire to try to keep the alloy secret after spending money on a picking and testing process. I’ll leave that there, because plenty of people think they invented an alloy or developed one. They can see this and correct me in writing if they are willing to do that. Woodworking companies don’t develop alloys, and XHP had enough positive press in the knife world that I think Lee Valley should’ve just said what it is and boasted about it.

So, I know it all?

No, I know a lot more now. I’ve tested a lot of stuff side by side, and I’ve found plenty of folks doing other ingot steels not that great and have been nonplussed.

In 2013, several years before this, I was totally on board with the newer stuff having to be better than the older. After all, that’s what we were told, we can analyze it, nobody can do things by hand unless they want to be grampy under the shade tree, and of course people were tortured and suffering in 1830, and they must’ve been dumb.

Except none of that’s really true. So it’s having come from that and getting my eyes opened a little bit. The first thing that opened my eyes was planing with a few irons and seeing the edges, and then planing with a butcher iron from around 1830 that was little used, and then seeing the most uniform spectacular even wear and what looked 10 times finer than anything in the new irons if chromium was involved. And finer than O1. I was stunned.

The thread on sawmillcreek has a little of every flavor. Old is always better all the way to “they were dumb and of course new is better” to the old engineering platitude “we could just always make it better”. I can’t really make tools better than Ward did, even if I cheat and use 26c3. And I’m using what someone may have made on a Tuesday afternoon at Ward, not my best weekend effort with a fresh head.

Houston- We have a Problem

Lunch Thursday, I stepped over to the forge to hammer out a chisel. Hammering is probably a lot like resawing. you can resaw for a long time if you do it slowly, but if you’re in rhythm, you’ll have enough of it in half an hour for an hour to do something else.

As I was starting to celebrate getting more efficient at making a chisel, my forge would only work at lower and lower current. Each time it would quit, it would click and spark through the bolts on the front of the forge. Before you get excited about the idea of holding a piece of metal in a coil that’s sparking, the voltage is low, and the current is high. Around 800 amps at 5 or 6 volts. I guess you could get a tingle, but I’ve never gotten anything off of the machine.

This progressed in a matter of minutes until 1/8th power was all the machine would run at.

So I did the thing that all smart people do with a machine that can pull 7 or 8kw continuously from the wall, I took the cover off to see what I could find. I couldn’t see anything initially but I pulled the foot pedal back to a safe distance and could see a flash of light each time the machine reset.

Definitely not a flash of light that’s supposed to occur.

These machines are simple in one sense, but fairly complicated by adding controls and safety trips. the hoses are all water lines. The coil has to be cooled, but so do other components inside the machine. Actually seeing how much stuff is cooled in the machine taking it apart is nice – I have less concern about it running continuously and being damaged.

However, what’s going on here is the magnet stack is arcing to the bracket that holds it in. As it did that, it burned more insulation off of the bracket quickly, and here we are. What do you do?

There’s a year warranty on the machine, but it’s not like amazon where you just return and exchange. You have to try to fix the machine and the warranty is parts only. So it’s kind of worthless aside from technical help. The technical help wasn’t really much help. This is an $1100 continuous duty machine, and versions of it can be found as cheaply as $475 from china. You would go broke if you tried to source the parts and even make it for $1100, so I don’t expect much and the warranty doesn’t bother me that much.

The more curious thing knowing little about induction forges, is that the bottom stack magnet where the spark occurs is cracked. It probably always has been, but a little piece has come loose. I know as much about magnets as I know about forges. Not much. But an irregular surface on a magnet is probably a problem, and I picked out the cracked bits on the bottom corner and that definitely exacerbated the issue. They were coming out, anyway.

What do you do? Well, first, the video is close up, but I’m not that close to it with the cover off. I think there’s no danger as long as you stay away from the high voltage stuff at the back of the machine – there is definitely danger there at the very least, in the form of an enormous high voltage capacitor. But I just used an old cell phone taped to the wall to get video and pictures of what was going on after this to see exactly where the arc was. And I covered it with electrical tape. Burned right through that. A couple of layers of paper, burned right through that. And then card stock , and that seems to be enough for now.

I’m waiting for mica sheet to show up from amazon, and I think that will be a permanent fix, as much as it can be. I use this machine for several hours a week sometimes – it’s not something I have an interest in going without, and this looks to be a one-off thing by how the bracket is against the stack. The other three legs of it do not touch the stack – just “quick work” by the person making the machine and then the magnet probably cracked when it was shipped.

But the $475 machine can be gotten to the US for $600 total, and I’ll have to think about maybe making a few things to sell or selling a few things (unrelated to tools) on ebay and getting a spare. it’s too good to go without and I use little of the functionality – Just the foot pedal and then how much power with one knob, so chinese writing on one of these for less than half the price is no big deal.

At some level, I was surprised how quickly customer service expected i’d get readings off of the rectifier to start diagnosing things. At another one, I kind of like the idea that we aren’t all just babies who can’t ever fix anything and demand to return something 7 months in just because we aren’t getting our way. I’d much rather learn more about the machine and fix it than just get another one and have no clue.

The Pleasant Effortless Process of Incremental Improvement

There are plenty of folks who will plan and plan and plan and then execute something, and perhaps the execution will be good enough and that’s it. I’m not one of them. If slicing the group who do that into two categories, there are the gifted, and then there are the conscientious. Again, not personally either of those, and this is just a personal bias, but I think being too much of the latter can pigeonhole you into making in ways that have compromises, because conscientiousness often comes with a lack of creativity, and the idea of planning everything out assumes you will disregard what you learn along the way. Life is not so absolute, of course – you can change plans no matter how good they are.

