Someone on another forum asked how long to make these chisels - it took me a little while to iron out a freehand process (no interest in making them look machine made or commercially finished - they're actually much more crisp at the edges hand filed).
about 2 hours per chisel from an old file to all of the dealing with the file to get blanks, hammering, grinding, filing, adding/grinding/filing the bolster and heat treating and then making a handle.
The kind of like a more interesting version of turning pens - you can go to the shop for a short period and get quite a lot done on one chisel - but the amount of metal dust if using a belt grinder is alarming. Laundry sink where the washer drains will look like the bottom of an oil pan with metal shavings, sans oil.
But, nonetheless, a full set of these only takes the same amount of time or less than it takes me to make a single plane. This set is left bonkers hard (on purpose) and they take a blinding edge and don't hold much of a wire edge on any stone aside from a very coarse one - so no challenge for anyone to sharpen, and no strange alloys (like excess vanadium, etc, or gobs of chromium, that's made its way into modern steels for stability for the maker or long wearing properties on cutting tools - chisels don't wear that way and a favorable combination of toughness and strength at high hardness is more important.
Add one hour per chisel to make them entirely by hand with no power tools at all, but doing such a thing leads to alarming consumption of files (though if bought right, they could be cannibalized for the next chisel sets).
The trick is getting old files where the alloy was seemingly higher in carbon and the flat large files were (lots) thicker than they are now. Making them entirely by hand leads to little pigtails of metal and much less dust, but also leads to little metal splinters in big numbers.
