Economics was my major at University, so I am aware of this law. I would not want this workshop, because 99 percent of stuff I do not need (e.g. 3 bandsaws and 20 ladders). I would feel anxiety just about thinking to maintain it.
Upgrade of my chisels
- Thread starter tibi
- Start date
Help Support UKworkshop.co.uk:
....so true Jacob....I tend to work with a small comforting selection.....but there is in the drawer a chisel or tool that I rarely use.... but when I use it nothing else really fits the bill......
Woodworking is like politics or religion, everyone has his own truth. But some things are objectively better than others. I am here on the forums to find out for myself. I ask different people and try their ideas. Both David and Jacob helped me in various situations. I am always keen on learning about new craftsmen that I can learn from.
I got reminded again this weekend how uncommon hand tool work is when talking to the president of a local woodworking club at the club's workshop. I said something like "I don't know if any of this will be that useful, but I think every article I've seen even in FWW, which is pretty far detached from anything like working by hand, that even the guy spraying WB finishes and demonstrating a woodrat still have a set of blue handled marples in the background. I'm guessing that at least, hopefully, most people are cutting dovetails with chisels", and he said "well, cleaning out dovetails with chisels".
He also recently retired from a full career of professional furniture making - something I didn't know anyone actually did around here gainfully. Talking with him was interesting - it sounds like the market demand (at least recently) was for substrate furniture with vivid veneers.
I don't go out and talk to other people that much - I'm sure most of them would think that working entirely buy hand or even close to it is stupid. I think it's pleasant, but it has to be done well to be pleasant and not seem like a strain. And then the fine work with the tools is easy - it's the same control and neural development. If someone can work in rhythm and hit a thickness mark (without ripping up wood) and plane a square straight edge without resorting to using measuring tools when they're not needed, then stuff like basic sawing, chiseling and smooth planing is uneventful and if any sanding is needed at all, it is nearly nothing (a light scrape and one relatively fine sanding grit to follow).
He also recently retired from a full career of professional furniture making - something I didn't know anyone actually did around here gainfully. Talking with him was interesting - it sounds like the market demand (at least recently) was for substrate furniture with vivid veneers.
I don't go out and talk to other people that much - I'm sure most of them would think that working entirely buy hand or even close to it is stupid. I think it's pleasant, but it has to be done well to be pleasant and not seem like a strain. And then the fine work with the tools is easy - it's the same control and neural development. If someone can work in rhythm and hit a thickness mark (without ripping up wood) and plane a square straight edge without resorting to using measuring tools when they're not needed, then stuff like basic sawing, chiseling and smooth planing is uneventful and if any sanding is needed at all, it is nearly nothing (a light scrape and one relatively fine sanding grit to follow).
May be $200 is not a waste of money....may be he does not have it....I know I do not for a set of chisels.
....and I know I have had to buy less than the best in tools or equipment in the hope it will do a job, bring in enough money to buy better....maybe....latter ......unless I have to spend it on something else.
I think that when someone does furniture just for himself / his family, then it is completely feasible to work entirely by hand (if one has enough stamina and no medical conditions that prevent hard work). I was recently tempted to start saving for Record Power BS350 bandsaw. It would be very useful for me, but I would need to get proper dust extraction to my workshop and say goodbye to my great grandfather's workbench, as I would no more have place for two benches.
But I told myself that I need to make 2-3 furniture pieces per year, if I only want to furnish my own home and give ocassional gift pieces away. I do not need to saw and plane against the clock,from dawn to dusk. I can saw the 32 mm oak boards 1 meter per 4-5 minutes with a hand saw. If I were to rip saw 15 meters per project, that is 60 - 75 minute of workout, and I would not do it in a single session.
Let's add some reserve and say that I need to saw 90 minutes per project and if I want to make 3 bigger items per year, that would be 270 minutes. Which is 4.5 hours of hand sawing per year. Do I need a bandsaw for that?
Being in a production environment, that is a different story, but for a hobby, I think that hand work, especially in hand prep is often avoided as unnecessary drudgery. No one tells that machines are not faster, but for personal projects, they can be done with hand tools.
