General Maker’s Thoughts – Of Making by Hand with Wood and Steel

How Do You Know What You’re Getting?

The mention of Wright talking about zen-wu chisels moving the needle, so to speak, really gives people who are into the whole influencer thing the idea that something odd – like a titanium backed chisel – is really going to move the needle. It doesn’t, of course. As much as I love making chisels, a good drop forged chisel at 62 hardness with relatively plain steel is going to be super – if you can find it.

I despise the kind of “secret steel” thing, as I mentioned in a previous post, and think that it would be a public service for someone to have the chisels XRFed, and then point out the actual or likely alloy in each offering. Most PMs are going to be biased toward carbide volume, which is antithetical to good chisel performance. Carbide volume in harder carbides adds edge life, if you can manage to avoid damaging edges. I think for anyone with experience, a plain steel edge that’s appropriate hardness and stable is going to be a better fit due to the damage/wear balance. If you’re doing more than planing pine that’s already clean and completely free of knots, you’re going to end up with edge damage. If you’re competent, effort sharpening is a pretty much linear association with the upper limit of time you’ll get with a plane. With a chisel, that doesn’t exist. If O1 lasts half as long in a planing test as V11, you’ll potentially get your time back unless you are not very good at sharpening.

That’s a good motivation to get better (faster, neater, sharper) at sharpening and figure out where you’re wasting time.

When you incur damage, you get to abrade the steel instead of the wood. Most carbide volume steels have some edge stability issues, or at least can, and some don’t wear very nicely. And some steels (like 52100) that don’t have that much carbide volume just don’t pick up a shaving as easily while they wear as something like O1, despite having similar edge life. You’ll work harder using 52100, which has always flummoxed me. Why? I don’t know. The things that show up on the microscope for 52100 are similar to XHP (V11), but in smaller volume. XHP picks up a shaving well if you can avoid chipping it – 52100 doesn’t. Sometimes knowing what is easy and why isn’t as easy and you just have to accept what and avoid getting stuck in the trap of reasoning that what you experience is just bad data. It probably isn’t – don’t try to outsmart yourself.

In the end, it’s nice to use an edge with less damage and avoid the scenarios where you just need extreme abrasion resistance. And hint, it’s not hard wood, silica or anything of the sort – it’s inability to understand that you don’t have to do most of your planing with the thinnest shavings you can make. Doing that doesn’t even give you better accuracy -it’s worse if you’re doing more than smoothing and probably worse if you’re just smoothing. That involves seeking edge stability, something you can sharpen in a minute with confidence and maybe that even points toward something where if you come up short sharpening, the uniformity of the edge is so good you’ve just accidentally done the smartest thing you can do with straight razors – you’ve left the original edge but improved the clearance behind it.

For cold woodwork (laning and chiseling, for example) I don’t see the point of anything CPM, but some of the stuff can be interesting. The lone high toughness steels that I can think of are 1V and 3V. I don’t think you’re going to find CPM 1V – literally a CPM version of a plain steel with a small vanadium addition, but it is fantastically tough. The market itself doesn’t seem to be that interested in super tough steels that may not have that great of an abrasive wear life. if you’re making dies, for example, it would have to be very difficult to find a situation where there are arises so acute that 3V doesn’t handle the situation. 3V can be super tough, but at 59 hardness, it would be a bung to use in a chisel. The 3V iron I tested, mistakenly hardened at 59 instead of 61 by Bos would form a burr on 1 micron diamonds and it never felt as sharp as V11 or really anything else. I kept having to look at it under the microscope. CPM M4 also offered fantastic resistance (not in a good way) at same sharpness, and none of this may have been as obvious if I weren’t using one plane, one board, and rotating six irons through. The differences were very stark doing that, and I’m glad to have done it, even if an intermittently employed CPA would say it’s not a good use of time.

That test made me fall in love with V11 irons. I quickly bought $400 of CTS-XHP steel, duplicated the results from V11, then went to work in wood and learned the lesson about nicking and running a test. Confirming with your style of real work is always worthwhile.

So, what does this have to do with Zen Wu – I get the kind of gas station knife goes upscale to google software engineering manager draw of the Zen Wu stuff. I think i could have Warren Mickley over, and I think Warren would never use something I made and just unconditionally say he’d like it, but he has used some of my stuff and told me the things he didn’t like about it and the things that confused him. That’s an A+. I don’t think you could give Warren a CPM chisel for production work and have him come back with any compliments. Even if you gave him free diamonds. And the reason Warren’s opinion is more important than mine or a software engineering manager’s is simple for anyone other than the chisel seller who is appealing to the engineering manager – Warren is encyclopedic, he’s accomplished and he actually does things day to day that people claim nobody does (make a living working a volume of wood by hand, and at a high standard). It’s not frequent that he visits, but I enjoy when he does – it’s like being a star trek nerd in a house full of Barbie enthusiasts when someone you know reasonably well but doesn’t show up often pops out of the car dressed like Spock. You can talk, and without saying “well, I guess I’d have to explain what that is and I don’t know how it relates to Barbie”.

The What are you Getting Part – Chinese White Steel?

I don’t expect anyone to remember this, but I’ve pipped off more than once about if someone had a desire to make a drop forged thermally cycled 62/63 hardness chisel in china with a nice profile and plain steel for a $5 unit cost instead of 75 cents per for the Aldi chisels, I would have no hope of making any chisels in retirement.

Zen Wu could maybe be that company? I don’t know, maybe they don’t work that way. The mention of them with Wright caused me to peruse the site and find these:

Zen-Wu Y-1 Chisel

That is not an affiliate link, by the way!! For posterity, because the link could go dead, it claims to be a set of chisels that are White Paper Steel. For the price, it’s possible they could be Hitachi white paper steel, but here’s where the critical may be valuable for you if you just assumed that. Sometimes people are honest, and sometimes they are misleading. It could be either, but if i were spending the dosh on Hitachi White #1, I would call it exactly that. I have a bar of it, still haven’t used it. It’s expensive beyond its usefulness because it has that kind of aura around it. It would be possible to make a four chisel set like this for $200+US – probably $50 worth of white #1 steel. I can only get white and blue 1, and not #2, so i don’t know what #2 would be.

White steel is not that kind to modern heat treatment process. We’ll just skip that. The part of me that is always a cynic immediately sees this and looks for the incontrovertible proof that it’s Japanese white steel and then assumes it’s not if it’s not there. I would imagine it’s not, but the way the ad copy reads, I can almost guarantee 90% or more of the market will think it’s the same steel.

Here’s the stuff that doesn’t make sense. 1.2% carbon and 0.04% sulfur. First, White 1 and White 2 Hitachi steel don’t come in 1.2% carbon – they come in a range for white 2 that ends at 1.15% and white 1 ranges from 1.25%-1.35%. 1.2% is an odd number.

White #1 in this case also has a sulfur limit of .004% (ten times less). Even the lowly 125cr1 from Buderus that I got has a melt certification sheet of 0.001% sulfur. Why is sulfur important? One of the more common faults in plain steels and probably in others is manganese sulfide inclusions. These occur, confirm for me if you’re a chemist, when manganese and sulfur get together. Rolling stock then takes those inclusions and stretches them from a ball shape to a linear shape.

What do they do? Since they are not part of the stable steel structure, they act as points where cracks start. if you already have excess carbon, or any carbide, you have points where cracks should start before the matrix of steel around them – and the less uniformity there is, the bigger the problem can be. I am not a historical metallurgist or even a metallurgist, but I would bet these kinds of things – inclusions – have a lot to do with why it’s hard for me to find a surplus carbon vintage plane iron or chisel, and it’s also probably why you will find stories about a camp razor from 150 years ago that the entire combat camp wanted to use instead of their own.

Hitachi White #1 is often touted as being able to achieve higher hardness due to purity. These inclusions are an example why. if you have 2% carbide volume, you don’t need to add some surplus more in sulfide inclusions – especially if the carbides are iron carbides – which still have pretty good toughness. harder carbides less so, but iron carbides still confuse me a little.

