Buster Bolster

Those 10 in figures are video with ruler. They're actual. The marks are probably not what others would consider marks and nothing at all like a hammer strike. You can just tell that the anvil has been used. My daughter put a hammer strike in it, though. Just a small ding, but she completely missed metal with a 4 pound hammer and with the head turned.

Thanks - i did see a lot of spray and steam as the material went between rollers. I wondered if it was for cooling the scale and blasting it off or if it was for temperature control of the rod. I also wonder if the speed and force of the rolling could maybe keep more heat in the steel than you'd want - or in crease it. As a side note, after tempering the chisel above, I'd forgotten about the ability of 52100 to buffer a bit of the initial effect of tempering. As in, you temper something with iron and carbon it it and just a little manganese and trace of chromium (like 26c3 or 1095), it starts to drop hardness. If you compare something that converts some martensite at low tempering temperatures - like AEB-L, the hardness sort of holds steady and then drops. I'm guessing that the fall off of 52100 is less. why? the chisel after a 400F double temper remains at 64.5 hardness. Brine is a treat - even as the cross section thickens well up the chisel, the hardness is 63.

Lost one of the ball bearings by the way. I set out to come here and put some accurate info out there for the competitor since I really couldn't find any. Final word on it - it marks a little easier on the surface than my possibly soderfors anvil, or whatever it is, it's a good vintage anvil. But, working hot metal, the marks that I have on the surface of the JHM after several hours of very heavy hammering to draw out high carbon bar are the kind of thing where maybe it will need to be resurfaced after a couple of thousand chisels, and probably if I have to do that, the slightly lower hardness will be a treat for that. Resurfacing a 60 hardness anvil of any size has to be a bear. 80% rebound and maybe slightly less than that if the drop is higher is still fine. And at least at this point, the anvil will show up at a decent truck freight rate, the shape is nice for me (big horn, big flat working surface - farriers shape but maybe big enough that operations more typical on a 125 pound farrier's anvil might be awkward). the heft is nice for my purposes and if I ever run across a dandy 300 pound vintage anvil for a song, then it'd be a more interesting comparison. I may be back in the future at some point, not sure.

ever so slightly over 80% for JHM, 90% for the smaller anvil.

Same procedure for a chisel in process with 52100 bar and I think I've mastered getting the retained austenite out of it so it acts like a more plain steel in a chisel (less tough, but more strong as far as edge stability goes). 68.5 hardness out of a brine quench and quickly into the freezer, and that being after thermal cycles to shrink grain. For clarity, the hardness test (diamond cone 150kg type, not superficial) is done after resting in the freezer. I'm not looking for industrial warp prevention type measures that sacrifice a little hardness. Hopefully all of it was successful, but the side by side test in wood vs. another similar chisel that's known very good will answer that. I realize there are probably a lot more people making knives out of 52100 who are having their eyes cross with the idea of brine quenching, but chisels are a narrower and thicker cross section and it's a better match than knives. Water without even the salt addition will crack the thinner modern plane irons, especially near the keyhole in a stanley plane iron. BTDT. I do better with 52100 if I give it an actual quench before the final quench. I can't think of anything else like that. It has come behaviors that W1 and 26c3 and others don't have. With some luck, a double temper at 400F (long duration) will yield 63 hardness, which is cryo territory on larrin's chart. Cryo steels are generally well thought of in woodworking because there is an improvement in edge stability. they would break bending more easily, but there are specific designs for chisles (mortise chisels and registered chisel types with a fat cross section and short fat tang) that were intended for that.

I haven't dumped the other anvil yet. It's still on the floor waiting for me [inappropriate language removed]. Given what you guys say, it'll be interesting. The sound and feel is definitely there for high hardness - it's too bad the mark isn't more clear. what's written on this one could match, but there's so little of my mark left due to deep corrosion that an attempt to knock off the outer layer of smooth brown scale did more to take more if it away than to remove scale and show it. The more I use the heavier anvil, though, the more I like it with 4-lb hammer work. It's like having a bigger ford truck vs. a compact 90s toyota pickup. The toyota pickup might last three times as long, but sometimes the load won't fit in it. At my level, i can't complain and in the past have fallen into thinking once I know something "higher end" and more expensive is available, I allow my mind to convince me that I need to eventually move to it, which then becomes quickly. changing to "if it's not good enough, I'll replace it when I wear it out or break it" really cuts down on follow-up purchases.

Thanks, guys. that's what I thought. The only thing I can recall seeing on video is square ingots heated and run through rollers, and maybe the comments mentioning descaling somewhere in the apparatus that I couldn't see, but I'd imagine on high quality bar, descaling is part of the process and then some kind of surface treatment like pickling. maybe the quality difference so far is just by chance.

