Tool Making – Of Making by Hand with Wood and Steel

Another Mortise Chisel and Complaining

First, the mortise chisel. The big one that I posted made from O1 works better than I could’ve guessed, but I wouldn’t want to make smaller mortise chisels out of O1 and sell them to general population in this jail we call middle age life.

The reason for that is that I think they will break easily by bending. So does D2, and so would V11. A2 is some more tough than O1 as far as bending tests go, so it’s probably not a bad choice for a solid steel chisel. Cryo treating it actually improves the edge stability but reduces the amount of force an A2 chisel will tolerate.

I won’t drive Volkswagen products again in my life, and I won’t buy A2, though. Just two personal rules.

So, it seems reasonable to see if 52100 will harden in a 3/8″ square cross section because at least that and below could be made of a steel that’s known for toughness. Well, it does. 69 out of the quench and 64 after a long double temper at 400F. I think even at that fairly strong tempering schedule, it could probably use a little more, but we’ll see in use. Steel is interesting in that what makes 52100 really tough (able to withstand a lot of lateral force before breaking) is at odds with hardness. Difficulty with it for amateur knife makers is getting the steel into something that can be quenched and will result in high hardness. Larrin Thomas has a nice article on it.

I don’t care for the way it behaves when it’s tough, because the characteristics aren’t what we like in edges, which is for them not to move at all.

But you can “cook it a little harder” hand and eye and get past that. I don’t have a furnace, but it looks like a bit of a nuisance time wise to get flat stock and do what needs to be done.

Larrin’s best result with a fairly technical bunch of stuff is 67.4 hardness with an oil quench and a relatively low furnace cook. That’s actually pretty impressive. With more temp and a faster quench, it’s probably similar to my result. His charts are two points shy of my finish hardness, and elsewhere, you can see that the toughness falls off after a certain point. The actual deal with that is it starts to feel like something else, except at 64, it’s sluggish on sharpening stones, but we can live with that. It’s about as abrasion resistant as O1, but slightly more slick on stones.

So, short story long, this chisel may be ideal for a bench chisel but a little too much of the characteristic toughness is traded for hardness in my heat treatment. Pictures of the chisel, the bolster, a little more square – left it like that just to see how it looks, and you can see that the cross section is slightly relieved (trapezoidal). This is essential for mortises that aren’t shallow.

For an idea on size, here is this chisel with the bigger O1 chisel and an older “pigsticker”.

These are not small. The pigsticker is a little longer in comparison, but being at the back of the photo makes the phone sort suggest something closer is bigger, for the same reason people hold out fish in front of them to get them closer to the camera.

the handle is a touch longer than I’d put on a bench chisel, but it’s nice to have some room to work. Short handles on mortise chisels make no sense to me at all.

If these need to be 62 hardness after temper to be tougher, I have another 50 degrees of tempering room and that would just about do it.

Here’s the Gripe

There was an interesting thread on reddit last week or early this week. Some guy snapped a ray iles D2 mortise chisel in two places. I did what I usually do, which was start pondering answers in type and drowining the people there. I don’t often post on reddit and don’t read it regularly – google brought it to me – but I usually drown everyone in pondering regardless of the venue. I thought those chisels were CPM D2 steel (about as tough as A2), but I think they are just D2 (about 1/3rd as tough as A2). Like V11 would be in a normal sash mortise profile or one like mine above, they’re not resistant to lateral forces breaking the. This is yet again a point where I’ve mentioned that V11 (XHP) makes little sense in chisels, and it’s attribute for Veritas buyers is that LV pushes the hardness up reasonably high. if they made a 62 hardness A2 chisel for mortising, it would be a much better idea.

So, I said something to Steve (or typed it) that I’d not consider making mortise chisels for sale in the future because they’re a pain to make. Only the large one was. This second one was already no more work than a bench chisel. And because they could be made reasonably elsewhere and you’re giving people something that they think they can pull on like a drawbridge lever, because instruction about cutting mortises is pretty poor and so is ad copy.

And then I went and looked at what’s available.