If people do not believe it can be done with hand tools, please watch the video below
if you're in the UK, you have the advantage of being able to find some of the best tools ever made for bench woodwork on the ground. I don't know as much about what may be available on the ground where tibi is.
tools like pfeils are to some extent, money in suspense. Once someone ventures into higher cost exotic nonsense, then that's not the case (e.g., japanese chisels that fall out of being retailed are a huge loss - people can't compare the price to anything).
Good wood here for cabinetmaking can be $2 a board foot if you're lucky to $10 a board foot if you're picky - a lot of folks like working walnut here, but fewer these days. Within a year or two of hobby woodworking, you can burn through 1000 board feet without much trouble, and even with careful buying, it's a minimum of $3-$4k.
it's a tough hobby to do on a budget unless you can keep things to small work. if you have more time than money, though, you can certainly find good tools for not much - people do it locally where I live, too, but they trade a lot of time looking through flea markets, etc, to get almost what they might want....eventually.
There is literally nothing but economics at this point keeping someone from making a good set of chisels equal to the pfeils in china for about $5 each. There's just no way we're going to get someone involved in doing that to the point where they sell them here for $10-$15 per - there's no economic incentive and that's too bad. The spec range for more industrially common steels like 80crv2 would hit 60/61 without issue and the steel is far finer, despite being really cheap, than stuff like A2 steel.
We don't know anyones' circumstances unless they clarify them - but it's still the internet and if you say you have the time to find something good enough for low cost, the next person will shout you down and say its' false economy and the seesaw will go back and forth.
George Wilson, who I mentioned above, got marples chisels that were probably made in the late 50s before they switched to lower carbon steels. I don't know what they cost - probably the equivalent of $100 now - who knows. At some point, marples switched to making bench chisels in a process that looks like it was people feeding jigged machines, and I have a set of 10 of them. Only two of my set of 10 are hardened. Something went wrong temporarily and because nobody actually had hands on the chisels at any part of the process, they couldn't feel that they were bogus. A job grinder would've immediately noticed that they ground way too fast.
that middle ground is kind of gone. The pfeil chisels are maybe close to it despite being kind of costly. The narex chisels are not - the regular - they're austempered to hit a price point and they have no chance of coming close to matching something even like a last-of-the-good-ones marples.
I would equate hand work once someone is well skilled to being about as strenuous as playing golf and walking. Nobody golfs leaning over or sprinting, but a lot of the hand work demonstrations show people red faced or braced up rigid or leaning over. None of the old pictures suggest anyone is torturing themselves like that. Eventually, the hand sawing becomes about 2 feet per minute in 4/4 hardwood - it just happens, and a little more than half of that in 8/4, and you'll migrate away from stuff that doesn't work well by hand.
I linked this last week - this is the bottom of a TV stand in a semi-finished area, so it's just something I could make entirely in an hour with hand tools - there's a top board and sides. The point of this is someone told me to buy #1 common cherry instead of FAS because by the time I picked apart the boards and got rid of the junk, I'd have far more wood with the FAS. What they didn't know is that a lot of the wood would be between straight and what's shown here. This is a deceptive picture because the knot is in the middle and the rest is subtle. Every single part of the board is grain runout into the face. I don't know if it could be jack planed green, but you can't get a jack plane anywhere close to it and there isn't a predominant grain directly to sever straws from ripping, so it's a pain in poo-er to work with by hand. With a spiral planer, a table saw and a drum sander, it'd probably be pretty fun to work with such stuff as long as you didn't try to cut half blinds in the ends (they'd break).
Dimensioning becomes part of the process doing work from start to finish, you cut what you need out of boards or off of them a little at a time rather than organizing a big part and milling everything and sooner or later you find out that you went through a couple of hundred feet without knowing it because you never amassed a pile of it and counted it at once. The productivity rate goes up such that if you spend a couple of hundred hours a year at the hobby, it will only be a year or two before you have nothing to build and nowhere to put what you want to build next.
Marking and design are the only things that really have a longer term steep learning curve - I would bet that in general, those are challenges forever. Coming up with something that just flat out looks good, and then maybe bits and bobs on each new thing. the joinery like dovetails and mortise and tenon will be so easy to execute based on skills learned dimensioning accurately (which is a must - it's just the easiest way, to dimension at a steady pace accurately rather than believing that it's coarse work that you have to bomb through) that they'll be little challenge.