How useful is it to ask a maker of chisels like this if the steel is Hitachi white 1? I don’t know, because if they don’t tell you the truth – something we have no reason to believe they’d avoid doing – but if they didn’t, you’d have no way to tell short of XRF analysis and then even if sulfur was in low form, it doesn’t necessarily mean the steel is Hitachi white 1.

If it is the case that it’s not, I can’t deny that it’s much more valuable for the retailer to say it’s white paper steel than it is to say it’s a Chinese origin or even European origin file steel. 125cr1 seems to be pretty good – but it wouldn’t sell chisels like the words “white paper” will.

The same thing here – the court numbers case. “Your honor, they said it’s 1.2% carbon and here is Hitachi’s product list”. That and the sulfur limit – could just be typos. They may not even be shown on this page – I didn’t double check. Dictum states those amounts. they could be really good, but I can make a 26c3 chisel with a beech handle for about $15, and with a nicer handle for $20. it’ll take me two hours, but I kind of like that part. I probably wouldn’t sell them for less than $100 per, and if these were just as good for $70, which they might be, how could I look in the mirror if I recommended you just pay more to make me feel special.

The Dude wouldn’t do that.

No worries on the recent crabbiness, it’ll subside. My next post will be about making things, and probably so will some after that, even if there is some delay between posts while I’m doing stuff and it’s busy season at the day job.

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.

I Made Amber Varnish

My last post about varnish stuff was a glossary and intro. If some of the discussion in this post don’t make sense, you can find definitions or discussion of the terminology in that post. Pardon the winding length of this post, by the way. Yesterday was an adventure replacing the cold water line in my house and some of the stems off of it – I finished at 1:30AM and am wiped out. But, back to the varnish…

Amber varnish is probably the earliest “super varnish”. One that has good toughness, high hardness, and is suitable for a lot of uses, from furniture to floors to whatever. I’m not sure if it was used for coaches and things of the like as the texts I’ve read are later, and semi-fossil Copal resin varnishes dominated.

Amber’s interest because Copal is described as being lighter in color than amber, but Copal also relieved varnish makers from having to make varnish out of Amber. So what’s behind these two things? Amber has to be heated to a very high temperature to run and be made soluble for linking to a suitable oil (usually linseed). As discussed in the terminology post, the oil and resin are cooked together to make a long polymer chain. The run temperature is high enough that cooking over fire would’ve been dangerous – it’s only a couple of hundred degrees between amber’s autoignition. The other thing about it, and perhaps some is the resin and some is the temperature needed in the cook, is that the resulting varnish is the darkest I’ve made. I feel like I’m new to varnish making and haven’t made much, but by jar count, this is the 16th varnish I’ve made.

Dark varnish isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but if all varnishes are dark, of course rare then would be a light varnish. Copal allowed relatively light hard varnishes if it was cooked quickly to short string and then used as it was.

At this point, I think the changes in semi-fossil Copal availability have made it so that the baltic amber that’s available, and even at a relatively reasonable price, isn’t much harder to cook than Copal, and maybe not any harder than madagascar Copal.

And, yes, amber resin is the same thing you’ll see with bugs suspended in the middle of it, or polished into sort of a relatively soft natural gemstone. The baltic amber that’s sold for varnish making appears to be little pieces that aren’t valuable for anything else. For the purpose of varnish making, this is nice – the resin does not need to be broken down and it doesn’t have tree trash and dirt in it that some Copal types have.

What makes cooking difficult?

The difficult part of basic oil varnish making is getting a good clean resin to start with and then getting it to melt without burning it. With softer resins, this isn’t much of a challenge unless you’re really new. But with something like Amber or the harder Madagascar Copal, I can see thermocouple temperatures of 700F or so and still have unmelted leftovers after filtering the varnish. My setup is sort of gamed so that it’s not easy to get much past 700F. I don’t have any interest in an eruption of sticky burning stuff that you can feel the danger of if so much as a raindrop or two falls in it and spits a tiny bit out.

If that unmelted stuff is something like 2-15% of a run, I just throw it out. While you’re cooking resins, some part of the mass escapes into the atmosphere, even if you keep the lid on the pot, and burning the pot contents probably just would lead to the same amount of usable resin in the end, but it would be smoked. Like dark and it actually stinks.

After reading extensively about how Amber is difficult to run, warnings from authors not to run it, and pictures online of people stirring what looks like charcoal, I kind of expected it would be a failure, but I also kind of expected that my easy “for dummies” setup with some experience would make it doable. And it was.

There is only one thing I didn’t anticipate: the smell of the resin being run was perhaps the worst smell I’ve ever smelled. Running resin stinks – enough that it’s inconsiderate to neighbors as it’s a putrifying kind of smell, not just like a campfire or burning cooking oil. None is pleasant. But amber takes the cake as being the most disgusting I’ve smelled, and it lingers, even outside. Like on the leaves of trees and under the eaves of the house even though my cooking setup is nowhere close to them.

But I’m happy to have run something that is warned against, no fire, it’s not black, and the properties of the varnish itself are nice. it’s basically a 1 part resin to 1.5 oil, and 15% of the resin or so was pine rosin to create a melted layer to help avoid burning things. Older recipes include Copal (probably easier to melt than what’s available now) and pine rosin up to 50% of the resin content as a cheaper alternative.

A picture of the final amber varnish in the large jar, and some poured off and thinned to use in the small jar.

I mentioned above that the old texts mention you can make a lighter but less durable varnish by getting string, which signifies that the oil and resin have combined chemically, and then just stopping. I use the term “quick varnish” for this. Get them hot, put them together, and take them off the heat before they get darker. Since this is already going to be dark, this is a long-string varnish. Long string in my experience is easiest to get by keeping the varnish over heat for some period of time, testing periodically. As string gets longer, you have to pay attention as the varnish can become so well cooked that it becomes a gel, and it’s generally a lost cause at that point.

So, I cooked this as far as I cared to push it and the mildly thinned result in the large jar is almost like corn syrup when it’s poured, and it has unbelievable adhesion, even wet, and is immune to soap and water.

Here’s a look at the side of the large jar tipped just to get an idea of the darkness of the film.

Very dark finish demonstrated by tipping the jar to see a thin layer on the glass.

I have no idea where to use something like this other than intentional dark finishes or on very dark woods. I don’t think there’s any limit to its shelf life, though, so there’s plenty of time to figure it out.

It’s waterproof, like a modern finish, and I test for that by pouring water on a piece and just letting it stand until the water is dry. If the varnish is impervious to water, it won’t let water into the finish, but also, it won’t even degloss. Semi-fossil copal and amber both do this. I’m sure some others do, too, but inexpensive pine rosin varnish definitely does not tolerate much water contact. BTDT leaving a test piece in the rain by accident, discovering the surface swelled and bumpy with water the next morning.

A test piece of beech finished with a thin layer of amber varnish, water has partially dried. A brushed finish would be considerably darker, perhaps tending toward the color of a violin.

So, about 4 hours of effort in this case, but not all of it with me being attendant. Probably about 2 hours of actual involved time, and all that results is a quart of finish. That’s true, but it’s worth noting that the finish is about 70% solids, so it’s more similar to a half gallon of a higher quality urethane. And it’s just a different animal, anyway. There will be no curing in the jar with this, and if sunlight is available, it’s dry to the touch in about an hour or two.

Two other Varnishes for Color Comparison

It’s not impossible to have a lighter varnish with good tolerance of water, but I haven’t made one yet. I think it’s hard to look at the first picture and get a sense of just how dark the varnish actually is, so here are two more pictures for comparison.

Semi-fossil copal short-string quick varnish. Still a good varnish, but gives up durability in theory to keep this lighter color. Note the film color left on the glass as the varnish jar is tipped.

A fast-cook limed pine rosin (lime added to increase hardness and melting temperature) varnish. The film is so light it’s hard to see on the side of the jar. Unfortunately, the durability and hardness of the varnish isn’t that great.

I may return another day and try to improve this post so it’s not just like some short-sleep dude typing at random, but if you’re reading this last sentence – I haven’t done it yet.