IBC (Cosman pushes them, but maybe others do) makes an ugly straight sided chisel for $145. This is appalling not because it’s $145, but because of what it is for $145. A2 is not expensive, and it’s just a flat sided slab of A2 with a short handle and a screw thingy through the handle. The handle is cherry, I guess because of a metal threaded gadget that goes through it, but it’s short and fat. I think what we see with this and others is the loss of skill and insight. It’s probably harder to create side relief on these chisels. If you’re working freehand, you just create it by eye and then work to width. To get perfectly square would be a pain, but you could get close. But the chisel, as well as the cheap looking flat stock bench chisels for moon price, I don’t get it. They are garden variety A2 in a spec that A2 lands if you heat treat it – there’s no substance there.

I had LN’s chisels. they have no side relief and I couldn’t tolerate it, but they were pretty and well made. Again, though, socket mortise chisels with short handles, I don’t really get it. At the time, they were $60. They’re $115 or something now, which is hard to swallow because they are not ideal for even small cabinet mortises with square sides. Is it the case of something that could be relatively good isn’t because the trapezoidal cross section is harder to machine? I don’t know. The whole bit of the sides being flat to aid in alignment sounds good, but it doesn’t work in practice. Instead, they work like a drill bit that’s wandering and there’s no way to stop it, and they bind tight and someone reading this will at some point break out the side of cabinet parts fighting these chisels out of a binding mortise, especially if the wood isn’t perfect. Not that this is hypothetical – I’ve done it. I like LN. the price doubling is a surprise, but they may be replacing production tooling like LN is. There’s the stick for CNC – it’s expensive and it doesn’t last and wear/replace like more crude but harder to engineer production solutions. Again, some art has been lost. These could be forged and ground probably for less cost.

That leads us to LV’s chisels. They’re infrequently available, the cross section is horribly tall for a cabinet size chisel, they’re made of a steel that has poor toughness (but good abrasion resistance and hardness – just an application mismatch here), and the steel is expensive. It is legitimately expensive, they’re not running a shell game charging more for it. Height of a mortise chisel should correspond to mortise depth. Pigsticker height is a deep mortise production thing, they were not a cabinet chisel. There is at least some side relief on the LV chisels based on the ad copy, but the cross section is a nuisance if you’re making face frames or cabinet doors. They could be 2/3rds as tall made out of A2 and be a better chisel.

I’ve described what I like here in something for, for example, 1 1/2″ long mortises 5/16ths wide and maybe 1 1/4″ or 1 1/2″ deep. If you make furniture or cabinets, you’re going to be making a lot of those, and some smaller and some about like that but longer in length of the mortise. Flat sided firmer type chisels are fairly common and probably met a lot of this need. Sash mortise chisels are often long and have square sides, and most of us aren’t making sash, but for someone with deep pockets, something like what I’ve made above is a pleasure to use. You ride the bevel cutting mortises and at the bottom of the cut, lift the chisel just lightly and rotate it a little bit (“levering it”) to pull break the bottom and sides of the little bit unbroken at the bottom. The lift is needed so that you don’t have the tip completely buried in virgin wood – if you do, you’ll probably find yourself breaking tips off.

This rotation is a combination of elegant and a little bit of force. You don’t want straight sided chisels interfering with the force you’re applying so that you can’t feel what you’re doing. It makes no sense, you can’t maneuver them. And you need some depth to do this rotation relative to the length of the bevel. The taller the chisel cross section, the longer the primary bevel becomes and the rotation point is out of the cut on shallow mortises. It should be obvious to someone designing tools, but maybe it only becomes so when you do get the chance to cut a deep mortise and see why pigstickers are so good at doing that.

It took me about 2 hours to make the mortise chisel above. I could profitably make that as a guy in a garage and it’s better than any of the offerings above. It is alarming that I can say that without guilt or reservation – that I am just working in a garage freehand and the commercial offerings don’t make sense compared to what I’m making with about $15-$20 in materials and consumables.

The one unknown variable is warrantying things. I’d never consider taking returns and I wouldn’t replace chisels broken from abuse, which would garner loud complaints.

And I’m also not in a position where I could just start making chisels in quantity, so this part, at least, is hypothetical.

What would I do if I were buying at this point? I’d get imported mortise chisels that are square ash type and grind them into a trapezoidal shape.

Maybe I missed a chisel being out there with what I showed above. I have some older chisels with those attributes, so it isn’t like I’m inventing anything.

The state of things is awful for the white collar buyer who may actually enjoy cutting mortises by hand, though. It’s wonderful to do after you get through the steep part of the learning curve, but can be made seemingly much harder than it is by tools that are just not designed well for the task.