I posted the process of making a chisel from round bar knowing full well that my ability to grind, file and heat treat is good. To have competence off of the anvil, not so much. But it’s getting better quickly.

There is an evolution of how you feel about things, and in this case, it involves grinding and filing. I love to file things, but there’s not much on chisels that you can bulk file reasonably. The bolster is always filed for me and so is the area around the tang. Files and body floats (believe it or not) are also nice to get everything final before heat treatment, so it’s not like the process is devoid of filing, but removing a cubic inch of material or something with files is out. It’s not on your first chisel, it’s out on your fourth, or whatever.

that’s what hammering looked like at first. It’s already intolerable just looking at it. The tang is forced to be long and an enormous amount of metal has to be removed. How long ago was that, two weeks? I can’t remember.

Yesterday’s effort looks like this:

Apologies for the blur – it was getting dark and the forge corner of the shop isn’t that well lit and the phone couldn’t grasp it.

After this step now, I cut the chisel off of the bar with a stub of full width bar and then draw that out into a tang. Grinding in below the bolster involves much more material, and that means the chisel won’t be forced to have a garish long tang. The width is uniform and the thickness is relatively uniform.

There’s room for a little more improvement, but the thickness ground off at this point in width and thickness is needed for some decarb. Maybe there is improvement by forming more of the tang before moving on, and maybe even more beyond that, but it’s not apparent to me and forcing it to be instead of just continuing to make things is a pain.

To be honest, I think none of the above chisels came from the first blank picture, but there’s a chisel laying around here that’s had half of the weight ground off from the first blank.

Only the two on the right don’t suffer a bit from long tang disease. Handle looks funny on the middle one, too – it’s just a temporary handle on that chisel, but it does look weird on a chisel design that’s more 1900 in nature than it is octagonal handle.

On the forums, it seems there are few who are there making something similar over and over, and if anything, it may be repetitive discussion about mortise and tenon joints or dovetails. I guess it’s fine to improve those things, but there is something missing if you are wired less like the conscientious folks and you don’t give yourself the room to start making things in some number so you can both figure out how they will look, and how you will make them with relative ease. I’ve always liked making chisels, and forging on the bolster before was nice in the sense that it finally made for a chisel that didn’t need some weird handle design to prevent creeping down the tang. But replacing sawing flat stock and grinding and cutting away a lot with forging is such a welcome change, even if it wouldn’t be necessarily if drawing out and hammering half a dozen of them a day.

What’s the biggest obstacle for hobby making? I still think it is finding something that you want to make well so badly that you’ll continue to make it to the point that you want both aesthetic, fineness and speed improvement at the same time. So much becomes familiar instead of treading lightly. It’s hard to go back to making one one-off unrelated project after another once you can trade some of that “what next, and how, and still stinging from the mistakes I didn’t anticipate” for just walking up to your bench or anvil and considering mostly things you’ve done before, just keeping your eyes open to do it a little better.

Revisiting 52100

Forging chisels by drawing out round rod poses a problem. I can’t use 26c3, and the steels that I can use are 1% carbon or less. They make a decent chisel, but I’m not trying to come up with a routinely make able decent chisel. I’m trying to come up with something demonstrably better. 26c3 is better than any production chisel and it sharpens easier than hard 01. Yes, I’m mourning the lack of it as well as the inability to get defectless 115crv3.

I don’t care for 52100. It makes for a very tough chisel at 61. People talk about a tough edge, but mean strong. Toughness leads to a persistent foil at the edge of a chisel, and a deflection with a foil is a bung to push through wood.

However, I’ve had luck pushing up the hardness of 52100 to make gravers, and the tables suggest it should be no tougher than 26c3 assuming 52100 is pushed up into the upper ranges. Double tempered gravers were landing around 64 hardness with no sign of grain bloated and the tips would chip off, which sounds bad but it’s better than seeing them bend, because they would bend long before they break from chipping. Or said differently, there’s more potential to resist edge distortion, a higher point of abuse where things finally fail, if they fail due to chipping and not folding. Why didn’t I do this before? Simple – I wasn’t able to get hardness out of the quench high enough to do it, and most other folks never will, either. 52100’s behavior is a bit of an odd duck and the heat treatment routine needs to be just a little different.

Because I’ve learned this just by experimenting – which is like getting something for free – it seems worth reexamining now that I’m comfortable with brine quenching. 64 hardness after a 400f temper should be attainable. More than that is unpublished more or less, but here we are. I am pushing method experiments to see what is possible, not just what’s possible with a furnace schedule and cryo.

This is the above chisel after a long double temper at 400. You can see the chisel between the anvil and cone at the left. 400 in a .9%+ carbon steel is usually an area of sweetness. In case you can’t see the dial, it reads a strong 65 hardness. Further up the chisel where you may be working with it in 2054, it’s still 63.

I’m pleased with this, the chisel is miles better than the 61 hardness 52100 steel chisel I have on my rack, but even though the alloy is pretty plain, it does start to resist some sharpening stones at this hardness.

I have to test it more. And see if bar 26c3 will also easily reach 65 after a brine quench. I’m fairly sure it will. And I think 26c3 will have a dry razor like bite and still be a little better than 52100 – certainly more agreeable on natural stones at the same hardness.