And maybe that’s suitable for Varnish. I could make this varnish on a regular basis, but making it was more about making something that’s practically forbidden in some texts and less about doing it regularly. Especially with the smell – bad enough that 10 ounces of it running would’ve easily tinged the nostrils of dozens of neighbors.

How Flat is a Type 20 #8?

First off, I don’t really do much following of type studies, but have taken a shine over the years to later stanley planes. Up to a point at least. Once there is a gap between the frog and the casting, I’m out.

At this point, I already have two 8s – a wartime Record that’s OK, but Record seemed to have a lot of problems shaping lever caps properly to fit over the cap irons, or making them the right length so they were over the hump and not pushing on it from the back (which also allows shavings to get through).

The other 8 is an earlier stanley that’s a typical ebay story. The plane was sold as in good shape, but it’s got a stripped thread for a frog screw that’s solved by a non-original screw, the bottom was nowhere close to flat -and I don’t mean like a little inaccurate – it’s a banana to the point that no sane person would flatten more than an amount of the sole needed. And, the “original” handle stuck on the plane doesn’t fit and can’t be tightened. Fortunately, I didn’t pay much for that – got it at the end of a regular auction.

I don’t use an 8 much – it’s generally a match plane. I plan to get rid of the other two 8s one way or another, but since I’ve taken a shine to type 20s (that are generally blue – but I guess not 8s?) I’d put in the back of my head if I eventually found one in good shape, I’d buy it and dump the others.

I have not yet found a type 20 plane that either has a lot of wear, or that has a serious issue with sole flatness. The smoothers are close to flat, and the 6 and 7 that I have both were hollow in the sole about 1-2 thousandths. Most of the hollow is from the tips front and back – I would guess the machining is done with a heavy hand and flexing of the casting leaves the toe and heel a little low. It’s too bad it doesn’t go the other way.

The tale of this plane is a bit interesting. It came with some other stuff, but what’s usable of that stuff to me is a standard spokeshave without adjuster (I only have LN types, and they are lacking if you are removing wood rather than cleaning up – the mouth is tight). And also included was a newer 9 1/2. I just got a 9 1/2 recently, but I can dump one or the other.

But the tale is this – a mechanic somewhere probably in NY where the plane came from was hobby woodworking and he’d gotten a smoother, a continental gutter plane and this plane. The smoother was worthy of the garbage can, so it went there – not sure what it was, but it wasn’t even on par with a handyman. As is the case with many, I think the hobby is vexing because the planes were all used until the irons were heavily damaged, and what was in this jointer was mostly dust from using the unintentionally toothed iron.

I found it interesting that among the very common things, the person who never got into the hobby as deep as they could have found a Stanley 8 with a smooth bottom. The iron shows some signs of being ground as 1/2″ of the length or so is gone and the plane itself shows almost no wear. The damaged edge has been sharpened recently, it was just blasted away and full of really large nicks, but the edge is otherwise fresh and was hollow ground.

But what about the flatness?

Getting to the point isn’t my strong suit. I paid $225 plus shipping and tax for the whole group. To me, and maybe not to others, to get a plane with little wear like this, I’m good for $200. 15 years ago, you could find a plane like this for $100, but it’s not 15 years ago.

I tipped this thing upside down in the vise and secured it lightly and checked the sole expecting a low toe and heel that won’t be much work to address.

And that’s exactly what I found.

I scribbled on the sole, but the scale of the picture here may make it hard to see. No part of the front allows a .0015″ feeler through. The middle just does allow one through, and then a small section just in front of the heel allows a 2 thousandth feeler just through.

For all of the talk about this or that flatness and how poorly the later Stanley planes were made, I just haven’t seen it. I have seen earlier planes that are out of flat without it looking like wear. I don’t know why.

This one will be quick to address some afternoon when I have an hour to very accurately flatten the sole. The discussion of whether or not the hollowness of this sole between toe and heel even matters won’t satisfy tax preparers and pallet furniture makers who always know more than everyone else about woodworking, but for someone working by hand, it will make a world of difference match planing. if the sole were opposite, flat in the center and toe and heel just off of a board, I’d never bother to touch it unless it had other issues (twist). I’ve not seen serious twist more than about 4 times out of probably 100 planes.

If I’m wrong about the type and it’s not a 20 (8s seem to get less common with later types), good enough

Too, I’ve mentioned it here before – one of my first large plane purchase was a machine gun purchase of both the LN 7 and LN 8. The 7 was straight as an arrow, but had the fault at the time that you couldn’t set the cap iron close to the edge. LN laser cut or punched the hole in the cap iron assuming nobody would want to do it. I ended up selling that disclosing it. The 8, on the other hand, was hollow like this plane. Almost exactly the same amount, and I tried to use it to match plane and joint long ends, and it was difficult to plane something without the ends falling off. People seem to have trouble believing that, but it’s not a matter of mistaking what was going on – it’s a matter of people who don’t believe that could happen overvalue their ability to reason and assert things. Conflicting with reality doesn’t phase them too much.

One Last Thought – What do the Numbers Mean?

I am throwing around thousandths and what matters and what doesn’t from the view of someone who will be using this plane for long edges. I will, of course, make the plane as easy to use as possible.

Given that I’ve had just about everything other than a 24″+ norris jointer, and I’m floating toward a late type Stanley, maybe I should address two questions:

What if you bought this plane off of the internet and you didn’t know anything about flattening planes, what would happen? Well, the answer to that is pretty simple. Not much. You might find it to be a little more difficult to get a laser tight joint at the ends of boards, or that you’d have to take a few shavings on already flat surfaces to get the plane to cut end to end (not great), but otherwise, you could end up with a plane about as accurate from a boutique maker pretty easily. I did from LN, twice out of about 10 planes.
I think the underlying question of “why not just flatten the original LN 8 and use that” could come up as beginners who pick up a new boutique plane will almost certainly think the experience is better. I thought so at first, but when the volume of work increased, I began to prefer older planes. And beyond that, most volume work is better done with a wooden plane if the work allows. In terrible wood and for fine work like matching edges, having an adjuster is a little easier. At any rate, it’s not strictly a weight issue – I just find that the whole stanley package is a little better than the boutique planes when the planes are no longer being used as a half dozen smoothers of different lengths. I also didn’t have the confidence a decade or more ago to just get after the sole of an expensive LN jointer. It was easier to disclose the sole’s shape and sell it – most people don’t care as long as it’s inside LN’s spec. it was uncanny how the #7 in that pair would plane everything easily and accurately, and that little bit of hollowness in the #8 was enough to keep it from coming off of the shelves.

But I do actually like the Stanley planes better, and thus have no boutique planes at this point. I just don’t see a reason to have any, and it’s certainly not a money issue. I migrate to what is easier to use – functional laziness. Now that I have a hammer (can flatten these planes by hand and accurately), the “nail” isn’t a big deal. I don’t care to flatten many more planes as I have better things to do, but to sort of cap off my collection and dump the less common more collectible English planes and go to “plain old cheap later Stanleys”….hopefully that will be a last move.

How People Get Dumb – Stay Dumb and Mislead Others

I stopped posting on the UK forum January 1. There’s just no chance for anyone to learn there because there is too much opposition there by people who really don’t care about getting better at anything, or perhaps who are missing the nerve endings or bandwidth or ability to discern things.

However, I have learned something over time. If you are better at something than someone else is, a few people will notice, and they will imitate you. I’ve always hoped that enough people would work by hand that fertilizing the idea would lead to other people telling me things I didn’t know. This happens once in a while, or perhaps it results in someone pointing me to an old published source of something I’ve backed into just out of laziness, and the source provides more background and confirms what I’ve found and perhaps adds some resolution that gives some incremental improvement, that’s great.

There’s one individual that I gather from discussions and exasperation has failed at most things in life. They refuse to offer helpful advice, and constantly rail about things that don’t exist or aren’t occurring with an undertone of being cheated out of appreciation they deserve or that everything is part of a lifetime of hard breaks that they got and nobody else did. These kinds of people are a waste of time, but just like with negative news, they have some ability to convince other folks that they will offer some kind of reward. That is, if you are not having success at something, you can rely on someone else who implies that they are much more experienced to confirm that the failure is certain and then you don’t have to feel the obligation to do something better.

I can’t post on that forum as I’ve asked to have my ID ghosted. In the past, I would’ve had the urge to jump on such a forum and disprove (not difficult) or provide an exercise of some sort in a project or as a side by side comparison to make a point. One or two people would do it. There is something fundamentally wrong with enough others that prevents them from being able to get far enough to prove themselves wrong, or actually prove me wrong (I like this when it occurs – if I am proven wrong, I adopt something better).

Of course, as the nature of forums go, the original poster just asked a separate question – can you round off only the corners of an iron and get something useful out of it. Sort of, but you can do the same with a square iron, just a little better with rounded irons. You can use a square iron and plane a track free surface by biasing the lateral set just a little bit, getting a surface flat and then carefully taking overlapping strokes with a plane in the direction that favors the bias. That is, if you’re working from the right to left edge, the bias will be the opposite of the left to right. It’s not practical, and the original poster will have no idea, nor will anyone else on the thread (I can guarantee) have the experience or capability to give that answer. There are probably dozens or hundreds or thousands of people in the world who could actually give this answer, but the forum nature drives them away.

What you Will Get

I’d guess the chances of someone taking advice and attempting it in a way that they’re determined to get good at it is less than 5 percent. The chance that they’ll succeed is well less than that, and the chance that they’ll avoid discussing it because of the collective comforting incompetence of everyone else is very high. Everyone gets dumber and stays dumber. There’s a steady state, and it is unfortunately a bar that someone working a couple of hundred years ago would’ve passed in a matter of months. Everything related to better work in the past (design, sawing, planing, basic efficient sharpening) suffers and all that is left in the wake is people firing paul sellers, tage frid, rob cosman mortars at each other. Relating actual experience and describing it in resolution is mostly off the table because it leads to someone telling you what you’re doing wrong. People who despise someone else who is better at something than them are going to have a huge problem with this. People who are good at one thing and not that good at another tend to freely admit what they don’t do or fail to do well. If they can’t do that, it’s something to work on.

I don’t build a lot of furniture. I’ve perhaps burned through about 1500 board feet of wood on furniture in 15 years. It’s not stimulating, it’s a hobby and it’s hard to find an end user for what you make. Most forum members don’t make much of it, either, and the folks who do it for pay have trouble admitting that there are things they aren’t good at, especially if, for example, they’re selling to clientele who wouldn’t be able to spot fine work in the first place.

So, that’s all fine. Here’s where I get pissed off. When incompetent people attribute statements to me or deny reality. Here’s an example:

“David denies that higher angles can prevent tearout”

Say what now? I’ve literally never said that. Of course increasing angles can prevent tearout. However, now that it’s in print on a low-wit forum exchange, I suppose it will become fact. Is it intentional? I don’t know, but it’s stupid. What function does this perform? It shows someone who sees that statement and who can tell they reduce tearout with a higher angle that somehow my advice on cap irons is unreliable because that statement wouldn’t hold water. However, the problem with this chain of events and conclusion is that it’s false because the assertion that it starts with was never made in the first place.

Here’s what “David said”. If you want to do more than smooth wood that comes from a planing machine and you limit yourself to controlling tearout with tight mouths and high angles, individually or in combination with other methods, you are on a dead end trip to dimensioning wood. I learned this the hard way. I guess there are a lot of people who can’t do the learning part on their own and will refuse it when it’s shown to them. There is an imaginary world where you can still get perfect old growth wood that is all down hill. If you can find it and it isn’t $25 a board foot, you’re ahead of me. With cherry, maple, beech, anything I could find, relying on high angles while trying to dump power tools was a no go.

Eventually, someone will repeat this, perhaps a lot of times – the false statement that is – or a question will come to my inbox as to why I think high angles don’t work. Or scrapers or whatever else. But it won’t come from an origin that had the potential to help anyone learn. It’s only coming from people who intentionally or unintentionally will lower the level of discussion.

If you run into anyone who makes a statement like this, feel free to ask them to locate where I actually made it or tell them that I didn’t. The last thing I’d want to do is have an argument so weak that it relied on making false statements about other methods. So, I don’t do it.

Here’s Another one thinly veiled and shot at me:

Real Craftsmen only Look at Surfaces and Shavings Don’t Show Anything

It’s not hard to disprove this. I learned to use the cap iron in a vacuum. It seemed like there should be a way to just plane material, at least reasonably, and even if it’s so bad (like dried up Louro Preto) that you will probably have to sand some, anyway, you can limit the amount of dust in the air by a factor of ten. Let alone not have to create some ninny thin plywood rack with a neatly piled assortment of sandpaper and constantly run and buy sandpaper and try to figure out when you should stop using it. Just avoid that. When i’m forced to sand something, it’s generally with one grit, manually and linear. There needs to be something really worthwhile to get out an ROS (the worst of woods bordered by a moulding, for example – even that can just be scraped and burnished). I have two ROS sanders. I always have the feeling of regret using them about halfway through because the tease of 2 minutes with them turns into 20 and changing paper and then checking to make sure there are no swirls or uneven parts left.

So, I used the shaving to discern what was going on. If the shaving coming out of a plane changes just a little bit from curling up or coming out torn, and it’s continuous, the cap iron is set well. Laziness brings you to this – how else are you going to figure out how to get through wood planing faster and safer – create an app and a measuring device? The historical basis for this exists (it’s nice to find confirmation later) in Nicholson talking about what will happen with the jack (the chip will break), and Holtzappfel (starting page 475 in the 1875 edition on google books) showing a very intentional diagram of a straighter shaving feeding through a plane in a picture, and describing that when a steep angle also shows modifcation of a chip, it will be polygonal more than curled.

There is information in the shavings. You have to be smart enough to use it to discern things, and the bar to figure that out isn’t very high. You can figure it out long before you see any texts, but not actually using planes much or staying busy trying to get more paul sellers or rob cosman mortars to load in a wobbly artillery piece won’t get you there. If you can read the older texts (pre 1900 when planing efficiency would’ve been routine), and take the very compact discussions and make them work rather than believing “oh, that guy is just an author or editor, so he probably doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But Chris Schwarz does!”…well, i’d bet you’re ahead of me. I had to figure it out by feel – which is actually easier. At least, i think it is. I learned of the historical precedent in text by people asking “are you saying this?”, and found the holtzappfel entry a little less than a year ago. It is sublime, discussing specifically that the polygonal shaving from a steeper angle will mean something, and then very accurately going further to state that the cap iron will instead achieve the same thing but just holding the shaving down while severing fibers at an unmodified angle. This is better.

Holtzapffel also states that the plane will be harder to push. It will. This ignores a hidden variable for someone who wants to conclude that means “don’t do it”. Weigh the shavings and notice all of the other variables. You’ll only need to do it once. If you’re above examining an outcome for a couple of minutes so that you can remain in the dark for an entire lifetime, I’ve got little to offer. But you’ll find that every aspect of planing improves in the case where that effort is warranted – the shavings will be heavier, the surface and planing more even and controlled and overall, the effort far less. The sharpening interval will lengthen. This may not be taught in tax preparer’s class or on a router outing dvd, but it is fact.

It doesn’t matter if it comes from me or nicholson or whoever else, you can observe it for yourself. Because there is one other pure fact – I am better at observing things than a lot of people, but there are many better than me. However, my inclination to do things, especially repeatably, if they are tediously difficult is tiny. There is absolutely nothing that I do that is reliant on it being me doing it. You can do every bit of it, and if it’s useful for you, you will figure that out on your own.

One Other Shaving Observation – In the Shaving, On the Surface

If you are good at planing, you will finish something planing generally straight down the length of whatever is being planed, and if there is a moulding, you may need to skew the cut somewhat to avoid creating a mess. When you finish plane something, or even try plane, you find out that you are done and on to the next step when overlapping shavings through the length of a board are continuous. If shavings are discontinuous, the surface is probably not in plane. This is obvious. What should be obvious but seems to be elusive is if the shavings are not continuous when they are coming out of the plane, something is discontinuous on the surface of the work.

It could be a knot or a defect from a prior step (or if you like power tools, from a planer, but vertical or elusive to see because of the light). The shaving will show you that it’s there by having little holes in it, gaps or whatever else. if the shaving is not continuous, what would give someone the idea that magically down the length of the surface, all of the irregularity just came out in the shaving and the surface left behind is perfect?

Even if you are a sand-a-holic, you will learn that certain things in shavings mean departing from the as-is condition work will lead you astray. Sanding tiny fractions of an inch off of a surface, isn’t that big of a deal. Sanding a surface to get rid of three sheets of paper of tearout depth, and your surface will look like mushrooms are trying to emerge from various spots. And you will have wasted a lot of time and created a lot of dust to get there.

What is True

I have said less than flattering things about the idea of using someone like sellers as a single source or believing that in year 12 of your enthusiastic woodworking career, there’s more to come learning. I feel the same way about cosman, or anyone else similar.

If you are going to make your own way and get to the point that you can discern things, you learn what you need to learn to get started and then go out into the wider world.

To say something like this, or to refer to the focus of the above not being fine work, but a narrow view of what’s out there will get you fire from people who have determined that online personalities are their friends. Because they have spent money and had a one-sided relationship that is an alternate curated slice of “it’s not real” reality.

This comfortable familiarity and wanting to avoid dealing with finding out what your hero is not good at is a low ladder. It’s about as dangerous as finding out that you’re not good at something (I’m terrible at freehand drawing – I’ve seen George Wilson do it and it looks like a 25 year old walking the way he does it – it’s so easy looking) and then deciding that you’ll not venture out and try to be good at anything else.

In this case, Paul and Rob may be very good at something they’re not showing because it’s above the level of the audience. I don’t know what it would be. I’ve seen some of both, not just guessed at what they present. It’s strange to me when there is someone who just loves Paul and hates Rob or the converse, but that kind of stuff pops up, too. In my opinion, they operate the same business and present the message differently.

I learned basic sharpening and basic planing from David Charlesworth. Instant success because I followed what he said. It would be hard for me to say without the guilt of lying that I didn’t pass everything that David teaches with planing, but I was able to do it because I got a start with his stuff. I have some adoration for the late David Charlesworth because the early success gave me a basis to work from. I didn’t want to stop at what he presents. None of us should be bound to that. If you can learn something from what I do and then you progress past it, by all means, please share and prove and think about how you can help someone else.

And be smart enough not to make false statements or get emotionally involved in thinking about your own failures and somehow making me or anyone else responsible for them.

And one last thing – I don’t post under anonymous or alternate IDs in comments or on forums. Ever.

A New Idea (for me) – Induction Forge

Not by any means a new idea, but seemingly available at home with enough power to forge steel – probably a little newer.

I envisioned buying an electric heat treat oven when I started making more stuff out of metal years ago. But I haven’t yet found a practical steel for my purposes that demands taking up space, and worse, waiting for the thing to do what it does ramping temps up and down.

So, as I add another tool for metalwork, it still isn’t an evenheat or paragon furnace. Instead, where I spend time is heating steel to shape it and to forge weld the bolster. I want control, not just a high heat source – especially if this may be usable to heat chisels by eye as I do with a forge – to quench them.

For plain steels, I’m not much into the idea that everything has to be soaked. It can be, but my tested samples suggest that it’s not needed and in the case of 26c3, my samples were better than furnace heat treated samples by a large margin.

So – Then What?

I have three different forge type setups, all gas forges. One is just a paint can (small) with insulation. A second is two diameters of stainless exhaust pipe – long and narrow, capable of high controllable heat and good for knives and paring chisels. And the third is a typical two burner stainless forge that would be big enough to heat axes and mauls. I don’t need that. I need higher, faster heat that can be directed. That’s what he device below does -create a short distance field around a coil of copper tubing and apply a lot of current to it. With the coil sized right for the project, there is enough power to burn steel and reach temperatures you don’t want to go to. From demonstrations, it appears there is also enough control to do a lot less, and do it fast. it should afford the ability to heat chisels to be forge shaped in about 30 seconds, one at a time, so no losing track of what’s in the forge and what isn’t.

It’s easy to find videos of these in use on youtube, I haven’t wired this one yet – they do require a lot of current and the manual demands a direct wired circuit, no plug. 40 amps at 240. Sounds like a lot, but it’s no more draw than a kitchen oven with all of the burners on.

The bottom unit is just a water cooler made for a welder. it circulates water in through the forge and into the coil continuously so that the coil doesn’t heat itself or get burned by the hot steel around it. The whole thing is a nifty idea, and hopefully it will do exactly what I want.

if you’re offended by my hand sawn shop constructed screwed together table, I’d challenge you to think about whether you’d like to spend extra hours making a table for something like this, or if you’d like to make half a set of chisels with that time. I’d prefer the latter, and can’t think of too many amateur shop nesters who actually make much. I got into that for just a little bit of time early on, and then realized that it’s like treading water at best. No thanks!

If you’re in the cap of believing that hand ripped wood is just a mess that requires a lot of time, look at the faces of three of the legs. they are straight off of a five point rip saw – as fast as i can rip in rhythm, which is different from “as fast as I can go”. to rip this by hand instead of setting up the track saw or the wall hanger table saw, about 50 linear feet of ripping in total, was about 20 minutes. SYP cuts fast and is nice to work with in general until the the rings dry. Once the rings have some age, it’s a pain.

the edge of the plywood at the bottom is also just handsawn – you can see the little “teat” of the top veneer that didn’t come off quite so neatly as the two ends of the cut met. Two years into the hobby, I would’ve been ashamed to make something this crude. and even with power tools, it would’ve taken three times as long. No thanks!

Oh….and hand ripping this was a pleasure. I sit on it like an old fat guy. I’m not that old. it’s kind of like taking a walk when the stock and the cut made allows sitting. You’re the clamp, and only spending energy sawing the wood, not holding yourself up and getting red faced.

W2 Steel Chisels – Surprisingly Good – and Surprisingly Hard

It’s early February. Those two characters (W2) probably make people think of doing taxes. And the steel is probably very little known.

But I followed up the first pair of chisels for little boys with acromegaly trying W2. Why? 80crv2 is OK. It’s missing something hardness-wise, which results in a chisel that’s maybe sweeter on the stones, but I prefer something with some hardness and bite.

There are all kinds of options to try next, but I do not have a heavy blacksmithing setup, so getting a giant ball bearing or a piece of round stock 3″ wide and 3″ long and drawing it out is no bueno.

You’ve probably heard of O1, which I could get. O1 makes a decent chisel, but I’m looking for more than decent. It also lacks toughness (resistance to breaking -not chipping, but breaking from prying). I don’t think the toughness is a big deal as I’ve never broken anything in O1, but I want a notch up.

Day to day chisel making, for me at least, is 1.25% carbon 26c3. It’s unusual for chisels, but it makes a superb chisel. 80crv2 emphasizes toughness and, and there is probably a little bit more improvement in the hardness department, but if the window is that narrow to get it, I’ll leave it to plane irons. It makes a nice fine grained plane iron.

W2 – By Composition

W2 is, by composition, similar to a 1095 spec (0.9-1% carbon for the only retail source), but with the addition of vanadium, and in the case of what’s available, maybe even less hardenable (needing an even faster and more warp-risky quench).

It is low hardenability (needs a very fast quench to get high hardness), with small amounts of manganese and chromium added. And there are a few other alloying elements (a trace of tungsten, silicon, …). The vanadium is important to me. I can make a good chisel out of 1095 now. I couldn’t early on. It also suffers from toughness problems, but more importantly, I haven’t always seen uniformity in broken cross sections in 1095 – and those are the result of quality problems.

If you read the internet for a while, you’ll probably see a history of steels in the last 200 years that goes like (and this is curated for boutiquers – not a complete professional history).