The Finished Mortise Chisel

Finishing the chisel after the prior pictures was uneventful. As dumb as it sounds, even when you work freehand, you have to come up with routines on how you’ll do something. Which contact wheel, where on the flat belt sander, how to avoid overheating anything.

Yeah, not great pictures with the mess in the background. it’s bigger than it looks, about 13 1/2 or 14″ total. The handle is pretty but the feel of it is forgettable. It’s large and more figured than the picture show – london plane tree again, but indistinguishable to the average person vs. hard maple.

When I tested this chisel after tempering, it’s 61 hardness at the tip and 63 an inch back. I harden with forges and temper usually with a toaster oven. Toaster ovens are wildly accurate on average, but the temperature swings around, so I put chisels and plane irons in an aluminum sandwich. I think this chisel may help me figure something out, though. The plates are stable, but I think the ends might be slightly warmer than the middle, and I’ll drill a second hole in one of the plates to get a measure of the stack temperature on the end vs. the middle. if it’s different, then I’ll need to engineer something slightly different.

The functional difference won’t be anything on a mortise chisel – better this than a paring chisel. Bench chisels don’t experience this because they are short enough that the business end is near the thermocouple. if you have a choice with most steels, full hardness halfway up and tempered a little further beyond that would be lovely.

A theme here probably starts to show. All of my chisels look the same. This one has an extra fat and longer handle, it’s more like a shovel handle in size, but you can’t tell that so easily online because proportion is observable. I have somehow ended up with larger than average arms and forearms and teeny little hands, so my dainty fingers are no help.

I’ll cut a mortise at some point and post the picture at the end of this. It’s nice to have made something different here, but I can already see areas for visual improvement, and that’s kind of annoying. It’s the kind of annoying, though, that makes you do more, not less. So that’s not that bad. I suffered the other kind long enough when first starting out – the one where you don’t know what you want to build, how you want to build it and when you’re done, it looks just OK and you haven’t the slightest clue how you’ll make the next one look better.

Edit: Mortise picture added. I did this first with dry SYP. Which is marshmallow and glass. SYP works like it’s greased when it’s wet. When it’s got some age, the rings are crap, and so is the stuff between them. I’m at a loss for scraps because I’ve got an over-full shop and I decided a while ago if I have scraps that could maybe potentially possibly sort of kind of be useful at some point in the future, I would burn them. I’m not poor enough to hassle myself. And so, here we are, I’ve got nothing but good FAS wood and a gaggle of exotics that I don’t want to cut test mortises in.

And after 15 minutes of looking, I finally found a piece of cherry that I received in a lumber lot , and it’s shockingly worthless and this is the rough size of it!!

I’m sitting here thinking about all of the ways O1 might fail and completely failing to remember that I’m not a hard core chisel prying guy. I don’t think the pigstickers were actually intended to be pulled on like someone pumping a jack lifting three tons, either. the tall cross section is to rotate in the bottom of the cut. The more you get away from that and the more you try to be stronger and faster, the slower you’ll mortise.

And so, I’ll never break this chisel. The first edge *should* be sacrificial, but even it holds up fine before the marks are even out of the back, and with nothing more than setup using an india stone.

Too, the sides of this chisel are sharp and crisp on the bottom. scotchbrite belted the tops to take off their tooth, but leaving the edges alone on the bottom is important. This chisel has a pretty good bit of trapezoidal relief, and the bottoms are sharp and crisp. it works better than I expected, creating a clean mortise without any real effort.

Iv’e got thoughts on cutting mortises, too. I’ll post about them sometime. I despise anything other than cutting mortises by hand with no drilling, no machines, no routers, etc, and I cut them in a way that is probably common but doesn’t resemble much taught now. Some of the methods taught show the instructor has no idea why there is a tall cross section on these chisels in the first place, and the idea that it’s there to make it strong so you can put both feet on the end of the bench and lean back is no way true. Just like the idea that the top curvature on tall mortise chisels (rounding at the top of the bevel) is to protect the ends of the mortise.

I’ll save actually discussing cutting mortises easily point and shoot for another day. If you have a thicker cross section chisel like this and you try it, you’ll think 20 lightbulbs just lit when you see how the chisel works in your own hands.