Who knew that making gravers would lead to improving some of the chisels? That’s the free part – I made gravers, they worked, done, right? No, don’t miss opportunities like this and just write things off without proving they won’t work. it would’ve been easy to say, well, you can do that with gravers because they’re little square stubs, but a chisel will break or crack or warp with the same routine.

It’s very nice to finally have a bolster that’s formed from the same piece of steel and have a tang thicker than a quarter inch. I’ve not yet had a forge welded bolster break loose – I don’t think more than 1 in 100 would ever let go, but all one piece of steel is even better.

Amber varnish on the handle again, of course. No metal driers, so uv light is needed unless a cure time of weeks is allowed. No thanks. Curing I’m the sun is fast, but Steve Voigt motivated me to make a black light box and the cure may be a bit slower, but weather matters not and there are no bugs stuck to the handle.

Oh, and I’ve already tested the edge malleting hard maple. It doesn’t chip, so more evaluation is needed. Even at 65, there is persistence to holding a little bit of a burr when sharpening, which is a surprise.

The heat treat process is not complicated and does not require a furnace, though it has become easier to really manipulate the steel with an induction forge vs. propane. If you want to normalize the steel with a heat all the way to the point that there is scale forming and then let it air cool, it’s 20 seconds with an induction forge, and follow up thermal cycles to shrink grain are a fraction of that.

Hand Forging a Chisel from Round Bar 3

OK – there’s been some delay in getting this wrapped up. I finished the chisel, but the chisel is a different chisel. The first two parts are unchanged, but charging forward and trying to find something to make a single piece chisel including integral bolster just happened by chance to run into trying a steel that is defective. The 115crv3 bar that I was using is defective. I relayed my experience to the supplier of the steel and they gave me a refund and canceled a back order that I had out there. Phew. So, I went back to W1 bar, and the last post here is a chisel made from W1.

This process changes none for any steel that I use other than the heat treatment, and I think it’s not worth going into specifics about heat treatment.

The W1 replacement looks the same – but I forgot to take a picture of it flat out of heat treatment. I thought this was the chisel, but this is yet another one after, but pretend it’s the W1 chisel. Flat and wedge shaped in profile as far as thickness goes:

I do almost all of the shaping and finishing work on less than precise grinders because none of it is jigged.

Actually, you can see the three things I use. Any of them could do all of the work. For example, on the left is a simple “bucktool” 4×36 sander. That brand is a low cost direct drive brand that you can find on amazon, but the sanders are not all the same. this one has a steel platen bed with some rigidity and a graphite coating that’s infused into woven cloth. it’s the best graphite platen material I’ve seen in terms of durability.

You need a sort of flat area somewhere on something, and an idler.

Which brings up the two grinders. One is back right. the spindle sander is for electric guitars, so you can ignore it.

Both grinders are identical, and they have the cheap multitool attachments. one is 4×48 and the other is 2×48 with a larger contact wheel. The two separate sets of units are some fraction of the cost of a “good” 2×72 grinder. The multitool attachments are not high quality or precise, but I haven’t broken either of them. So there’s a lukewarm endorsement.

The grinders are the Jet IBG-1, which is only important if you consider the power level important. They’re hogs for an 8″ grinder (11.5 amps and strong), which makes them a good candidate. Unfortunately, Jet has decided to almost double the price of them in the last two years at street level (they were $260 each when I got them, and now $470 seems to be the norm). I’m sure there was a “shortage” vs. just money grabbing. Or maybe they’re in the club George Carlin talks about and we’re not. Whatever the case….

I figured I’d show what I use – I’ve made entire chisels just with the 4×36 belt sander and if I did it here, you wouldn’t see an aesthetic difference. It would requirement to hand file the neck/tang area of the chisel, which I did for a long time. To put that in context – forge welding the bolster was later, so you could profile the tang mostly with the idler, weld on the bolster and then hand file to clean up. The bolster is now there out of forging so I do the rough grinding with the wheel. The wheel is 24 grit. Strangely, despite alumina prices being about the same as they were two years ago, these have also increased 72% in price. and when you do heavy grinding, you will actually see consumption of wheels that you’d never have considered before. One because you’re doing lean in grinding and two, the metal up to the point of the picture above is unhardened.

But that’s the past – we heat treated now, and heat treatment should leave the tang below the bolster semi-hardened so that it can be filed. The tang after the bolster inside the handle is unhardened.

Phew, a lot of background here – but it will feed into the discussion forward. I think you do not want to consider trying to jig anything you don’t need to jig. It’s limiting to do that and then the work is also boring.

On to the Finish Grinding and Bevels

The chisel is generally still wedge shaped and not warpy at this point, but if there is a slight lateral warp, observe it so that you don’t forget about it. Visual warps can be a matter of a couple of thousandths and they’re seconds of work to deal with. I leave chisels ever so slightly wide if the width really matters down to a couple of thousandths and then grind the sides to width after heat treat so that they’re straight with a very slight width taper. it makes for a nicer chisel to use than parallel sides.

At this point, I will grind the top curvature into the chisel. that is, the bottom is flat, the top shoulder is thick and the first several inches of the chisel are thinner, so the natural solution to this is some curvature in the taper as you approach the shoulder. It again makes a better chisel, but it also looks more interesting – a nice combination. On a short radius contact wheel it would seem hard to do this because you can create a lumpy surface. Working in slight diagonals both ways will eliminate most of this and if you see a spot that needs more ground off, of course you just do it by eye until it looks about right.