I think reasonably, they're not something for me to solve, either. I gather in the old days, the steel would've started with excess carbon or been carbonized to deal with heavy forging, but I'm also working by hand so that heavy heavy forging isn't going to happen, anyway. Drawing out and hammering to width and thickness is enough. I'd be curious if anyone knows enough about how the rod vs. the flats are processed given my sample is fairly small - four or five rod purchases and a bunch of flats, I've only had one purchase of flat stock that was really equivalent to this. So far, O1 and W1 have looked fine in rod, and 115crv3 (tons of graphite or something and wouldn't harden) and this 52100 haven't looked as good. The 115crv3 was no good and the supplier gave me a refund. the 52100 could be inconsequential once I get a few chisels made and handled and tested. if it's just cosmetic, I don't really care. it's problematic in a plane blade only because allying differences that aren't fully dissolved will actually leave different marks on wood - like little lines of a different sheen, probably different wear rates, too. That's not a supposition, but actual experience from the 1095 sample I think I showed earlier - I thought the edge was chipped but it was just the bands of what looked again in that piece, like chromium, leaving little faint stripes on planed wood. In a chisel, it may be no matter. I wonder if the rod is drawn or rolled in a way that the refinement isn't as good as flat bar.

A sliver sawn off of the rod and hardened without any forging looks much the same as far as the shiny bits. So far, I've had 50 or 75 flats with only one showing irregularities. Round bars show some issue with 2 of 4, but it's no issue if the chisel works well. 68 quench hardness is pretty solid given no cryo. Quench tail was at zero F, and quick after the initial quench based on larrin's discussion of cold finishes. That is, freezer makes a measurable difference, but it has to be immediate whereas a delay before nitrogen doesn't reduce the hardness increase much.

This is just a short (but long due to pictures) follow up after getting 52100 round bar. I get it that 52100 varies a lot in bar form depending on the condition it arrives in. If it's coarse spheroidized, then a fair bit has to be done with it to switch the microstructure to something that will hit high hardness on a regular furnace cycle. I don't have a furnace, and screw around with hand/eye type adjustments to get good hardness without bloating grain. The only round bar I found was from Jantz, which isn't so consumer friendly on small orders ($60 of steel, $40 of shipping), but I can't find much in round bar. It seems like some time ago, it was easier to find round bar 52100 and the flat bar was being rolled by suppliers to cater to the knife folks, and it didn't lend itself to just a quick normalizing and then a sort of regular feel treatment (or furnace schedule). Long story short, I forged a chisel out of this bar, and it came out an inch long, which gave me a piece to cycle. Quench hardness after forging, normalizing, and thermal cycles for a .15" thick sample is 68. The hardness has to be there before temper to make a good chisel. The rest of the nits here can't really be addressed in terms of are they going to affect performance without just making a chisel and testing performance. Testing chisel performance is pretty easy, though - a legitimate woodworker uses a bench chisel pretty much straight in either pushing or malleting. I pick wood harder than would typically used and a mallet that's 50% heavier than I'd use - if the result is good (tired by the time it's time to touch up sharpening, and touch up a brief 30 second to 1 minute process), then the chisel should be fine in use. that's a cross section about 0.15" thick or so. The bright dots are unusual - large grain is either uniformly all that, and I haven't seen something like this in a snapped sample. A closer picture just to confirm that the grain isn't big: I'd guess those spots have something to do with chromium, but they still are strange to see - why wouldn't it be more uniform? I'll have to cut a sliver off of the round bar and heat treat that and break it to confirm that's in the steel, and not something occurring at my hand. the hand held scope is pretty easily fooled by bright things that are grainy into making them look like one shiny bit, so I set the sample in a better (but less flexible) metallurgical scope. The picture is bigger just due to the resolution of the scope. This is steel at the break. I don't have etching solution and don't want to go that far - the round will either make a good chisel relatively easily or it won't, and if it doesn't, I'll move on. The size of the large splotch in the middle is about 10 microns. fortunately, it appears to be an agglomeration of things and not a big solid defect. To compare this 52100, here is a picture of steel that was bar and that I'd normalized, cycled and hardened using an induction forge to make gravers to stitch rasp teeth. These came out of the quench 68/69. Compare this to picture 2. The last sample is buderus 52100. I have no idea where the jantz stuff comes from. There's nothing involved forge wise for the last picture - it was just quarter flat stock cut into gravers, so the treatment of it was all thermal. Since I don't have a furnace, I can't answer this question, but maybe someone else can - if that's chromium in those splotches that's poorly dispersed, is a regular furnace normalization actually going to disperse that evenly and make it disappear? I think this is a hard question to answer unless you've seen it and done it. Reading this makes it look tedious, but I'm already heat treating by hand and eye. if there is a problem with the steel and I am heat treating by hand and eye, I'm sure everyone will immediately assign it to the heat treating. It's usually the steel in my case if there's a problem. chisels don't benefit much from alloying because they don't wear due to abrasion, they wear due to distortion of the edge in use. So far, the best chisels I've made in use are 64 hardness 26c3. They seem to hold together practically forever. here's what 26c3 looks like snapped, same quench hardness, and holds maybe some little bit more after tempering and though 52100 is "more hardenable" getting 26c3 right is a lot easier. If it sold in round bar, I wouldn't be talking about other steels for chisels.

Not much on the review of this book above. I bought the book shortly after it came out, but have generally used simple steels for knives sometimes, but more often tools. Larrin's website is a better resource than the book, in my opinion, and I don't know which is better if someone wants to support him - but I would guess patreon gets more of the same dollars to him as a %. A lot of things in the book center around really high temp soak steels and things like carbide coarsening and if you're a reader and seldom a doer, it gives something to read end to end, but learning to heat treat is easier with back and forth reference between attempts to improve what you're actually doing in front of you in the shop. When it came out, and maybe it's still the case, it was inexpensive, though. It looks like it may be a few dollars more now or maybe I'm just not remembering that it was the same 3 years ago. The level of information in it is thorough enough that it's not summary leaving you asking a lot of questions, but it's also not like reading a research paper on steel where you're left feeling like you need some other references to decipher what's in it.

Hi, David - I haven't been accurate enough in the past to get the tang drawn to greater thickness by hammering, but it's been quite some time and it's possible I could do it now. the other thing that's popped up is 125cr1 showed up at New Jersey Steel Baron, and it should be similar to 26c3, but I can buy it in 3/8 bar stock, and that's fine for anything I'd make tang wise. I think in the past, I didn't want to spread out the rest of the chisel vs. just tapering lower half or a little more of the chisel toward the bevel, but I'd be fine hammering the whole length to thickness from thicker flat stock now - which just leaves the bolster still being forge welded. obviously, it's one of two things. On a chisel with a ferrule, it's stopping the handle but if it were to fail and stretch down the tang a little but, the brass tube would stop the tang from going in further at some point. But on the earlier styles, it's the only thing that keeps the tang from eventually splitting the handle. Point with that being I leave the bolster a bit big out of caution, I guess, but I haven't ever proven that's needed and if a bolster has failed, it fails to forge weld. I've never had one break after the weld is good, but if it's formed on and the weld doesn't take, they're no good - and it's apparent immediately. Forging the chisel out of round stock alleviates that I guillotine the bar in front of and behind the bolster section and then grind and file and the bolster can be thinner, which looks nicer. 52100 is a bit of a trick. I can go into this on another post sometime or perhaps make a video of doing it, but I think a temperature overshot for a short duration is a better bet than trying to soak it. I am about to forge 52100 bar. I'll snap samples and let you know what I can get, but it was the one steel that vexed me when I first started - it tolerates more short duration high heat than you'd expect and needs it to hit high hardness. it's this process of testing how high and for how long to get grain to bloat that gets you where you're comfortable not bloating the grain but getting high hardness. Little short bits of it are nice for this, of course, because you can manipulate heat level with them easier and they're quick to cut off of a bar or whatever else, hammer out - whatever you want, and then easy to break in a vise. If 52100 is hard to break after quench, really at all, it's got more room to go before things turn sideways. 80crv2 is a little like this - it really needs a decent dose whereas 1084 tolerates almost nothing and bloats quickly - like in 10-15 seconds of overheating. doing the exact same thing with 26c3 results in a superb chisel at high hardness, and with thermal cycles preceding the quench, snapped grain is half the size of a commercial vintage file cross section. I think 26c3 is ideal for this method - it responds well but the carbides block grain growth a little bit. 52100 is harder because you really have to push it more to get the carbon out into solution to get high hardness. it's just torture to use in woodworking tools if it retains a lot of toughness and holds on to a deflecting edge. And when it's got subpar hardness or issues with retained austenite, the edge just deflects easily. For gravers this past year (to stitch rasp teeth), I saw 69 hardness out of the quench with 52100 and 64 after a solid double temper at 390F. it behaves like a less tough steel when it's successfully done that way, the fine edge taking is better and it won't roll. Rolling is toxic in woodworking tools. Even if it's failure by rolling. I think it would be very hard to nail with a longer duration soak, even using a muffle and thermocouple. this method I'm talking about was probably done regularly 175 years ago, but it's frowned upon now. I just fail to see the reason as once you get the process down for finding the bloat point and doing some samples inside of it, the whole process takes a total of about an hour and you need to do it once in a lifetime for each steel.

Someone who pointed me in the right direction a long time ago - sort of "you can do better, and don't think you can't without proving it" got a fair bit of bad press from question askers on woodworking boards. I'm sure he rubbed people the wrong way elsewhere, but I would consider him as reliable of a source of general advice and some very deep specific advice in certain areas. In short, his sometimes disagreeable or dismissive manner - or perceived to be that is from two things: 1) people who have not made or really learned anything of note asking for advice, and then wanting to argue, especially if they come up with "my opinion is just as valid as yours" - all too common. 2) people who ask for advice and then draw it out endlessly without letting you know they're probably not going to use the advice and tell you later they didn't. There aren't many areas I can give advice that you can't just find better elsewhere, but in the few that I can give good advice, I've started to grow a curmudgeon crust. In some topics, the demand for gobs of information is big from the start and the chance of complete follow through is probably <5%. I wrote some articles about things in the past and a red flag is when someone wants to know something, you send them an article link, or links to other references to look at, and they won't actually read them because they think it's a waste of time. it's too bad we all don't have a number below our name that conveys our intent to each other with a color to say what results we're looking for. Green and 100% for someone who is going to take information you give them and go do their absolute best to use it and down from there, and so on.

amateur chisel maker, and on woodworking boards where I started, i took a lot of grief from people who liked the chisels I was making before I managed to figure out how to forge weld on a bolster (not a blacksmith or that wouldn't have taken as much creativity). After not hearing it for a while, one of the guys I made chisels for said "you need to start making and selling chisels instead of getting so wrapped up in getting the bolsters just the way you want". My real name is Dave.

I think there may be some cases where aesthetics can't be handled at the same time as the functional parts. On chisels, I have some aesthetic wants, but none of them are tuxedo t-shirt in nature where they don't serve a real purpose. Put differently, I'll chase aesthetics when they can be done along with the functional, and sometimes they can't and I don't care to chase them then. the heat treat stuff has an off shot. I've got methods to figure out how to do heat treat hand and eye with simpler steels, how to control grain size, and dial in hardness. Someone told me they snapped samples in the old days to grade batches, so I started doing that and taking pictures - once you are consistent, everything looks relatively small. If that shows up, it's W1 magnified at 50x, or to scale it, the sample is .14" thick. Since I'm just starting to draw out and forge chisels, there's some hesitance on my part as to whether or not I can get the grain back and get decent toughness. Since some of the chisels draw out longer than I need them, it gives an opportunity to use the cut off end length to test things. to get a handle on this takes a $15 handheld scope and about a 10 minute process to go from forging to normalizing to thermal cycles to heat and quench. If I had three samples, I'd intentionally overshoot them to see how much grain growth there is, what it looks like to get it and then that's sort of the end of it. Patterns of behavior emerge and then you don't have to "remember how to do 10 different steels 10 different ways" but rather you find some to lump together. 1095 and W1 and W2 (no surprise) seem to like about the same thing. 26c3 is slightly more tolerant of pushing the heat briefly before quench and 1084 is less. I think this is very very easy to learn to do, but it's limiting to some extent. At any rate, a little diligence with these quick trials answers a question for now - I *really* like drawing the steel out and forging these chisels instead of just tapering flat stock and forging on a bolster. It'd be a real shame if in trials against my other chisels and known standards if they don't perform as well. I can't live with that if it happens - as in life with it and ignore it. don't worry - I'm running out of new topical material to post long posts about. I'll lay around in the long grass in case anyone wants to get really good at heat treating hand and eye specifically because it either fits their workflow like it does for me, or if they really enjoy it and want the challenge. And that's before saying there could be three other people on here 10 times better at it than I am and I just don't know it yet because I'm new. this sample tested 68 hardness out of a brine quench, by the way. Another little learned thing after starting to forge. No round 26c3 forces me to look at other steels and W1 really seems to like brine better (I thought brine was kind of a mortal sin, but haven't cracked anything chisel shaped yet - I'd be much less confident about a thin tall knife), so I'm learning things that I didn't expect to learn.

The aesthetic discussion one is interesting, by the way. I think when the chisels are first viewed, it looks like they have a bias for aesthetics, but not one that's over the top. I think these are the same set - there aren't too many people I would make parers for, but this set was for George Wilson. The top two are rejects, so I keep those for me, they're handled and not finished as well. George was the toolmaker at Williamsburg and is a supremely fine maker. He doesn't always try to make everything perfect. Eons ago, i was wallowing in bouncing from making one thing to another and it was fine, but George saw a saw that I'd posted and aesthetically, it was OK. George called and said I think you can improve this and here's how. I'd never talked to him before and didn't like being saddled with expectations that I was pretty sure I could prove him wrong...that I would try what he suggested and fail. I'm not a gifted maker, so I tend to have to experiment and refine rather than second one is as good as the 100th type of thing. A couple of years ago, George asked what I was doing and I said I had been making chisels. He wanted to see them. I hid that I was making them from him because I want a mentor who tells me how to improve on my own, and not one who will necessarily tell me how to do things. George is that person, so there's no reason for me to bounce things off of him unless I get stuck. He asked if I would make him a set of paring chisels, which he could easily make better than I can, but it was a nice gesture, so I made him these chisels. There are a couple of stray marks in them and the bolsters are filed OK but they could have bene turned more toward jewelry status if I wanted to spend twice as much time on each chisel. I don't ever really want to do that and the marks are not much different from what you'll find on old tools - a mark here or there that didn't get totally ground out. He called when he got the box, and he immediately pointed out that the mark or two and I pointed out that I did not jewel the bolsters by spending a lot of time trying to make them look like they were practically polished but still crisp. I really thought about removing the marks just because of who I was sending them to, but I decided I both didn't want to spend the time and George of all people wouldn't expect them to be "fakely perfect". Immediately after he said he saw the remarks and I said "yeah, I left them". he said "I wouldn't have removed them either, and a 19th century maker wouldn't make them any more neatly." I gain experience and don't seek much advice, and haven't for a while - though trading chisels to professional users does have a benefit - if they don't like something, I solicit them to find out what it is. That's the kind of thing that's good advice. The aesthetics comment from George was important, but i'm a big boy enough now that if he disagreed about a few stray tiny marks in places that don't matter, I'd still be fine. I owe changing my mindset about trying to make things a little better each time and making a lot of a few different things rather than just making a few each of a lot of different things. Some people may be talented enough to do that well, but i'm not. I hope that my 400th chisel will be better and faster to make than the 100th was. I don't know if people know who Peter Ross is on this board, but the only reason I have a clue who he is is because he was at Williamsburg at the same time George was there and he's one of the "real" blacksmiths who can make good chisels but doesn't seem to be interested - at least according to a few folks who are willing to take tools from a garage maker like me. John - I forgot you also mentioned violins. George was the instrument maker at Williamsburg before making tools. Not repeating anything he hasn't said - after some fraction of two decades having to make violins and other instruments in front of a question-asking public, I guess the toolmaker was a trade more or less to make things for the other trades being demonstrated there and didn't require being patron facing at the museum. You probably won't recognize his name, but if you did, that answers that question.

You are correct, John - there are aesthetic things, but the discussion of these points is to tie functional into them and try to make them as aesthetically nice at the same time. The seaton chest types predate factory bevels but pictures of them show that a cabinetmaker would add them to a few chisels. They're clearance for dovetails, and importantly, things like sliding dovetails on cases or even dado joints where it's nice of part of the side has some clearance to be able to work all of the way into a corner. The top having some curvature is a functional thing - it gives a length of a paring chisel that will not fatten immediately, and the spring of a paring chisel is important. If the chisel is too thin, it will not stay in a cut, and if it's too thick, it will dive in one. These little nuances are why I'm always amazed when someone makes tools or violins or something without being a user of what they're making. In the old days, there would've been professionals giving feedback. I like to keep the side bevels fine, but not existent, and leave them a little heavier toward the back of a chisel for shoulder strength. some older chisels are like that and some aren't. A lot of modern boutique chisels have the sides ground down evenly along their length or come out to a sharp edge, which leads to weak corners at the front of a chisel. How much bevel there needs to be is a "i'll know it when I see it" kind of thing. If the corners are durable, then things are good. if not, then they aren't. And if the side bevel is too fat as is sometimes the case in machine ground chisels, the user is left searching for a chisel with finer sides since most people are afraid to grind the side bevels down on their chisels. My comment about the tang being thicker is a combination of functional and aesthetic. I'd like the thickness taper to continue to add stiffness in the tang, but it's not been an issue thus far. The business end of the wider chisels is about 0.11 or 0.12. these chisels can be malleted (I test them before calling them good by malleting rosewood or something stiffly) - the flat stock type like this (blue spruce is an example as a maker) leads to a flimsy design toward the tang and thus the paring chisels are shorter and the user of the chisel is told not to ever strike them. As an amateur user comparing old tools to new, I think that's a shame. A ward paring chisel from the 1800s looks delicate but suffers nothing from striking. their tangs on a 7/8" parer tend to continue to taper - the balance is nicer. the older chisels were balanced so you could keep one hand on the handle and one on the mallet and easily place the chisel with some experience - no time wasting or arthritis inducing stopping and starting mid work to move hands around to place a chisel. It's hard to get much done like that and it's also not very physically pleasing. good hand work is productive and physically pleasing at the same time.