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.

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.

Hand Forging Chisels with Integral Bolsters

I’ve made a fair number of chisels. I don’t know how many exactly, but probably about 150. At the outset, I shrunk bolsters onto a tang by heating a bolster, tapering the tang (fatter as you go down the chisel – opposite of historically) and then allowing the bolster to shrink onto the tang. They could move, but hard handle wood and a stout brass ferrule probably would’ve limited that.

It stuck in my head that I wouldn’t be a “real” chisel maker until those bolsters were not able to move. So, over time, I experimented with forge welding a mild steel bolster onto a high carbon steel chisel. Using the same steel would’ve been better in some ways (easier to weld) and less good in others. But being a bit of a chicken, knowing that the weld could fail if it wasn’t great, I’ve always left those bolsters a bit bigger than what you would see on chisels historically. Bigger meaning thickness – more gripping surface on the tang of the chisel. If the weld fails, it usually does immediately if you strike it, so I put the chisels in a mock handle and hammer the end of the handle hard. It’s usually even easier than that, though. The welds are either good or they aren’t.

Here’s where things depart from “how it was done in the past”. Chisels that were actually made by hand often have butt welds on them, and I’m sure industrially made chisels do, too. As in, even where you see that bolster and assume the tang on an all steel chisel goes through the bolster or the bolster was upset or die forged in place, you might rather find the bolster was upset on the end of a blank and the tang is actually butt welded. With wrought iron, this was common, but for purposes of making chisels, I don’t really care too much for laminated types as I’ve had three failures in chisels that I’ve purchased – all three were related to the back of the lamination. And making something like an all steel paring chisel allows for much more control of the chisel’s spring. you should be able to lean into a bench chisel or paring chisel, and with my parers, you could mallet them if you could stand how high your hands would be.

The departing from how it’s done in the past is I want to make chisels out of a single piece of steel, hand forged and ground. To do this, the idea is to get bar stock big enough to form a bolster – remember, I only want hardenable steel – nothing more formable like iron or mild steel – and then forge and grind the remaining steel and file the bolster into place. I have finished one chisel and hammered blanks out for three more. This requires either square stock or round rod, and in the US, the steels that I like to use are sold mostly as flat bar – so my beloved 26c3 is out when making these types.

One finished chisel and another rough blank – hammered and ground from W1 rod

Hammering the steel from rod out to this point is no joke, either. I don’t have a power hammer, and at this point hope not to have one. I hope to improve my ability to hammer to draw these chisels out in 10 minutes instead of the half hour it took to do the first one and near that for the second.

The funny thing about the first chisel above is that the bolster – the first one I’ve done that is integrally part of the steel, actually looks like it’s forge welded on as a separate piece. A clue to how it’s formed is in the second blank.

There are plenty of other questions to answer – the most important being whether one can hand hammer round stock as much as is needed here, not allow too much carbon to escape into the atmosphere, and then in the case of a hand maker, normalize and heat treat by hand and eye and get a good performing chisel that won’t be bettered by anything commercially made. I think the answer to that is that it can be done.

The first chisel is handled now and seems to work fine malleting – but after getting carried away grinding the tang above the shoulders, it could use some aesthetic help with the tang to shoulder length being shorter on the next one.

Forged W1 steel chisel with London plane tree handle

The bolster looks a little wonky – but that’s actually due to an attempt to finish grind the bolster to a fine finish with a high speed wheel. Not a great idea. Filing and hand finishing will be fine for the tail end of the process.

Bevels that you see on the chisel don’t change from any prior process – they’re always ground onto the chisel after the chisel is hardened. If they are there when the tool is quenched, you get a banana unless you’re using A2 or some other steel meant for accountants obsessed with eliminating skilled labor.

It shouldn’t be too hard to visualize what goes on from the blank above that’s not finished to the chisel that is finished. It’s a little bit of back and forth. The rough shape is formed, and the better I get at hammer swinging, the closer it will be to final dimensions vs. these early attempts kind of wasting a lot of time and steel and belts and wheels with grinding.

It would certainly be easier to do this rough work with a power hammer, but it’s true at the same time, I don’t want one and my shop is under the house on a slab shared with the basement – it would be undude for the house, and the family, and cheat me out of experience that I need. Thus far even in 4 chisels, it’s apparent to me that I’ll never form these smooth and easy the way Williamsburg can do with two guys and buttery soft wrought iron, but 10 or 15 minutes could be enough to get the initial blank. ready to start grinding. And in case someone thinks 10 or 15 minutes should be what it takes to make a chisel, it’s more like two hours for a hobbyist if you’re really going to do all of this without taking shortcuts or investing in a lot of equipment.

I’ll spare everyone why I think excess carbon is good in a chisel. With W1, after forging, the carbon content is probably down to 0.9% or so, and I’d like more than 1. And fortunately after starting this process making, I’ve found some European DIN 1.2210 steel sold here in the US in round rod (about 1.2% carbon) that may be a suitable substitute for 26c3.

The anvil that I’m using is 125 pounds, though. I can tell moving metal will be a 4 pound hammer or more venture, and it’s a bit much for the anvil. Which creates another problem – where does one find a reasonably priced local 250 pound anvil that’s in good shape? That’s an unknown – what is known is that something like a JHM ductile iron anvil (hardened, though) is a little over 2 grand after paying freight, and a ridgid forged steel anvil is closer to $3k with taxes and freight. Doable, but in principle, something I don’t want to give in to yet.

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.

O1 Steel for Woodworking

I often toss around the trade names for alloys (can’t keep track of the brands that try to hide – if you recall yesterday’s discussion of W2, there are something like 30 trade brands for the same thing).

But what I don’t have is my thoughts on steels that I have experience with, so you can reference them if you’re the rare person who comes across this blog and want to know basic characteristics.

I think it may be a good idea to put a summary of characteristics for each, and some description. There are descriptions of steels all over the place, but they are not commonly described in a woodworking context, and when they are, often by ad copy and lacking accuracy or tangible meaning.

Characteristics of O1

(characteristics are not for high speed turning or drilling)

Reasonable Hardness Range: 59-64c. Sweet Spot: 62c

Toughness: At the lower end of suitable (but still suitable – only a problem if heat treatment is poor).

Edge Fineness: Very good (fine carbides in the 1-2 micron range, evenly dispersed)

Edge Stability/Keenness While Dulling: Good – stable edge fineness for anything but fine razors. Retains good sweetness while dulling during planing (smoothly picks up shavings and retains uniform edge until sharpening is needed to remove wear)

Wear Resistance: Good. We’ll use 62 hardness O1 as the bar going forward as no skilled woodworker would be dissatisfied with edge life at that hardness, though amateurs may perceive they should be. That’s a different problem.

Elimination of Defects in Routine Sharpening: Good with good heat treatment. A skilled user is unlikely to need to “stop and grind nicks” before an edge is dull.

Brief History

O1 is a relatively modern (for steel) follow-on to water hardening steel. It’s more hardenable, meaning that it has more additives that are required to harden steel (manganese, and chromium notably) with chromium doing something positive in small amounts with iron carbides according to Larrin Thomas. The composition of the steel in general will be provided at the end of this article. My thoughts are generally that you can feel the alloying in O1 if you get used to water hardening steel. it’s “slick” feeling on stones at same hardness, but not nearly so much as something like A2.

The through hardening (= the entire cross section of a tool being hard through and through rather than just in a surface layer) and relatively easy machining makes it ideal for some die making and machine shops, so I think we will not see it disappear from woodworking use, but it certainly wasn’t developed for woodworking. Actually, I’m not aware of any steel that was ever developed for woodworking – we’re a small market and we use what’s available.

Increasing Manganese for hardenability wasn’t really an original idea. In the 1800s, an early type of air hardening high speed steel was discovered or developed (Mushet steel – you can look it up). As far as I know, Mushet relied on a lot of manganese (double or more that found in O1, ten times or more vs. some fast quench water hardening steel). Too much and steel is brittle – the fact that we’re not using Mushet steel probably has to do with brittleness or cracking because it’s possible for steel to be so easily hardenable that in open air, it would cool too fast to be stable.

What happens in general for us (this always depends on what you’re comparing O1 to), the alloying improves wear resistance (increased hand plane life vs. water hardening) over very plain water hardening steels. The overall effect of the additives leads to strangely uniform small carbides given the amount of alloying, too. In terms of the reduced toughness, there is still enough for woodworking. That’s important – the world of all purpose knives and boutique knife makers where a lot of robust steel discussion occurs…..very fascinated with toughness. People return knives they break. We typically don’t break tools made of O1 because we’re not prying in tree stumps to make a youtube bugout camping video. What we like is strength and stability of the very tip of an edge that’s in the wood severing fibers, and O1 is relatively good for both of those.

Commercial Availability in Woodworking Tools

O1 is relatively common in boutique tools. some variation of it may be in older tools, but most European tools that don’t mention the type of steel or mention Chrome Vanadium are generally not O1. If a manufacturer uses the alloy, they usually mention it as use probably was uncommon in thinner cross sections (plane irons) until the last several decades.

Iles makes good chisels in O1 that seem like they’re right in the sweet spot, though I’ve had a set of boxwood handle chisels that were a bit soft. LV offers an array of irons that are a bit underhard to be as good as they could be in my opinion, and Hock tools offers tools that are on the other end of the usable range. There can be reasons for both of these – but it’s my opinion that a typical user would prefer something done between the two.

For Hobby Toolmakers

Not a great steel for forging, but there’s little that a hobby toolmaker should be done that involves any of that. Leave that to people making reproduction lock sets and starring on cheesy TV shows. Bar stock from good retailers or known mills (Starrett as a brand, Precision Steel (brand), Bohler (mill), etc – ever so slightly different in composition but all good).

Stability in hardening is middle of the road but far more stable than the most unruly of water hardening steels, and just generally heating to nonmagnetic and then some past that (quickly, like seconds, not minutes) results in good tools that will match commercial offerings.

No special oils required to quench due to the additives. And easy to grind, drill, file, shape with only moderate air hardening if heated to red heat while working.

Typical Composition:

Carbon: At retail, usually 0.9%-0.95%

Manganese: 1.2% (you’ll find out that vs. plain steels, this is a lot)

Chromium : 0.5%

Tungsten: 0.5%

Silicon: 0.3%

Vanadium: Up to 0.3% (but in US retailer offerings, usually not included).

These are what I’ve seen from easy-to-find retail sources, and not necessarily a full industrial spec (range may be wider).

Sites like Knifesteelnerds.com have more information on the history, and the owner (Larrin, a “real” expert metallurgist) will perhaps have something more specific in terms of historical spec vs. current. Interestingly, steels as they were offered originally often have changed over time depending on the conversation. For example, if there is a precursor to O1 or a whole series of oil hardening steels, what remains now may not be what was initially popular due to improvements or changes for other reasons.

You can also find generalized specs at steel suppliers.

If you want to machine O1 quickly, finding it in spheroidized condition (if listed) is a good idea. If you just want to grind and heat and quench bar stock, getting the steel in annealed condition should be better. Steel that’s spheroidized can be intentionally cooled very slowly so the carbides have “balled” to be larger and further apart. However, Starrett is spheroidized and before I knew that, I heated and quenched it in soy oil and the results were good. You can do better once you know a little bit more, but I’m not sure any woodworking tool user would notice.

Final Thought – it’s the Reliable Fairway Wood off of the Tee, Especially if You are a Maker

In the hardness sweet spot for me really the middle of the range, and 61.5-62 is about where I end up with a 400F temper, it’s like a reliable golf shot that scores well. Everyone always wants something for nothing, but O1 is a steel that gives you a fair something for something. And much of what’s in current woodworking tools gives you a little less than that fair “something for something”.

There’s nothing that O1 is really lacking in practical planing or chiseling, so it becomes the bar I judge other steels by. If I mention O1, like in the post about experimenting with W2 to make a large chisel, that there’s something I want a little more of vs. O1, it’s hard to describe if you’re not used to small improvements. Those mentions aren’t because I think O1 is something I couldn’t live with, but for example, if another steel may find its sweet spot in chisels a point harder with less alloying, I find that nice. Not differentiating for day to day woodworkers, though.

If anything, I think if you find you like Hock’s irons (but you may find that they nick easily before they’ve worn a little bit) or you want O1 from Lee Valley, but you find edge life short, it’s worth asking LV (who now has purchased Hock) why the irons aren’t offered at a target of 62 or 61/63, whatever is practical. In actual practical planing, i’ve found better life than when harder or softer, and chisels are far superior at 62 vs the low end of the practical range.

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.