Cast steel

Followed by W1 steel (not W2, but more on that in a second)

Followed by O1 steel

Followed by A2 (boutiquey), and Chrome Vanadium – a very generic term often derided, but the CV steels go anywhere from paint can opener quality alloys to razor and hard drill rod). And in this, is apparently, 80crv2 used commonly according to Larrin Thomas. We just don’t know who uses it. Probably European makers.

The W-steel groups and mild steel and pure iron (instead of wrought) weld electrically. Presumably, their presence came about due to industrial need.

O-1 is more simple – increasing hardenability makes it so that the steel is more stable and can be cooled more slowly and still get full hardness. This is a big deal to a manufacturer, and it’s important for a machine shop making one-off dies or parts. Oh – and also importantly, if you need a reasonably good die, it can harden in much thicker cross sections than cast steel and W1.

O1 is a good steel, and wonderfully easy to execute – and this discussion is keeping me from talking about W2 -but there’s a little something missing from it for me, both in irons and chisels. We are talking about the narrowest of things. I could make all of my tools out of O1 and work wood and never lack for something to use and make nice things efficiently. I think the same isn’t true for everything out there. For example, if I were actually going to do a large volume of work by hand only, I’d have no tolerance for Lee Valley’s V11 chisels. They work, of course, but their abrasion resistance is out of place on chisels and the edge doesn’t hold up as well as cheaper steels at same hardness.

That itself may sound odd to folks who have had O1 and V11 from Lee Valley – because LV specs O1 pretty soft and it doesn’t hold up well in apex critical things – like chiseling. That’s a choice on LV’s part – I could only speculate as to why – whether that’s a product of manufacturing ease dealing with O1 or if it’s a preference to have something that sharpens really easy at the cost of performance.

Oh – and that dimensional stability thing. O1 was seen as very stable compared to water hardening steels. But A2 and other air hardening steels as a follow-on are more stable yet, and O1 is fast becoming panned by commercial heat treatment services. Rob Lee mentioned the same thing to me (publicly on a forum) – that he likes O1 – but with his business hat on, he likes V11. When I quench XHP (which is V11 by Xray analysis results), it just stays straight. I get it.

So in the history of what we see used in boutique tools, stability wins. And 1095, 26c3 and now confirmed -W2 – are far from being stable in heat treat. They will warp if you don’t do everything right, and the faster you chase the quench and lower the temperature tail at speed, the more the warp. We can learn to deal with that – both in improving technique and in follow-up grinding.

So that brings us to W2 (vs. the W1 you’ll see mentioned everywhere). The original specs of these water hardening steels are very wide. That probably has to do with patents. 0.7% carbon to 1.5% carbon with ranges for other alloying elements. While the classification is wide, you may love a 0.9% carbon version and not 0.7% or especially 1.5%. I don’t order W1 steel because it’s not often found with a mill origin or certificate of actual composition.

But W2 is sold by New Jersey Steel Baron with batch certificates and a much tighter spec. So without being able to get my favorite (26c3) in 3/8″ bar stock, it’s just the thing to try. Carbon appears to be about 0.91-0.97%, manganese is half of what you might expect, and there’s a small amount of chromium to help hardenability and probably to keep some of the carbon in carbides and not in the matrix of the steel – too much carbon in solution and not in carbides leads to toughness problems. This is what is occurring in 1095 and O1.

And the steel is from Buderus and not “mill not named”. Good.

It sounds like…..

…..a plain steel that will require focusing on a simple but well executed heat treatment, an eye toward limiting warp, and rewarding chasing the steel from hot to cold as cold as possible and as fast as possible. And it’s not expensive, which is nice, but not that big of a deal for a hobbyist.

Could it be the steel that makes tools that feel like “old tools”? O1 doesn’t feel like old tools, nor does 80crv2, and I’ll admit, if 26c3 is landing at 64 hardness with a full double temper, it’s a bit hard compared to older tools. And the potential to use it up to 66 hardness after tempering – it will stifle sharpening stones.

Reading about W2 finds me landing at blade forums. That’s the site that I got banned from for talking about forge heat treating and being insistent that for simple steels, there’s no drawback. Interestingly, what I asked initially was if there is a “1095 with vanadium”. The answer there was no and my answer as to why (having the vanadium to pin grain size small and drive temperature past furnace soak temps just prior to quench to chase hardness), that’s what started trouble. “you can’t do that!!”. 26c3s results bettering furnace results (by a lot) and O1 matching wasn’t enough proof and nobody could seem to mention that W2 is available. So finding discussion of it there after the fact is humorous.

The discussion is littered with comments of not getting it hard enough, which isn’t a surprise – live by the furance, die by the furnace. Chase it slightly hotter than needed for a matter of only a few seconds and then quench as fast as possible and guess what -that concern went away. It’s bonkers hard. Right on the heels of 26c3 before tempering.

A brand new file will not touch it, not even the slightest anything on the sharpest corner. After a double temper at 375F, it still has a bit of a hard tempered attitude – just what we want in chisels. it’s a bit stifling for an india stone and skates on oilstones. That sounds like it’s too hard, but it allows use of the india stone to do minor work (grind for anything else), and an oilstone will polish and leave a blinding edge.

How the Chisels Turned Out

A review of what I want. A chisel that will not roll, but will not chip easily. 26c3 does this. A chisel with high hardness as that’s needed for holding a reasonably fine apex. 26c3 does this, of course. 80crv2 fell short in both of these a little. And excellent burr performance if possible – as in, a burr is raised on the middle stone and disappears on the fine stone without creating a nuisance after finish honing as softer steel might.

The hardness ended up higher than I anticipated so at this point, other than experimenting with some samples later and snapping to examine grain (more for longer-term consideration to use in both chisels and plane irons), the one thing that will expose large grain is chiseling something really hard. Like near water density wood across the grain.

26c3 handles this. 80crv2 rolls quickly.

W2 handled it just fine.

one 80crv2 chisel on the left – two in W2 at the right

The back sides. The left and right chisels are done and working. the one in the middle, I’m keeping along with the left. I’ll mail out the other one in the next two days. Chisel 2 is probably not prepared yet in this picture, but back flattening and setup was done after. Both w2 chisels are better than either 80crv2 chisel by a lot – which is a good thing. That was the objective.

These chisels are good enough that I’m not going to make two more in 125cr1, which NJSB listed just recently as an alternative to 26c3.

When I mention all of these alloys, I know it’s dizzying – without describing them and the characteristics, the discussion lacks resolution. But the details probably make for the need to ….make notes. I can’t really help that. Anyone who has worked through these discussions of steel will be long past “1095 is for saws, O1, A2 and V11 are for chisels”.

We’re not really looking for light and airy at this point – we’re looking for results, differentiation and learning. As one of my college professors said (in a challenging class, where it always seemed like he kept us confused and thinking hard) “learning hurts”. I have one goal when making chisels that stands out to me with everything else secondary. Can the chisel that I just made match anything vintage that I’ve seen and better anything current outside of japan. The answer for 80crv2 was no. So far for W2, the answer is yes. Finding that is what I want.

How do I Test?

I test chisels right off of the first grind. That’s two-pronged. First, it should be the worst part of the first several inches of chisel length, and second, if I can’t make that part workable, then from the making standpoint, I need to revise what I’m doing. It may be true that commercial chisels or irons can be lacking for some length, but that’s preventable.

If they are better a little further in, that’s fine – but I want the first grind and sharpen to have ideal characteristics.

I test in order:

By feel of the grind – if a chisel is soft, I will be able to tell finish grinding. This is unfortunate because it lets the air out of the balloon a little early. By soft, I don’t mean it’s 53 hardness instead of 63, I mean if it’s 60 and I’m hoping for 63, you can feel a pretty significant difference in how the chisel feels while grinding, and of course, some difference in the speed. Softer leads to more of a bite from ceramic belts, and harder more of a skate.
By feel of honing. For plain steels, a little bit of skating and not much steel removal on a fine india, hardness is high (62+, perhaps 63+). Skating on oilstones mostly aside from honing peaky scratches, also same hardness. Anything less, and it’s a matter of how much. Once the burr is established, in this high hardness range, it will generally come off of a plain steel on mid-fine oilstone and what is raised further will not be large. Softer can make a decent chisel, but it’s not my objective.
Buffing off the burr – the amount of “stripe” made at the very apex is highly dependent on hardness. Subjectively 59/60 hardness will buff twice as fast as 63/64.

And then tests in wood:

Paring hardwood (picture below). i try to pick something that is hard enough to be differentiable. Not pine or poplar.
Malleting a volume of harder cherry or hard maple. Cherry isn’t as hard as maple, but what damages an edge on one malleting seems to work on the other. Put differently, if I mallet a volume of wood and see any sizable defects, I’ll find it in either one. Zero defects in an edge is acceptable. It takes a fine microscope (not a 40x loupe, but something more like 150x optical to really differentiate and fine if there is nicking and how much. Sharpening removes a thousandth – anything more is a hassle if it’s avoidable. That is, a long interval of heavy use should be addressed by routine sharpening. A mediocre chisel won’t meet that standard unless it’s made pretty blunt).
Paring wood again after malleting is also fine – the surface should remain line free.
If that is passed, I have some older rosewood that is more than 90% of the density of water. It will destroy the edge of a mediocre chisel malleting across the grain. If a chisel is really good (a properly made japanese chisel, or one made out of very good quality files -properly – or 26c3, or the best of vintage chisels), it will tolerate some amount of malleting with a regular (not steepened) edge and take no more damage than the depth of regular sharpening.

How important are these tests? For you, maybe no big deal. For me as a maker, or some kind of critical comparisons of what you’re doing – furniture, fly rods or whatever – they are what will make you better. If you don’t have the fire for that, you’re destined to end up talking about making things on forums and not making much.

Charity Gifts for Children of the Millvale School…..

….for wayward boys with acromegaly.

(Millvale is just a local town here, but maybe one close to the city and burbs where you could actually afford to rent commercial shop space as a serious hobbyist).

A joke, of course. I survived making the second chisel – both are pretty much the same thing.

The first one is ever so slightly harder than the second, so I will keep the second. As a maker, as dumb as it sounds, you generally send the good one out and keep the one that’s not quite so great. In theory, I could have another go at hardening the chisel, but aside from not passing the rosewood endgrain malleting test, these chisels will chisel.

They may also be the ultimate test of identifying people who buy tools they shouldn’t. That is, if you are a hand tool only or mostly woodworker, you’ll find use for these. I get why Bill Pavlak likes them – they’re kind of half hatch, half paring gouge. But if you were a power tool woodworker, these chisels would rust before they saw oilstones again.

Shown with an English cabinetmaker’s chisel for scale.

I did mark the back of them, but probably wouldn’t have marked them had I made them first. the maker’s mark has to go on before something is finished, anyway – no clue what they did in the old days when they made a tool or four that were the toolmaker’s version of X-out golf balls.

I’ll live.

Coincidentally, the chisel in the center comes from Tyzack, and the set is quite soft but pleasant to use. it wouldn’t be so great in rosewood, but that’s for me to worry about. As a toolmaker, I want to make a tool that will do everything.

Among forums, it’s a disease – people who will never work rosewood, or leadwood or whatever else they want to dream up – demanding that their favorite tools that they often imagine using should allow them to imagine working exotic woods.

W2 arrives today, and after some oddball reading, I found that NJSB (steel supplier) now carries a steel called 125cr1 up to 3/8ths thick. It is almost the same as 26c3 (about a 1.25% plain steel that would be suitable for razors if clean). So maybe I will eventually have made four more of these.

Haunting me a little bit is a a 19th century long flat gouge of about the same size (less weight) that holds an edge a little better. I can’t let that go.

And maybe it’s a spontaneous unrelated thought, but as I was heating the bolsters on both of these to forge welding heat, which is doable with oxy/mapp on top of the already capped out forge heat level – I realized that perhaps a better method of heating the bolster would be an induction forge. That doesn’t sound like a tool for amateurs, but it’s also not a particularly expensive tool, at least in relative terms, and it would allow me to expedite some thermal processes in smaller steel items – like chisels.

About the Toothpaste – and Failed Forge Welds plus Mediocrity

Finishing a pair of the large chisels has allowed me to brush with dogshit flavored toothpaste again.

Below are pictures of one of the two chisels – sans the really final aesthetic work around the tang and up.

So, what are the pluses? The 80crv2 isn’t underhard. And the chisel (which is nearly 15″ long – and by itself weighs as much as a set of bench chisels with handles) is more useful as a paring chisel or sizer than I expected.

That’s fine. But, I expected the chisel to be better overall.

Why? First, this is the third forge welded bolster. I usually use mild steel with 26c3 chisels, and the bolster is smaller. I don’t like to overheat a whole lot and distort things, so a small part of the tang and the bolster blank are brought up to forge welding heat and then the business happens.

But, 80crv2 doesn’t seem to be amenable at the same temperatures, and what I probably would really love to have – pipe dream – is a high current induction heater to just turn the whole area yellow in a short period of time. I use an oxymapp brazing torch near the junction, which is a bit of an art as it could easily melt the steel and cut it. This after the whole joint is already as hot as it can get with two ts4000 torches. As often as I see advertisements that propane torches or forges can get to welding temperature, I’d hate to have any of my steels at that temperature long enough for them to get there – and in my experience, they don’t, anyway.

So, imagine, if you will, spending three hours or so on a chisel, putting the handle on, setting it and having the bolster move.

No bueno.

That brings up a gaggle of other questions afterward, because the area at the forge weld needs to be resurfaced and another go at it is needed. Each time, the tang gets a little smaller. Fortunately, it’s big.

If the weld is good, nothing should move it – not even smashing at it with a steel hammer. The first few times I learned to weld (smaller) bolsters on 26c3 chisels, I could tell if the weld was good by taking a chisel that maybe I’d keep for myself and hitting the bolster to see if I could seesaw it. If I could hit it long enough to bend over the tang and no separation or movement came in the weld, it’d be good for the long haul in a chisel.

So far, that’s been true. The weld is either deceiving and it moves quickly, or it never has after that.

The solution in this case was to find bar stock of something plain that’s higher carbon. this is harder to form and the whole process is a pain in the ass, but I think in this case, the steel that I used is forge welded. This chisel is for me, so maybe it will never matter. What I used, because I couldn’t locate 1095 that I thought I had on hand (did I actually throw it away? I may have – different story for a different day) in 1/4″ – was W2 steel. Which is only a slightly more modern water hardening steel than “cast steel”.

Two things became apparent. One – I have no interest in something that hard to forge weld. Two – if and when I make more than the first pair, they will be a different steel.

And then I finished the thing and tested it.

Mediocrity

80crv2 has some claims to fame. It is very tough, meaning your attempt to lean on this chisel and break it would be futile. If you could get it to do anything, it would bend instead.

It has ultra fine grain, and compared to lower carbon steels, it can get reasonably hard.

After setting up the chisel and paring beech and then malleting cherry, it seemed fine, but without iron carbides that are in something like files or 26c3 steel, you can feel that it’s a greasy smooth feeling very fine steel and it doesn’t have the bite that you’d recognize in something like Japanese chisels or really good older English chisels.

And so, trying to figure out where it just wasn’t right, I malleted end grain rosewood.

And without a lot of accommodation, it just doesn’t have the edge strength or stability. Is it on par with harbor freight chisels? No, it’s better than that. But it takes some effort to make something like this – just physically and time wise, so I cannot live with the idea that it won’t match the better vintage chisels, let alone the ones that I’ve made out of 26c3.

And because you can always double check a double check, I chased down an earlier chisel that I made out of a file (which is strikingly similar to 26c3 steel) and that chisel tolerated malleting the rosewood test stick that I use. One that is a little bit more dense than usual.

So, what now?

These are difficult to make due to the size based on what I have at hand, but I could get better at them and cut the time in half and probably not care.

There just isn’t enough upside with the 26c3 – something is missing vs. steels that have a surplus of iron carbides. I could tell when making plane irons that 80crv2 and 1084 both have this property – this greasy ultra fine feel, and when you make a comparable 1095 plane iron, you can instantly feel it has a crispness that 80crv2 and 1084 don’t have.