I don’t have a picture of grinding the bevels, but the biggest reason I got a picture of the idler wheel at the end of the belt on the Jet grinder is that is where I grind the bevels on a chisel.

Linearly. As in, I feed the chisel straight up and down with the length of the chisel in the direction the belt travels, not across the idler wheel’s width. That decreases the contact area and slows the process down.

It takes about five minutes to grind both bevels with a coarse belt, and to do it reasonably neatly. If you could do it in 15 seconds per side, it would be hard to do accurately. There is a dip bucket below the idler both to catch swarf and lower the amount of dust in the air. A couple of passes with the contact idler and into the bucket the chisel goes, but it never gets hot enough anywhere that I can’t touch it. This small point of contact on the idler with coarse grit is important – we don’t want to just not exceed 400F, we don’t want to get close to it. Once the bevels are on, heat treat isn’t a reasonable option with a water hardening steel.

Make yourself a routine. Three times up and down the contact wheel, dip in the water, look. I do both sides of the chisel progressively so that I can look down at the bevels, at the sides, and then from the front. There is no jig, so they are even by eye.

Once the bevels are on, I do the same thing with a finer belt, and then into the vise.

The chisel is held by aluminum soft jaws and I work over the ground surfaces with a sanding block with 180 or 220 grit paper until all of the machine marks are gone and any lumpiness. You can adjust lines here a little bit. The perspective makes the bevels look uneven, but they’re not.

This is the actual W1 chisel, of course. I cross file the tang both on the sides and below the bolster and lightly file off anything black on the bolster and then clean it up. The order of all of these things doesn’t matter that much, they just have to get done.

Somewhere on youtube, I have a video of cutting the final bevel on the chisel using a spray bottle and a belt sander. it takes about one or two minutes to fully cut a long shallow cutting bevel after this and do it without heating the edge. you can intermittently grind on a very coarse ceramic belt and dip often and check temperatures with your fingers, but I find a slightly finer belt and a light spray of water just dandy.

You can use a flat belt on glass or a rotary diamond plate or something to finish flattening the back of the chisel – I should mention that I often do that before adding the finished bevels for several reasons, but you’ll figure that out. At the very least, you don’t want to overheat thin edges. I started using 10″ rotary diamond plates to do the final flattening of backs post heat treat because of trouble with a heavy hand on the long sandpaper lap, blistering fingers with heat and at least once, drawing temper by accident. The lap that I use is just a $30 10 inch diamond lap off of aliexpress glued to MDF and fitted to a mandrel for the drill press (low speed, too!! High speed grinding with diamonds is a no no).

After handling the chisel, this is the result:

The handle is oiled at this point, but varnished later. Since this is the first W1 chisel of this type of make, I was hyper to see how it would hold up malleting a couple of cubic inches of maple. It did fine. I think 26c3 is a step better for harder woods, but it’s not available.

Even as I look at this picture, the tang is too long. but that’s a known thing – my grinder wheels are 8×1. I have a narrower wheel coming in the mail to do the early rough grinding and bring the shoulders up closer to the bolster. the tang is plenty heavy, though – it’s just an aesthetic issue for now.

Amber varnish on the handle brings us to a close. Shellac and oil would also be fine, or whatever else you’d prefer. .

I didn’t discuss how I make the handle. It’s separate from the chisel and it’s just a handle with the socket hole step drilled freehand. How do you get drills that like to wander to make a hole in line with the handle? Freehand. you drill a little and adjust the direction of the drill as you’re going so that the handle spins without much runout. You’re looking at the drill that drills the handle in the background. I’ve got no tolerance for trying to jig something like this up – it’s lazy, time consuming and the result is often worse. We are makers, and can trust our hands and eyes.

NAD and the defective 115crv3

Not like go-nad, but “new anvil day”. I used to like buying stuff, but I kind of despise it now. And buying a new anvil or a good used one is something I’d have liked to avoid. The 115crv3, by the way, is definitely a lost cause, but more on that afterward.

I have seen anvils over 300 pounds hours away and I’m fairly sure that my ability to get them into the car without damaging the car, and then get them back out is not great. So, I ordered a hardened ductile iron anvil from JHM. Ridgid (peddinghaus) also makes a 275 pound anvil that’s apparently a step further up in quality but it’s both hard to find in stock and also a step up in cost – a full one. Nothing is cheap in the world of anvils unless you’re a lucky flea market shopper. I will be practicing either asking for forgiveness instead of asking permission, or perhaps husbandly hiding and avoidance.

The deciding factor was first that I don’t believe I need “the best and super hardest 60HRC anvil” and despite the scant feedback on the ductile hardened cast anvils, I saw no actual reports of damage. The big one (the “competitor”) was on forged in fire, and I have to admit when I see products placed, I usually avoid them, so that was a strike against the anvil.

The company that makes them, though, was quick to respond to a freight quote request, and they shipped the anvil pretty quickly. The only question was that at an actual weight of 270 (claimed size is 260), how hard would it be to lift. If you have a bad back, I don’t want to goad you into lifting heavy things, but the lift was less eventful than I thought it would be. Anvils have no lateral leverage – the weight is just all right below you and centered unlike a weight bar – the latter being something my hands haven’t touched in decades. I had other plans if it couldn’t be lifted, but they involved a hydraulic jack and pushing over to the stand, and I had a real fear that would potentially result in an anvil slipping off of something and falling.

In the end, I decided if I could prop up the anvil about 2 1/2 inches on the bag cart, that would take away the hardest part – the first few inches, and that was true.