ahh..i see what you're talking about, the bevel radius. 6 or 8 inch wheels are fine. I'm fascinated with the side bevels because that's where you differentiate the design of the chisel and I guess the function - if you're crossing, to grind the sides, it's harder to have some freedom. I work entirely by hand in wood sometimes, and have done so with more than 1000 board feet of wood. When doing that, grinding and sharpening of the cutting bevel starts to reveal things. What takes less damage, what's faster to sharpen, and so on. I came to appreciate grinding fairly shallow and honing only the tips of tools, and saw it here and there on older tools (like 175 years old old) when the tools hadn't been passed down and their history erased by later careless users. On the woodworking forums, this is considered not a historical method, but it's better. The issue with the forums is they are not correct. Nicholson and holtzappfel both talk about grinding shallower and then honing a smaller tip of the tool to get longer working time out of a tool (it's about freehand control of how steel the very tip is more or less - it's easier to get that right over and over between grinds if the bevel is shallow). long story short, the grinding part doesn't matter - it can be a 20" wheel or a 6" wheel or an 8" wheel. the idea that one will hone on the two flats created by a wheel or hone an entire flat bevel is relatively new unless you have a reason to use the bevel for something like you might on a carving tool, riding the bevel itself. There's no merit to the idea that one radius will make for a weak edge and another won't (within reason). I spent a lot of time sussing out details and found that most of the damage that sends us back to resharpening happens in the first few thousandths of an inch. Like 4, and even if you get to that big of a damaged portion, something needs to change. I'll spare everyone going bonkers into sharpening and really getting the most out of edges, but I found commonalities with what's done between chisels and plane irons and what linen and leather do to straight razor edges to make them stand up a lot better than they would with a fresh bevel. I've got both 6" and 8" grinders, though, and haven't noticed any difference in edge life because the bevel is shallower and not a factor in edge failure, nor is the upper side of it ever in contact with my stones. long and flat on a platen is OK, but water needs to be introduced and care needs to be had to make sure flat is actually flat and not convex outward. As far as grinding of chisels, I would guess that significant grinding is a pretty recent thing. Most chisels before 1800 were wrought with a bit. There are some finer cabinetmaking chisels that are an exception to that, but not too much. When tools went from being a locally made smithed product to being factory made, I don't know, but factories were definitely going at it around 1800 and then grinding was more prevalent, but there are a lot of as forged areas left even on all steel tools. Chisels didn't start to get side bevels ground onto them until later, except as a matter of user taste. I don't know exactly when, but shapes changed over time from having thin flat chisels with sides tapering in width to less taper, and now pretty much none - they're mostly even width from end to end. Bevels appeared in the 1800s on all steel chisels, which necessitates grinding post heat treatment (chisel turns into a banana otherwise when there are bevels up and down one side before heat treatment). At the shop level for a bevel would've been a round grinding wheel (speaking centuries ago) and if one wasn't affordable, a big flat sandstone. What we think of as a general chisel design is an 1800s thing, though. The seaton chest chisels other than mortising chisels are more like carving tools in their design - fairly thin with any bevels needed added just to the tips for clearance. But the thickness is like .05-.08" at the bevel end. Possibly due to lack of powered grinding but also very likely to ensure through hardening. this is a pair of that style, though they're a little more plain than pictures show. For reasons I don't know, it's pretty hard to find woodworking chisels made prior to the early 1800s. Even the early 1800s chisels are pretty rare. this style was factory made in England, but I think that factory base instead of a blacksmith shop also made it possible to have grinders and glazers on staff to do much more grinding later. Even the seaton chest chisels have file marks on them from manufacture and don't look the same as later chisels that were all done on wheel and then further glazed.

I think you can get some heat treatment places to do differential heat treating, but I have short arms and some regard for what I'm doing because I think it would be hard to communicate if you're not doing something they've done before. For example, on the paring chisels I showed, if I said I need 63/64 for the first four inches and then if things fall off a little, it's OK. by the time you get to the shoulder, spring temper or less is fine, and the tang needs to be very partially hardened so that it's stiff, but it needs to be below spring, and behind the bolster nearly unhardened is OK. 150 years ago for the actual process of making that would've just been routine. I'd have a furnace if I were making knives for sale only to avoid arguments - I get them already from amateurs asking if I will make them chisels, and I think they get confused when I say I am an amateur, at least in spirit, and I will not sell to amateurs but would be happy to help them find what they're looking for. They often want A2 or something else and would like to ponder if I've ever made a chisel out of 10V (I've used a plane iron in it - it's suitable for turning tools, but not good for chisels and plane blades). But if you are making knives to a whole bunch of people you don't know and can tell them you used a computer controlled electric furnace - the questions are off. I tell people who want to trade something (that's what gets me out of the chair - someone who has something I'd like and they want something unusual made in return, like seaton chest style chisels) that I work by hand and eye, and it's not comforting for some people to hear that. I've never had a pro who wants to trade bothered by that, but amateurs are very unsettled if I don't tell them a steel they've heard of before (none of them know 26c3, and they are sure that 1095 is only used in handsaw plates. W1 is a foreign concept - "do you mean O1?" and they're afraid of what they'll get from hand/eye heat treatment. So, here's a good example of getting really detached. There are some boutique tool companies with more than 100 employees, but those companies sometimes run into a bottleneck because despite using fairly common stable steels, they still will not do their own heat treatment. they need something that makes business sense. On the axe side, it seems like most things are 5160 or 4140 or something all the way around. And too much paint to tell if there's differential hardening. Some of the swedish axes are higher carbon, but the videos I've seen of them don't ring a bell with someone dipping only the bit end into oil. The woodworking world suffers from the same thing, even with one of the moderately educated writers constantly telling people that "O1 steel is just plain old carbon steel that's been around for hundreds of years" and the sentiment is that A2 is perhaps something that showed up in the 90s simply because that's when it first showed up in woodworking tools. O1 is, of course, highly alloyed compared to 1084 or 1095 or even W1. Process, machinery and changes in alloy are in some cases part of the age old battle that will go on forever -if you can change process to trade skilled labor for semi skilled or unskilled and maybe increased production at the same time, that will win. I'm agnostic on the whole thing - most of the time, I need the $30 version of something and not the $200 version of something. this dynamic of refining things so that less human intervention is involved increases the standard of living for most, just not the skilled guy who gets bumped out. I'm agonistic because sometimes the hand made stuff is nice, and sometimes it's actually better (1875 chisels are sometimes better than anything available now, but can't be made without the same skill set so they will not be made again), but it's also the case when you look at disposable income charts from 1900 vs. now, you realize that the average lower middle to upper middle class person didn't have many pennies left over for things like anvils and hobbies!