If I could get 26c3 stock in 3/8″, the fix would be simple. I could make them out of O1, but I just don’t love O1 long term for chisels – it’s also a bit greasy feeling and its got problems with toughness. Would anyone find them? I doubt it, but toolmaking to me is an ideal. It’s about trying to make something that people would prefer without having to think about it or be lobbied or convinced. O1 is OK. I want to get closer to 26c3. So I found W2 bar in 3/8″ and we’ll have another go at this pair of chisels and I’ll figure out what to do with the first two.

I kind of expected the chisel to be a little better technically and more awkward and useless feeling shape wise.

The good part of this is I’ve learned a few things that will help down the road, making forge welding a little bit easier. And I’ve got a couple of ideas of things to try when doing the bigger forge welds.

I’m aware that on bigger chisels like this, that I could create a physical step as a barrier for the bolster, but I don’t want compromises if they aren’t required.

I guess that means that instead of a final post when these are done (one is, the other will be the same), I’ll have a later post to see if W2 solves the problem.

What is W2?

W2 is just a water hardening steel – at least that which I’m buying – that is like 1095 with a little bit of vanadium added.

That itself is a funny thing. I got banned from bladeforums for talking about heat treating in a forge and refusing to agree that it was stupid, but rather wanted to talk about it further and get some other folks to try it with more of an eye on doing and testing (snapping samples, etc).

What led to that? I asked if there was a 1095 steel or a 1% carbon steel that was like drill rod but with some vanadium.

All of the answers were no. 80crv2 was one of the suggestions. Carbon V was another (the old sharon steel that was used in the many decades old camillus type knives that always seem to be so crisp and easy to sharpen). Nobody mentioned W2.

That place is just another forum, though, and I’m done with forums. You get stuck dealing with too many other peoples’ baggage, and ultimately create nothing positive in return – which is what I’d gotten to.

Learning to Like Dogsh*t Flavored Toothpaste

(I realize that the point of the commentary below may not be immediately obvious, so to state it briefly before getting into it; it’s critical to learn to like the bad taste that comes along with making something that you realize you don’t like. You may even immediately dislike something you’re making vs. the slow “ah…the more I look at that, the less I like it”. But, understanding how to make what you like and what others will like builds heavily on learning the feel and eye appeal of the things where you come up short. Allow yourself the space to come up short, ponder and discern to make things better.)

Sometime in the last several weeks, I was listening to Don Shipley, a retired Navy Seal who busts fake seals, and several other things. But he’s famous for confronting people who steal valor.

While he was talking about something, he said “that’s about as desirable as dogshit flavored toothpaste”, or something along those lines.

When you’re a beginner, you want success. Success is like eating candy. Whether you’re experimenting making tools, or furniture or cooking, keeping things only easy and refusing to venture out really limits what you can do. Referring to my good friend George Wilson here is perhaps the far end of things – George doesn’t have to brush his teeth with dogshit flavored toothpaste too often, but I’ll bet he’s done his share of it to get where he is.

What do I mean by that? The mindset of someone learning, or perhaps someone curious but destined for some mediocrity in the long term. We are fed a line by people selling gimmicks, or touting quality in their goods that will keep us safe from realizing and then subsequently improving our own shortcomings. Selling you the line that you have enough stuff to make things 95% of the time and what you lack is skill is a very low profit thing. It’s also unsafe for unaccomplished and some accomplished people when it comes to ego and wanting to share something.

I want to share failure and what it can do for you. But willful failure. I bring up George because George is a savant. He is a design savant and a savant in understanding and executing, but he is still human, so it serves us nothing to pretend we can’t learn from him. If George makes one of something, it will probably be better than my 5th try. It may be better than someone else’s 2nd and a third person’s 20th, and of course, there will be a few people who don’t get it at all and should find another hobby. But I know George didn’t shoot out of the tunnel at birth with a quill pen in his hand drawing sailboats freehand. He learned to do it. He spent time doing it and I’m sure he made things he ultimately didn’t like.

Welcome the Flavor, it’ll be Mint Later

When I started, I didn’t have the patience but I wanted to make things. Or at least, I thought I did. It was hard to separate the people who could make things and would share knowledge from everyone else. It was also hard to understand standards at that point and design, whether visual or utility with feel. Some of the fine makers seemed harsh, and as I learned over time, the Facobs asserted some long experience and criticized, but they really have nothing to offer.

I hated mistakes. I hated making something and looking at it and then not liking it. And then sometimes throwing said item away without much feel for what’s next. What’s next should just be more making, but I chose to do tedious things and get sucked into “well, I’ve got a long list of things I need” vs. a long list of making to do. That resulted in things like four hour dovetailed drawers that are now 1 (and better), too much pondering, trying to pretend that I have an organized mind. I don’t – I have a classic attention deficit type mind – lots of planning, but execution has to be something other than that because the execution of a complex plan is agonizing, whereas it’s bliss for someone who is conscientious. The whole attention deficit thing is a weird topic and maybe worth discussing another time – it’s got a branded label, but I think it’s just a better description of how brains work and not which urn you fall in – red balls or blue ones.

Where’s the stinky toothpaste come in? I never really stopped dreading making until i realized that brushing with the dogshit flavored toothpaste is how I find out how to stop doing it. Or put differently, if I try my best or reasonably best at something and expect item one, or maybe even item 5 to have characteristics I don’t like, then at some point, eliminating those as part of the process is a lot easier than trying to avoid them.

Here’s my latest brushing exercise:

This is just a kitchen knife in AEB-L that I offered to make for someone. I really like to put straight handles on knives but I’m thinking that sometimes, the handles that have a slight drop at the back and some registration to the sides are more appropriate for inexperienced users.

If you’re wondering what I mean by that, look up Zwilling Professional S knives. Those are big bulky knives with some kind of polymer handle. The handle is huge, but the knife is heavy to balance it out. I’ve made several knives with a drop on the back but attempting to put them with a lighter blade is leading to a lot of brushing with dogshit flavored toothpaste, so to speak.

The knife above is closer to success than any I’ve made so far save one that looked terrible but was a little more comfortable. I kept that one for myself. This one, I will send along anyway, but a second “free one” (the first one is free, too) will follow so that I can compare.

so, what’s wrong? Well, the knife is very light. The heel is a human finger filleting machine, but that heel is often useful, and the last section of it can be honed a little dull if it’s not desired. I like to have a little cut in at the front of straight handles so that gripping with thumb and finger onto the blade is comfortable. The trouble here is that the handle is kind of blah already *and* the notch is exactly where you don’t want it when you hold the handle without fingers on the blade. If you grip the handle, the notch is just there, teasing your thumb or forefinger forward. I have an idea to improve the next one. Having not made this style of handle as small as this before, I couldn’t have anticipated just how much it would be like brushing with dogshit flavored toothpaste to hold the knife handle for chopping.

If the knife were just for me, I could get used to it. If you were enamored with things made by hand just by the notion of it, you probably could, too. But if you objectively compared this handle to a lot of others that aren’t any harder to make, you’d have to admit that the notch is just wrong in most cases, and at the length of the handle, it would have to be handed and only on one side. Which isn’t great, either. There are left-handed people in the world who have already settled in to playing guitar left handed and so on. I should be able to make a knife that accommodates them.

So, instead of getting a really foul attitude and throwing the knife across the shop, I’ll take that feel (taste?) and how it it immediately felt like “ghee, I just made it worse than doing nothing by a mile putting that notch where it is”, and use it so that the next issue isn’t that. I appreciate what I’ve learned, and looking at the lines of the handle, see other things that could be improved – it’s just a little uglier than it needs to be.

Perhaps a better maker would have to brush with the stinky less often before figuring things out, but who cares – I’m not another maker. The disappointment is short and quick. If it takes five of these in the end to get one good, lots of little things are still occurring to learn from, and finally getting things right puts one in a place to make something better and more thoroughly thought out than any first item – no matter how good – could ever be.

It would take a really unproductive ego to go at this with the idea of entitlement, that everything will be minty fresh from the start.