I’m not a strong guy if there are strong guys in the room, so I’m pleased. Youth did provide some chance to work in a rural areas, including on farms and finagling rounds to be split for firewood (far more awkward and threatening to backs than anvils, for sure) – I guess that turns out to be useful.

The anvil in this case sits with one of my favorite things – the induction forge. Put rod through that little ring and the first heat, you’re forging in one minute. After that 15-30 seconds between heats. Weird device, but super – no combustion of propane in the shop setting off smoke detectors elsewhere in the house and aside from a somewhat unsafe (by US standards) shielding of the live wires on the back, it’s predictable and cheap to run.

So, here’s a comparison of old and new – the old anvil being a very nice farriers anvil, an unmarked copy of a Soderfors anvil. I only wish it was 250 pounds instead of 125.

I find myself now in the place of someone who just wants something good, not wanting to be barraged with the “no anvil under 300 pounds or $4,000 is worth having”, which you can get. And I see through the lens of someone who has been woodworking for one year and who runs into several people giving advice, all the way up to “nobody can do woodworking without Kikohiromahru chisels”. Or Tasai – fill in whatever you want. I’ve seen both of those being advised to someone who hasn’t made much of anything yet.

The challenge for us is a little different – be less particular about making demands of only having the best, and try a little harder to prove we need something better because the tools are limiting. This anvil won’t be that – i’m a piker with a heavy hand hammering hot metal, not ball peining anvil surfaces.

phew.

On to the 115crv3

I encountered various things, like stable graphite in the snapped steel samples, and what never gets to be more than very superficial hardness. But the chisel that’s shown in the couple of prior posts and that I probably will swap for another to wrap up that series of posts first, doesn’t get to the hardness I should see after quench even with brine. And then second, what hardness it does have is lost far more than expected with a very cool tempering temperature.

I forged those, so maybe it was me.

A test of the 115crv3 rod that’s as simple as cutting a sliver off, doing nothing other than normalizing, cycling and heat treating shows the defects are in the rod, and hardness is less even with the sliver. With W1 and O1, the forged goods also seem to get slightly above the hardness target I’d get from flat stock. we’ll see if that holds up.

I’ve attempted to cancel the rest of my second order of 115crv3 from the seller (Maedler) but haven’t heard back. The last thing I want to do is sit waiting for a backorder when it’s likely the stock won’t be any good. Plans to try to hammer it thin and make knives or something, it’s really just unsuitable for anything all the way down to trying to make a thin plane iron out of a forged sample at .08″. never experienced anything like it.

What I do have is a second iron forged at the same time out of 0.75″ O1 rod. First order of business with that one is to see if it has any defects that rolled flat stock doesn’t have due to my potentially damaging influence forging (escaping carbon, bad microstructure, etc), and then after that, to identify any differences in looks under the microscope or feel in use and see if there is anything positive about forging the iron.

So far, I just don’t know, but the O1 version is a point harder than I expected and so far not brittle. I realize a point sounds like nothing, but when you’re working with stock that you know the spec of and see no variance, when you get an extra point of hardness, it’s first a potential worry and then also a curiosity. Is it possible that the forging doesn’t lose that much carbon into the atmosphere but may get more of it in solution? I don’t know.

Both the 115crv3 test iron on the left -that can only get superficial surface hardness that’s lost into the mid 50s with a 350F temper (should be 64 at that point at the very least), an the O1 iron on the right, which after a double 385-390 temper is still 63.

if it looks like the back is out of flat, keep in mind, I flattened this iron with a contact wheel and eyesight, not a flat surface. if it’s any good, the little bit falling off on the right will be worked out with subsequent sharpenings. No sense going nuts and finding out that I don’t care much to use the iron. Starting out with 3/4 tool steel rod and hammering these out by hand isn’t that smart, but it takes a lot of heats and really gives me an idea of whether or not decarbing will be a problem because of that. It’s a good learning exercise, though. The iron on the left is oddly shaped because of hammering technique. The one on the right is straight because the first one wasn’t.

Edit/Update – Anvil Use – Poo on the Idealists

After using the anvil a little bit this afternoon, I’m ashamed that I allowed the discussion of what’s ideal lead me astray. I have no idea why anyone would claim they couldn’t work on it vs. “it’s not my preference”. Love it. It’s a bit of a ringer and that will need to be addressed – it will take a mark from a misstrike, but the rebound is almost as good as the small one in the picture above and the size increase negates that small different several times over. It should outlive me, and if I can ever use it so heavily that it becomes unusable, I will boast loudly about how much work I did.

Also, I think I might be wrong about it being the anvil on forged in fire. Emerson Horseshoe and Traditions are two I remember, but at the same time, I am no expert on forged in fire and only learned that it existed after a coworker said it when I mentioned making chisels (“You mean forging? like forged in fire?”).

Not in Houston, but

We have a problem.

Nothing about the 115crv3 data sheet suggests it will be anything other than slightly easier to heat treat than 26c3 and slightly harder to heat treat than O1.

Great.

However, after several attempts to harden the steel bar that I forged into the chisel in the two chisel posts, I get around 61 hardness at the tip and after a 380 temper, that’s 58. No good.

Not just accepting this, I’ve heated and quenched and broken about 20 different iterations terminating with a slight overheat and a brine quench – which gets more uniform results, but 62 out of the quench.