I'm not sure what you mean here. The bevels on the side of a chisel would probably have been done in the early 1800s and later on a wide round wheel - so the grinding is "crossed". I grind mine linearly by eye most of the time for several reasons, but one of them is heat. The old wheels would have a film of water on them at high speed. If you're in my position, the smaller radius and slower process is some freedom if you can visualize what you want and then grind it, and perhaps (as I do here) hand finish the bevels so that they don't look like they were done linearly on a small radius or large radius wheel. Not sure how much discussion there is here about work that would've been done by job grinders and glazers (glazing just being fine grinding tending toward polishing). The video below shows a job grinder doing a chisel - though little was done this way after maybe the 1950s or so - semi-automated grinding setups and lathing for the bolster area were put together (bolsters went to being round). I'm not doing the crossing which I see evidence of on chisels in the 1800s mostly because I don't have any way to do this kind of thing and I'd lose some of the ability that I have controlling the bevels. You can see what I'm attempting to do on the side bevels - i think i only posted the top picture earlier. you can vaguely see the nuance of a slight curvature - there's less of it on the narrower chisels because they can't be as thin and not spring too much or break. The chisels are nicer to use if some of the bit end is similar thickness and then the taper has top curvature and one of the reasons I really wanted to go to forging rod is something you can see here - the tang can only be as thick as the 26c3 stock less finishing. That flat tock isn't think enough and they'll look better and the bolster less bulky if it's actually all from a single piece of steel.

JHCC hit it exactly - I have an 8" contact wheel. if you try to do fine work (i'm saying this from my point, not yours - you may do fine work. I wouldn't say my work is all fine, but I try to and I'm sure there is neural eye development and adaptation), you can look at a tool that's being ground like a plane iron and grind a very gradual even curvature into the back. If you measure a couple of points, like the top and bottom of the tool, and then at the center of the hollow, there will be very little difference from one to the next that your eye won't see. For me to grind taper and curvature into a large iron, I budget myself about 20 minutes. For a hobbyist, it's not that long. For production, it would be off by a factor of 20 or 50 probably. I do the grinding of the hollow after hardening and the taper before then. it's not critical what the hollow is in size, its function is to have the plane iron sit on a flat plane bed and touch with a bias at the bottom and the top and not in the middle. I have a wide and tighter radius contact wheel on another belt grinder attachment that I could do almost the same thing on with about the same accuracy. Anyone here could. it's a matter of I think what a lot of people do but don't think about - the maker's art of doing only what needs to be done for something to be practically no better. As in, if I talked to a machinist and said that I ground a 5 thousandth hollow in an iron that I'd checked on a few points, they'd laugh at me. I think if they looked at them, they'd have a bit less of a problem with them and be surprised that there's not much variation, but offended that it wasn't specific in some way that it was measured and could be repeated. What's actually critical for not getting embarrassed from my point of view is the curvature needs to look decent, but it's critical that on an iron that was tapered in thickness, no part on the thin end is fatter than any prior part. *that* looks bad. I grind everything freehand and by eye at this point, including all of those chisels. if I had to do it monday to friday, I'd try to not do that because what do you do on a tuesday afternoon when you're not feeling good or your eyes hurt or your wife is telling you she's unhappy or whatever

I have a lot more pictures, of course. I want to feel my way around here rather than dump media everywhere, though. So as not to get hyperfocused on the topic for some extended period of time and talk a lot without listening. In response to what Frosty is saying about the heat treatment sort of being above and beyond in detail, if someone has a customer for chisels, I'm always more than happy to talk about not just what I think is ideal, but what I've found in the better old tools in terms of heat treatment, proportions, etc. It seems to me that someone could make tanged woodworking chisels similar to the older English type and have a solid niche market and a long order list. If I didn't have a day job, I'd think about it. Thus far, there are a lot of common (a word my dad would used) chisels being CNCed or cut and assembled and highly finished or polished by machine, but they are lacking in use compared to something made in England or Scotland 175 years ago. If nothing else, for the folks who have already bought 10 sets of chisels while they're frustrated with lack of time outside of the surgical ward or corner office, an 11th set that's different would almost certainly sell. My mother was a teacher and spent all of her time serving the craft market (painting and decorative stuff). I watched as she went from sort of dreaming about things and really pondering them to finding profitability. She really wanted to justify her time (I'd hate to have to) and when she found profitability in the wood crafting circuit, she went that direction and the things she really dreamed about getting good at fell by the wayside. It was the right answer for her, but it wouldn't be for me - to officially go pro and focus on who is buying vs. what I want to learn and explore. I'll share one more picture here, though- this is about 1- years ago now, maybe a little less. I made a few planes at the time, but didn't want to get into doing it professionally for reasons stated above. I also wanted to do all of the actual work with the wood by hand, which is the case here aside from drilling a couple of small holes in the mouth area of the plane to start before doing the rest of the opening by hand. You can see that the iron that I used is an old one - I didn't care for the later plane irons in a plane like this, and the taper style is factory made with curvature on the back and flat on the front for better fitting in the plane if something should ever dry unevenly in the wood or wear even just a little unevenly. My point in this case is the style of iron met the needs of the plane and a blacksmith (earlier than this 1800s iron- made in a factory by this point, but not hands off) was able to do what was needed. There is another planemaker making this style professionally and I kind of bend his ear about why copying the best of the best made around 1850 is worthwhile. I think industrially, just getting an iron with two flat tapers is about as good as one could hope to do because the market is small and the price a plane commands is not like a $4000 custom knife. Slowly getting to my point - for the first time in the last year or so, I've realized that I can actually irons, and freehand grind the features into them on a contact wheel, just as would've been done 175 years ago in a factory on a large grinding wheel. blacksmithing will be a big part of that regardless of whether the iron is bitted or solid steel - it gets old grinding the taper into flat stock - even though it's not time prohibitive. It's far nicer to get close with the hammer and finish on the contact wheel.

I learned that on the blade forums. I've made knives, but not sure how many - 50, 75? I learned some things and we probably all have - from discussion about custom or production knives. Like staining and breaking being the horror of knife makers because - especially at the commercial level - because they result in returns. Chisels are a lot more like razors in terms of what's liked at the edge, but with an apex around 30 degrees or slightly more and a grind that may be a little more shallow (razors probably more like 15-18 at the apex). But the issues of steel staining or bending toughness, just like with razors, not really on the radar for chisels meant to be used at the bench by a cabinetmaker - especially because those other aspects have a negative effect on the first several thousandths of a chisel edge that's being pounded straight into wood. The market for knives and the interest in making it is strong. There are little niche markets for woodworking tools, but it's hard to get motivated to make them if they aren't going to be used, and I think that's where the fuel is for makers looking to pay bills - selling to white collar (I'm white collar, by the way) people looking for some escapism and something nice. I can make chisels in a variety of shapes and make them better than people expect they'll be and pay the bills another way - it has given me the freedom to be bonkers about what really makes a chisel nice to use rather than how can I make it for $13 and sell it for $100.

Thanks. I'm a used to be rural guy (well, 20 years ago) transplanted to not far from Ross Park Mall. Admittedly, I never make it out of the city and south too often. If there was a straight road without much traffic, I'd travel around more.

I've used a lot of commercially heat treated stuff, but only have exposure to consistency on the hand and eye side (do have a metallurgical scope, a hardness tester, and thermocouples, though). I have some lack of trust, I guess, on the more plain steel side of things but am personally wary of other people who do sort of hand-eye heat treatment unless they have some data. I don't quite have the trust that a commercial shop would get my chisels heat treated the way I want them (posted elsewhere in this forum - and also straight at the same time as I don't leave much margin for post HT grinding and adjustment).... I'd trust a good heat treatment place to make a million A2 blades almost identical, though. I could be totally wrong about how things were done in the old days, too - I just assume it took someone who has a lot of repetition with personal judgement in 1850, doing things commercial heat treaters won't touch now (really warpy steel that makes divine chisels and scissors and razors, etc) - they could very well have had highly controlled process that was just controlled in a different way to take the maker's judgement out.