I think the average person would do much better work and have much more time and less limitation to think about design - eventually if you're building nice things, the rest of the work is so much time compared to dimensioning that you'll appreciate how pleasant it is to go back and forth. The dimensioning is a treat - a mind clearing treat. if it feels like you did more than take a brisk walk or walk a round of golf (if even that) after a few hours, then something else needs to be addressed.
https://bluesprucetoolworks.com/products/optima-bench-chisel-4-piece-set
These are flat and shiny... I like them like a magpie would
They are v expensive of course but I just wondered how they get them that flat?? Do they use a lapping machine which metal workers may use for making very fine components in engineering (aerospace etc) If were to try to flatten to a mirror finish which is measured in light bands I think I would struggle on my japanese stones/norton oil stone at home/work! Just wondered if you guys and gals might know!? Just very curious that's all
These are flat and shiny... I like them like a magpie would
They are v expensive of course but I just wondered how they get them that flat?? Do they use a lapping machine which metal workers may use for making very fine components in engineering (aerospace etc) If were to try to flatten to a mirror finish which is measured in light bands I think I would struggle on my japanese stones/norton oil stone at home/work! Just wondered if you guys and gals might know!? Just very curious that's all
dannyr
Established Member
https://bluesprucetoolworks.com/products/optima-bench-chisel-4-piece-set
These are flat and shiny... I like them like a magpie would
They are v expensive of course but I just wondered how they get them that flat?? Do they use a lapping machine which metal workers may use for making very fine components in engineering (aerospace etc) If were to try to flatten to a mirror finish which is measured in light bands I think I would struggle on my japanese stones/norton oil stone at home/work! Just wondered if you guys and gals might know!? Just very curious that's all
Yup - so what does a magpie do with it's shiny collection - the local bird stores it in our gutter - I have to climb a ladder and unblock it - it will eat dove's-eggs but never saw it cut any dove-tails.
Not an expert, but have seen such shiny and flat tool steels and cemented tungsten carbide gauge blocks being flattened to this optical standard here in Sheffield - takes a bit of time but the machines are available, old and new.
The Spruce blurb also refers to the tempering and cryo 'resulting in an incredibly fine grain' - anyone enlighten me - I can see how it might change the martensite/austenite/ferrite balance somewhat, but would it refine the grain? That's mostly defined (by melting, quenching, forging, powder met techniques) at an earlier stage.
Adam W.
A Major Clanger
It was getting very tedious with the slating of forum members and their work from the usual suspect.
Jarno
Established Member
They are shiny, but I am not sure they are actually have a level of flatness that needs lapping, you can get extremely accurate with "mere" surface grinding.https://bluesprucetoolworks.com/products/optima-bench-chisel-4-piece-set
These are flat and shiny... I like them like a magpie would
They are v expensive of course but I just wondered how they get them that flat?? Do they use a lapping machine which metal workers may use for making very fine components in engineering (aerospace etc) If were to try to flatten to a mirror finish which is measured in light bands I think I would struggle on my japanese stones/norton oil stone at home/work! Just wondered if you guys and gals might know!? Just very curious that's all
To get them shiny, they could have used regular polishing processes, which makes the surfaces shiny, but not necessarily flat. Lapping is done on very specialised machinery, and while that is done with very fine abrasives, it does not necessarily make surfaces shiny. It does allow one to create extremely accurate "basic shapes" so flat surfaces, cylinders and spheres.
And as mentioned above, people can make very flat and curved things for a long time already, to very high standards (even without machines, saw a youtube video of a dutch guy making integrated mirror optics for telescopes by hand, in his attic: ).
Keen on finding out the chisels thread starter ends up with, and what his findings are.
The Richters do look nice, and I think they have a handle which is pleasant to use (ball end, not too much ridges and edges).
Last edited:
I have already ordered Pfeil chisels, as I have read some negative reviews about the quality control on Richters on Amazon. The only concern is the handle shape on Pfeils, but I can smooth it out with sandpaper, spokeshave, etc. Chisels might arrive by Friday from Germany, so I will see them then.