So, what do I think? I think the steel that I got may not be 115crv3, but I have no idea what it is. Even something like 1070 or some other lower carbon steel would harden at a high initial hardness if you push it, but it will not have the same edge as a higher carbon steel and it will slip more in tempering than a surplus carbon steel like 26c3.

I changed my quench oil, tested other things I’ve forged from rod (O1 and W1, both end at about 62 hardness after a 400F double temper). I suspected my hardness tester was off, perhaps there was a significant decarb layer, or the steel wasn’t hardening through and through and who knows what else.

Nothing.

So, I’ll brine quench the chisel in question and lightly temper it and we’ll move on.

I’ve never had anything quench neatly in water let alone 10-15% brine (much faster than even a plain water quench), but a not quite finished other chisel of 115crv3 took the “ptthhhhfttt” noise in the brine, which is a violently fast quench and hardened nicely if 62 is nice and very evenly because no part of it transitioned from hot to cold slowly. I have used water quench before just to experiment and cracks are almost certain if you’re pushing things.

I am curious enough about these bars to see what will happen if I hammer out a plane iron. Will it show carbides, which suggest enough carbon to form them? I think it does in broken samples. If it does, why won’t it come out of the quench greater than 62, and what will I do with 12 feet of rod, which will literally make about 25 continuous feet of finished goods – more than that if making chisels. I think it’s destined to be put aside and used for junk knives. Since the steel is so uncommon in the US meeting actual spec, there aren’t any options to order more and compare. Others that I’ve seen listed claim 1% carbon, more chromium and more vanadium. I don’t know what those are – they may be an English spec of something, but they aren’t 115crv3 regardless of what the listing says.

This kind of stuff is part of the process and even if the rod that I thought would be ideal isn’t at all suitable, I’ll learn other things from it, and in this case, quenched in brine for the first time.

Hand Forging a Chisel from Round Bar – #2

After the prior post, I had a chisel that needed a tang. Admittedly, I am not quite to the point where I want to hammer that tang out immediately – a little break is nice. However, I’ve done it and can do it. Which brings something to mind for me in terms of hand work. There is a version of tired or fatigued where you can take a break or set up a rhythm that I refer to in definitions on this site as “the count”. Work happens neatly and is pleasant when you can do that.

Then, there is a level of work where you push yourself and perhaps it only accomplishes a little bit more, but it ruins you for the day, or in the case of my arm and elbow, may lead to problems in the long term.

Hand work doesn’t involve that kind of thing. Hand work involves the former, as it allows you to assess what you’re doing and not be distracted by pain which leads to errors of stupidity or contemplative neglect.

Don’t do it.

I will be comfortably hammering one of these chisels out entirely in one stop soon enough – it may be chisel #12 instead of 6. That happens not just from brute strength, but neural development, efficiency and control. That combined with your brain understanding what’s easier is part of what I like to refer to as craftsman’s magic. You get better at things just by doing them, they get easier, you don’t have to become a strong back weak mind version of yourself.

On to the chisel.

Here’s where it stands after guillotine and hammering

Kind of ugly. I would prefer grain direction fan out from back to front but the tip of this chisel sort of has the grain flowing in like the toe of a shoe. I’ll grind that off. I’m sure this steel still has directional favoring as far as toughness or resistance to breaking goes.

there’s a lot left here and in time I may get close to the finished product above the shoulder, but the penalty in this case is about ten minutes of heavy grinding.

After a total of perhaps 15 minutes of grinding, I’ve arrived to this point.

this probably seems quite a leap, but I can’t really give you much advice on grinding other than making sure the general direction or flow in the roughed piece is the same as the ground part. you just have to grind and file things to learn to do it. Unless you make 100 of the same thing, you are not going to establish a mindless routine. Not that getting to that level would be bad if still doing this by hand, but I would say grind just shy of where you want to go and file or then light grind to finish. That’s what i did here.

There’s nothing special about my mark here, by the way. It’s a piece of old file that I heated, then when it was cool (unhardened), imprinted some reverse letters and put on mock serifs, and then used a checkering file to crate a postage stamp border. you can make your own if you can find the reverse stamps, and then just mutilate something to make those little serifs on the ends and bottoms of letters.

My grinder for this is a combination belt and wheel – it’s a strong jet 8″ grinder. They make at least two. This one draws 11.5 amps and it’s nice to have it on tap. You can grind something this size without ever slowing the machine down.

This area is a mess. there’s another one of the same thing with a larger narrower wheel back right, my OSS, which is typically a light use tool for guitars and obviously gets cleaned off if making them, and on the left is a 4×36 direct drive bench sander.

Dust collection or fanning metal dust is an absolute must. Wood dust is annoying. Metal dust is that squared and probably a much greater long term health threat. I have a bucket below the belt both to dip tools and to catch most of the dust so I can throw it away later in a big rusty brick. The vacuum is hooked to the dust port on this grinder and it doesn’t catch everything, but it catches a lot and throws it into a bin.

The fan sitting on the top of the heap sends all of the remaining fines and smoke out of the garage in a gentle breeze. I don’t grind with the door closed. In winter, whatever is being ground is hot enough that just having it in your hands will keep you warm. I thought that was odd until I read that it’s more effective to warm someone by warming hands than full body warming if the input energy is the same. That was something from a doctor discussing hypothermia, not something from bro science.

After some more filing I’m here, starting to file the bolster:

width doesn’t matter to me on tools, and I like a slight taper in width with the bevel edge being widest. This chisel is probably between 5/8th and 3/4ths. It’s a mule, anyway. If accurate width is important, you can leave yourself a hundredth or two of fatness and belt grind it off after heat treatment. If heat treatment distorts more than that, you’ve got bigger problems. Whatever the case, hitting something within a couple of thousandths in finished width is not difficult.

Filing the bolster is done with chisels that have been made safe edge and also had some of the corner transition to the cutting side ground off. You’ll figure out what’s right if you file a few of these.

Files are consumables, and there’s no need for anything expensive here. The round filing at the shoulder is done with cheap files, the heavier filing is done with mill files and a cheap double cut half round file, and taper saw files and chainsaw files do a good job of cleaning up the rougher work.

Just like grinding, filing the bolsters on is better learned by doing it, and not by memorizing a 14 step process. That’s nonsense you will pretty quickly realize you’re filing flat facets on work like this and that dragging the file backwards is a good idea because it prevents pinning. Again, files are consumables. Don’t trade a dollar of file wear for an hour of wasted time or ugly results.

Something important does come up here:

You can overcut things or file into the tang. You don’t want to do that. When filing the bolster, I file five strokes and look, five more and look. This happens in rhythm. It both keeps fatigue away and also allows to see things that are occurring and adjust without having to think about it. And importantly, it builds in rhythm an assessment that prevents overcutting. This is something worthwhile in all hand work that looks good if it’s done just right and terrible of done a little more than just right.

Heat treatment is next, where we could find out the whole thing has been a waste of time of we get serious warping. This will be the first thing I’ve ever heat treated out of 115crv3, but the heat treat schedule and the composition suggest that warping should be my only problem if there is any. Water hardening steels like a fast quench, though, and the potential for warping is already there. Go too gentle on the quench and the chisel won’t be full hardness- that’s even worse.

The most common thing with chisels for me is vertical movement or bow. For example, the flat back of a chisel ends up not close to that and grinding it out leaves the tip thin.

it’s once in a while, not every other, and the skill to do these water hardening skills right – especially with manual heat treatment by judgement as I’m doing – is why you don’t see alloys like this used by the tool making companies who sponsor manbun parties.

Hand Forging a Chisel from Round Bar – #1

I’m going to post the process that I’m using to make a chisel from round bar. Two things about this – I’m sure it will be refined as I make more chisels, but it is already practical. Second, this is my sixth forged chisel from round bar and only one of the other five is fully finished. But, I’ve made a lot of chisels hammer tapering flat stock and then affixing a separate bolster, so those two pieces of information is useful. You may get to this point in six chisels total (i doubt it) but if it takes longer than that, I’ve paid my dues and enjoyed it rather than running from the failures and hoping to avoid them.

The point of this, as mentioned in yesterday’s post, is both to get to more forging, but more importantly, to have the chisel made from a single piece of steel. I’m making this chisel out of 115crv3, a relatively plain steel (less plain than 1084, more plain than O1, and miles more plain than A2, for example). I’m using this rod type even though it’s kind of hard to find because I want a chisel that is going to land in the 63 or so hardness range with a solid double temper of 400F, and 0.9% or 1% steel can suck wind a little bit in trying to achieve that and not be a bit chippy. This steel is 1.15-1.25% depending on the melt. I expect to lose a little bit of that as decarb from forging, but not too much due to the induction heating instead of sitting in a hot gas or coal forge. Induction allows you to focus more on the part you’re hammering and heat adjacent areas enough to avoid cracks, but not have to heat a whole blank end to end to upper forging temperatures.

So, unlike most of my very wordy posts, this is going to be more pictures and fewer words. The goal here is just for me to share what I’m doing. The goal in the future is to really get the amount of chisel made forging vs. grinding and filing increased. I’m not there yet, but have made huge strides just in six.

Here is the round bar – 20mm 115crv3 steel. I’m not fully decided yet and have ordered three more bars of the stuff with some smaller, but I think I’ve learned enough thus far to know that I don’t actually need anything smaller because drawing it out is easier than expected. That’s not to say it’s easy – it’s a little physically demanding by hand.

115crv3 alloy rod – sold in the US only in one place and apparently intended as stock for material conveying systems.

The first step is to start drawing the stock out from the bar. There’s guess work here until I’ve got more experience – as in what will yield a chisel between 5/8 and 3/4″ from the bolster down, and hopefully a little over 5″.

I leave a lot more at the tang shoulder because this chisel will have a classic taper with top curvature (eat that CNC), and then use a guillotone to start to establish the tang.

That gets me to this.

You can already see why I like doing this – the bolster does not have to be upset to greater diameter, the basic rod is there and it is high quality, so I know it won’t be brittle or weak.

This is what the guillotine looks like. It’s apparent from this making and others that I will probably want to make a guillotine anvil/bar set that will taper this more into the shoulder and perhaps leave the tang area a little shorter than the 3/4″ flat default. But those are things to learn. I’ve already ordered more 4140 bar stock to make different anvils – this will become a useful tool for a one-man operation.

The guillotine, resting. You lift the top bit and put the work between the bars and then hammer and turn.

To this point is about 15 minutes of heating and hammering. 1/3rd of 1 and 2/3rds of the other. I’m using a 4 pound hammer and am by no means a physical specimen, but I’ve not handed in my man card yet in exchange for looking in the mirror and always-clean pants and hands.

After establishing the roughed tang, I draw out the steel in about the taper that I want to have less some room for grinding and finishing off the outer layer, as well as the expectation that more will come out of the tang area. Not much needs adjusting near the business end, but the tang area is nice to leave a bit to work with as distortion there is a pain.

The last 1/4 to 1/2 inch of this will come off. it’d be nice to have left a bit more on the end, but we’ll live. The objective here is to get closer to straight top and bottom to avoid distortion in the quench later. I will grind the top curvature in, hoping that the warp in the quench doesn’t make that difficult. The actual tang thickness will be ground down quite a bit, but I will probably mark this one with my stamp so there will be some distortion on the blade below the tang from doing that.

It’s slightly wider at the shoulders than the business end, and grinding will deal with that pretty quickly.

Enjoying Experience and Slow but Solid Improvement instead of the Fallacy of Instant Success

I started out woodworking like many do – working behind a desk in a long hours job and seeing other people do more than slink into a couch for off hours and just sit in a daze until forced to go back to work the next day, and sometimes that would be later the same day if the prior day went late enough. Not saying I didn’t put through plenty of physical output at work, but it was stacks of paper and files. Someone at work thought I was particularly frustrated – which was probably true, but problem solvers typically don’t have a pitchy salesperson like fake outlook on things.

That started me out woodworking and the first thing I learned to do with hand tools was sharpen from a David Charlesworth DVD. I followed it, it worked, and spent another couple of years wondering how much sharper things could be because all forum input was “there’s no way I had actually sharpened a plane iron properly…it takes years or longer to master”. Well, it doesn’t, and that’s another discussion for another day – how do people get stuck for decades trying to learn something that should be routine and mostly mastered in weeks or months.

What I didn’t know, and probably wouldn’t want to hear is that there is satisfaction in woodworking that doesn’t sound like “if you get a good set of plans and have the right tips, you’re building things better than the pros do”. That message was out there, but it’s bullshit. Which pros. Are you comparing your bookshelf-with-metal-adjustable-pins to some guy who is assembling concrete forms?

It took me about 6 or 7 years to learn that first, you need to have something you want to build well so badly that you’ll figure it out, and second, you don’t have to sweat failing. And not in a fat kid finishing the mile way – “oh, there’s no such thing as a failure”. Well, there may be. Maybe a given individual isn’t meant to do fine art, or carvings, or run half marathons, but most of us will find something we are good at or that we enjoy, or if lucky, both at the same time. And when we do, it’s worth experimenting, doing, and forgetting about someone telling you that a good maker will be able to make anything. A good maker may make more than one thing, but they will become familiar with a smaller number of things, and those things will be better.

And the Repetition and Realistic Incremental Improvement

….that incremental improvement, and learning how to improve faster, and adding on more universal skills like developing feel and training eyes: That’s the key to actually making something better than you thought you could, which will bring you far more than envisioning celebrating that you never made a mistake. You’ll own the knowledge. There is some self teaching and self learning in this that maybe hard to grasp if you’re super conscientious and not very creative. And some need to block out the “expert opinion” of people who either know a better way than what you’re doing, or who are at least dead set on telling you that they are.

Here’s an example from my current kind of build-up. I want to make chisels from rod or solid stock, which I discussed in the prior blog post. I don’t need to, but I want to.

The chisel on the right is the third chisel I hammered out. There is a *lot* of grinding to do on that. The one on the left is the fourth, and the one in the center is the last from yesterday. They look a little different because I’m trying things. you can see that I ran the tang out with the guillotine on the one in the middle, and you can’t tell, but I’ll come back later and consolidate that. It stings my eyes a little to look at it because what I don’t want is discontinuous length. This chisel was made out of only about 2″ of rod and the tip to tang length is 8.5″ now, so the grain is probably elongated somewhat, and for a chisel, I think that’s a good thing.

But there’s a little nugget of improvement on it. After hammering out the right side chisel on this picture, I started to realize that drawing the material out makes it easier to work with rather than hammering it flat. It’s counterintuitive, because drawing out and flattening along the way sounds like more work, but it isn’t. The length of chisel shown in front of the bolster is far more like what it will be when it’s finished. The bolster is rough looking and there’s a lot to grind back, but that can be solved another day.

At this point, the first two chisels were arm aching stuff, the third at the right was still chunky, and the fourth on the left started to clue me in about drawing out material. To not just learn this but feel it at the same time is far different than hearing it in a class and doing what you’re told.

This incremental improvement is very pleasant, and my thoughts about whether or not this was physically reasonable to do after the first couple of chisels are gone – of course it’s reasonable to do in perhaps several per day. And that will be plenty. I can’t physically put in a box what this is and ship it to someone, and it isn’t woo, either. It’s not superficial “lifestyle woodworking” to sell a class, and I think it’s not a beginner friendly thing, so I’ve got no rah-rah idea of what you should just go do (“go make chisels!”). I know that I want to do every single step of them in the shop and I want them to be better than anything I can find. Maybe that’s not possible, but I’m shooting for it.

And I’m shooting for anything else I can learn about moving metal to perhaps be useful elsewhere, and getting closer and closer to a finished chisel off of the anvil where it makes sense. Because these results are nowhere close to that.

And I’m thankful to be going to the shop contemplating, feeling, sometimes ending in some pain, but not limited by someone else’s ideal or limitations or what doesn’t make sense in 2023 or whatever else. It’s a lifetime thing, not dependent on the next class or the next article, and absolutely devoid of any of those internal dialogues about “how much is this worth, is it really worth my time?”. The last bit is one of the dumbest things I’ve encountered on a regular basis – that what you’re doing for leisure doesn’t have enough value and your time is worth too much to do it even if you like it.