This is the quote from Blue Spruce website:
It would be very unfair of them to claim using alien technology for lapping (and pricing the chisels accordingly), yet just polish the chisels on the buffing wheel and do nothing else with the flatness.
Jacob
What goes around comes around.
No idea how they do it, or why for that matter, but there was a thread some years back where somebody had bought a new set of BlueSpruce and had immediately set about "flattening" them!https://bluesprucetoolworks.com/products/optima-bench-chisel-4-piece-set
These are flat and shiny... I like them like a magpie would
They are v expensive of course but I just wondered how they get them that flat?? Do they use a lapping machine which metal workers may use for making very fine components in engineering (aerospace etc) If were to try to flatten to a mirror finish which is measured in light bands I think I would struggle on my japanese stones/norton oil stone at home/work! Just wondered if you guys and gals might know!? Just very curious that's all
He'd obviously got into a mess, having started with a coarse grit and spoiled them all, one by one.
He was following the common crazy-sharpening advice that all new chisels needed "prepping", "initialising", "commissioning", etc.
It's nonsense - any chisel of even average quality never needs "flattening" and is never easier to sharpen than when it is brand new. Just a quick hone at 30º and you are off! A tiny bit of "flattening" follows very quickly as the burr is taken off with the chisel face down on the stone and that's all you need.
Jacob
What goes around comes around.
Blue Spruce claim of perpetual flatness looks dubious:
Each time one is sharpened it will be turned face down to take off the burr. This will slowly and inevitably make the face slightly more convex, with every sharpening, unless the whole face is flattened every time.
Ttrees
Iroko loco!
There are some techniques where some would want a flat chisel.
That chisel aint flat, but the best photo I've got to try and demonstrate.
Try and get another tool to check that, not happening.
not even this slim protractor rule can fit that hole above, nor a ruler.
Those are some run of the mill Stanley's
I'd reckon it's probably a good thing to have something possibly a bit soft,
as it will teach you more, and how to get around that rather than mashing the tool into the work and it diving too deeply.
I have some Tesco ones I like also, same as these with an in-line handle.
A bit concave I think, not that it matters for use chopping combined with drilling.
Concerning the chisel deepening excessively, David made a video demonstrating a bellied chisel can be steered out of the cut,
That kinda thinking will keep the edge of a tool, and is easier to be accurate whilst doing fast work.
Not that I care about the latter for my hobby work, as I didn't go looking for some,
but I wouldn't be put off buying some more cheapies with that profile if I thought it might give me significantly quicker results.
Not saying that every chisel under the sun might be decent, but likely the case that many cheap chisels might be sound.
That chisel aint flat, but the best photo I've got to try and demonstrate.
Try and get another tool to check that, not happening.
not even this slim protractor rule can fit that hole above, nor a ruler.
Those are some run of the mill Stanley's
I'd reckon it's probably a good thing to have something possibly a bit soft,
as it will teach you more, and how to get around that rather than mashing the tool into the work and it diving too deeply.
I have some Tesco ones I like also, same as these with an in-line handle.
A bit concave I think, not that it matters for use chopping combined with drilling.
Concerning the chisel deepening excessively, David made a video demonstrating a bellied chisel can be steered out of the cut,
That kinda thinking will keep the edge of a tool, and is easier to be accurate whilst doing fast work.
Not that I care about the latter for my hobby work, as I didn't go looking for some,
but I wouldn't be put off buying some more cheapies with that profile if I thought it might give me significantly quicker results.
Not saying that every chisel under the sun might be decent, but likely the case that many cheap chisels might be sound.
I think that those chisels are specifically designed for users, who just want to buy a chisel a never maintain it again. It should be sharp and flat forever. In reality, it does not work like that.
Phil Pascoe
Established Member
They are designed to be gloated over, and precious little else.
Jacob
What goes around comes around.
The "bellied chisel" problem is a recent invention, along with the terminology itself.
Can be ignored very easily!
Exactly. "Nice" ones are nicer to use of course and some of the crudely ground bevel edges are completely pointless.
Wooden handles are good for repetitive work because of the lower weight but if you are going to thrash them then plastic or the chunky OBM type are going to last a lot longer.
Last edited:
