Why Do Chisel Restoration?
With so many quality chisels available today, why would anyone restore old ones? Back in October, Chris Schwarz did an economic analysis in his Yuppie Tools: A True Accounting post and suggested that it just wasn’t worth the time and trouble.
I agree with most of what Chris talks about and I don’t disagree here, but I do restore chisels. You see, I don’t think money is everything in the analysis. For one thing, for most of us, woodworking is about having fun. The notion that ‘time is money’ just doesn’t apply. For many it’s fun to find an old socket chisel that hasn’t had it’s brains banged out by someone with a metal hammer. Lifting old tools from the flea markets of the world is an honorable activity. Whether it’s fun to de-rust it is less clear but there are those of us who actually enjoy this messy, mindless task. Certainly, using a tool that you’ve restored is a pleasure for most.
But an oft-overlooked part of the analysis is that Lie-Nielsen (the company whose chisels Chris used for his comparison) doesn’t make wide chisels. They don’t make slab-sided firmer chisels. And for this reason alone, you might find oneself doing a chisel restoration even if they own a stack of Lie-Nielsen chisels, which I agree are wonderful.
I did. I’d been looking for a wide chisel for cleaning up the sides of mortises, for cutting a notch next to a cutline when doing dados with saw and chisel, and for the various other tasks for which a wide chisel is useful. I found one.
I had also picked up a 3/8″ firmer chisel. I have a 1/4″ firmer and have found the vertical sides very nice when you’re paring the ends of a mortise and since I do both 1/4″ and 3/8″, I jumped at the chance to pick up a 3/8″ version of this chisel. 
I cleaned them up, sharpened them and then thought about handles. The firmer came with an old, but quite usable handle. As it had a tight leather top and was otherwise not too beat up, I sanded it a bit and added some BLO and called it done.
For the other chisel I needed to turn a handle so I took a scrap of maple and did just that. I didn’t record this process as I’ve talked about making chisel handles in a previous post titled Handling My Chisels. Here are the end results.
In the end, for the princely sum of $5 + a couple bucks worth of expendibles, I’ve got two very useable tools that Lie-Nielsen doesn’t sell (grin). I do wish they’d come out with a 2″ wide chisel to match their bench chisels, though.
Cheers — Larry
How To Be Busy Without Getting Anything Done
It’s been a while since I’ve posted and I thought I should spend a few minutes to provide an update. It’s not that I haven’t been busy. I just wasn’t doing anything very photogenic or interesing. Here’s a few examples:
1) Today I went to the dump, culminating a bunch of clean up work. They had a cool machine for smashing junk but dump trips don’t seem bloggable.
2) I’ve been culling my scrap and reorganizing what I kept. I was overrun by short pieces of wood. A pile of scrap didn’t seem worth showing.
3) I Sharpened my new Lie-Nielson bench chisels. They’re photogenic but geez…how many chisels do you need to see?
4) Cleaned out stairwell into my shop. Much of the dump visit related to this activity. Definitely not photogenic.
5) Did some gardener support work. I don’t want to document such things as the less I remember them the better.
6) Did some minor work on my trailer so I could go to the dump. Seen one trailer, you’ve seen them all.
And so there are but two things to actually show you. My new LN chisels require a smaller hole in a chisel rack than the Marples they replaced so I removed my nice tiger maple chisel rack and replaced it with a pine one. Sometimes we take a step backwards. I really need to build a tool cabinet. I’ve been saying that for years.
By a stroke of luck I acquired a significant hunk of box elder for use as a chopping block. It’s about 18″ in all directions and it weighs a ton. Felt like two tons as I wrestled it down the stairs. I’ve got a hole in the drywall to prove it.
The good news is that the bench is cleared and I can get back to my bathroom vanities. But now, I’m going to go sit in the sun in my new Adirondack chairs.
Cheers — Larry
Lie-Nielson Comes to Quebec
I’m sitting on my front porch, writing this on my laptop. My mailbox is right above my head. It’s a beautiful morning but my thoughts are still in yesterday. Quebec City is somewhat isolated from the rest of North America. In spite of 700,000 people in metro area there is no woodworking store. There are no woodworking clubs. It’s also a long way from the many events that take place in the US like Woodworking in America and the Lie-Nielson events. I call it planet Quebec City.
So, when Lie-Nielson announced that it was going to do a show in Montreal, only 2 1/2 hours away, I did back flips, or I would have if I weren’t so old. Yesterday was the day and so at 7AM I pointed the car towards Montreal. All I’d heard about these events was that you got to play with Lie-Nielson tools. Truth is, these events are so much more.
I’d never been to the Rosemont Technology Centre before but it’s cool. Lots of oversize power tools everywhere. They have tech programs in cabinetmaking, finishing and even in how to start a business. And in the middle of the room, right behind door 14 (identified as the entry point on the map) was hand tool heaven.
The first thing I noticed had nothing to do with tools but everything to do with how classy Lie-Nielson is as a company. The first sheet of printed material I picked up was in French (available in English too). Most Quebecers won’t expect an American company to have such things available in French but I can tell you that they all noticed and appreciated that nice touch.
The tools were on display racks surrounding the work area. Calling them display racks, however, gives the wrong impression as they are on display only when someone hasn’t grabbed a tool and started cutting, planing, or chiseling. Benches were provided for that purpose. They even had a sharpening station set up to provide sharpening instruction. It was like being lead to the park when you were a little kid and there they were: the swings, the slide, and the sandbox. Where should I go first? Can I really just pick up the tools and abuse the pieces of wood lying around on the workbenches? I was overwhelmed.
So what did I do first? Talk to the women, of course. I introduced myself to Alex, short for Alexandra. Later I met Angie. I gotta tell you that if you think Thomas Lie-Nielson is a genius tool-designer, he’s even better at hiring people. These two beautiful women are absolute gems. Not only are they friendly but, as we say on the farm, “they’s smart fer girls.” They know tools and they know woodworking. Truth is, as much as I enjoyed getting to see and touch the LN tools I’d only seen in pictures, the true value of the day were the conversations I had with these women.
I had conversations with Alex about sharpening. She showed me how she sharpens a highly-cambered scrub plane blade in a jig rather than my sloppy way of doing it by hand. I asked her about the LN edge plane and why I would ever need one. She showed me. I’d always seen is as a ‘clean up’ plane but she squared up the edge of a board right before my eyes. And besides, it’s just plain cool. Oh, and the tongue and groove plane she demonstrated… wow. And have you ever used a miter plane? I’m left-handed so using a shooting plane in my right hand felt clumsy but… more wow.
I’d come, of course, to buy some stuff too. Isn’t that what we woodworkers do best? I won’t say ” do most” as I don’t want all the woodworker spouses to start bobbing their heads up and down in agreement. Unfortunately, due to an odd Canadian approach to US companies selling in Canada, it’s impractical for LN to have stock on site for sale but they did provide significant benefits for ordering at the show. I’d decided that I just had to have a set of LN bench chisels and nothing I saw at the show dissuaded me from that view. So I started talking chisels with Alex. We discussed A2 vs O1 steel, sharpening angles, micro-bevels and other sorts of chisely stuff.
Alex involved Angie in the discussion and we talked some more about angles, mostly me telling them what I was thinking which is always a precarious thing, and Angie pointed out some of the drawbacks of hollow-grinding.
I had a great conversation with Angie about the proverbial bevel-up vs bevel-down debate and it confirmed my view that it’s mostly a “less filling / tastes great” sort of debate and that “sharp works, dull does not” is a dichotomy that is more to the point.
And so I ordered the chisels and a couple DVDs. I took the quick snapshots you see here. I was really enjoying the woodwork talk, the tools, and a day where I could speak English to real humans.
I was preparing to leave and chatting with Angie about ‘next time’ and I mentioned that I wanted to get some planemaking floats. These are tools that sort of look like files but they’re more like a metal stick with a lot of tiny, very sharp knives on it. She said, “I like to use those for shaping.” We went to the float display and she picked up a large, flat one and started shaping the top of a cabriole leg. She used it just as you would a rasp but the results were different. The results were VERY smooth, as though you’d used a stick with a lot of tiny, very sharp knives attached to it. I’ve just got to have some floats. Next time.
And so here I sit, on the front porch, with mailbox above my head. I’m waiting for the UPS man with my package from LN. And I’m dreaming of floats.
Cheers — Larry
Q&A: Why Do You Use Those Crappy Clamps?
One of the problems with discussing woodworking in blog posts is that we tend to concentrate on a single aspect, discussing it in isolation from all other parts of woodworking methods and choices. This will be an exception in that I can’t answer a question about clamp choice without discussing other choices I’ve made.
On several occasions, when I’ve pictured my ratchet clamps in use, people have written and asked “Why do you use those crappy clamps?“ I chose that way of depicting the question as it was less inflammatory than some other ways the question has been asked. To those who were simply rude and justifying to themselves why they’d spent $500 on a rack full of Bessey K-bodies, [sound of a raspberry being blown here]. To those who genuinely wanted to know why (if?) one should use ratchet clamps, what follows is my reasoning and the reasons why I can/do use these clamps often.
1) They’re cheap.
There is no doubt that if you decide that you need to equip your shop with a bunch of modern “K-block” clamps, you’re going to spend a bundle on them. If money is no object, they do look nice when hanging in a wall shelf and they undoubtedly do a fine job of squishing joinery together. Push-button ratchet clamps on the other hand are cheap, particularly the smaller ones.
2) They’re handy in my shop.
This is a situation unique to my shop but others could do the same thing. Right above my work area is a small wood rack. To it are attached all my ratchet clamps. When I need them I can reach up, push the button on a clamp and it’s in my hand and ready to use. Maybe it’s cuz I’m lazy but not having to get the clamps before I start a glue up works for me.
3) Because of the way I work, I don’t need lots of clamping pressure.
Here’s the important stuff. Here is also where clamp usage and other woodworking decisions converge and where the discussion becomes more diffused. Because of the things I do prior to glue ups, and the glues that I use, I simply don’t need as much clamping pressure as many seem to think they need in their work. In my opinion, if you need a lot of pressure to pull a joint together, the joint is ill-fit but I’m not here to preach. Here are a couple of the factors that allow me to achieve tight joinery without a lot of clamping pressure.
a) Prep the joinery by hand
Power tools are great for a lot of things but it you want tight joinery, hand tools bring much to the table, presuming you’ve practiced enough use them. On this last limitation, I am still a work in progress and must defer to many others who are my superior when it comes to hand tool use. Still, I can create joints that have no gaps between the two parts being joined.
With hand tools, there are things one can do to eliminate glue-up problems. For instance, if you match-plane the edges of two boards you’re going to glue up, the two boards will fit together so well that clamps are not needed to pull the joint together (see below). For those unfamiliar with match-planing this amounts to jointing the edges with the two boards clamped together. You use a jointer plane in the same way you would for one board but by doing the two boards simultaneously you will achieve a perfect match of the two boards as they come together. Similarly, fitting tenons to a mortise can be done .001″ at a time with the use of hand planes.
b) Glue choice – the most important parameter
Beyond working with hand tools, however, much less clamping is required if one shuns slippery, aliphatic resin glues in favor of hide glue as your primary glue. Aliphatic resins replaced hide glues in production shops because 1) they are far cheaper, 2) require less maintenance when used in volume, and 3) clamping is less of a problem in a shop that using fixtures to clamp pieces on a production line. But these glues bring to the cabinetmaker, creating pieces one at a time, are glue joints that will slip, creep, and where the glue does not hold the joint together and so joints must be clamped and clamped tightly.
By contrast, hide glue is a very tacky substance that is not slippery and actually pulls the joint together as it sets. And hot hide glue will hold a joint in place almost immediately as when the glue temperature 20-30C, it will sets, holding the joint together. While complete setting of the glue requires several hours just like aliphatic resins, you don’t have to hold the joint in place while that happens.
If you’ve heard about “rub joints”, once commonly used by cabinetmakers, this is why they work. You simply slap hide glue on two parts, rub them together and walk away with no clamps whatever. To see good examples of this I urge you to check out podcasts by Rob Roziaeski over at the Logan Cabinet Shoppe. Podcast #17 (attached knee blocks without clamps) and Podcast #18 (does a panel glue up without clamps). If all you’ve ever used are yellow glues, you have to see the process to believe it.
And so, while “cheap” and “convenient” are part of the answer to why I can and do use ratchet clamps, the real reason is that I “can” because of the methods I use. More and more people are embracing hide glue, realizing its virtues. If you’d like to investigate it, you might start with some of my earlier posts on hide glue:
Stephen Shepherd’s Hide Glue Book
Are there times when I need more clamping pressure? Sure. If I were laminating a bunch of 2x4s together to create a bench top I’d drag out my pipe clamps, my F-body clamps, and I wouldn’t have enough of them. But for most things I don’t need any more pressure than those “crappy clamps” provide me.
Cheers — Larry
Handling My Chisels
Sometimes I wonder about myself. I’ve been a woodworker for a long time but like so many, I did most of my early woodworking by flipping a switch. But I’m a guy and guys like tools. The notion of having an excuse to dig through piles of rust at flea markets was appealing
So somewhere in the mid-90s I started buying old handtools and putting them on shelves. I learned how to do electrolysis to remove rust and while these days I use Evapo-Rust, I sometimes miss my bubbling tub. I learned how to clean a saw blade and make replacement totes for hand planes. Having the tools caused me to learn how they worked and, just as the galoots are fond of saying, I slid down the slippery slope. But I’ve always been one to want the tool in working condition, with little interest in making them pretty. I’m not sure why that is but it is.
And so many of the tools I use on a regular basis are less than pristine. They are flat where they need to be, sharp as I can make them. But pretty they are not. There’s something special about using a tool that someone else, in another generation used. But I admit that sometimes even I roll my eyes when I look at some of my tools.
And so it was that I was waiting for the Super Bowl to start and, I said “Why don’t I make some decent handles for these chisels?” (I talk to myself often, don’tcha know). “These chisels” are two Berg chisels and I love them as they hold an edge even at a low paring angle, which is how I use them.
I don’t have a pattern for the ideal chisel handle so I looked at a couple photos. I grabbed a short piece of 8/4 maple and cut a couple 1 1/2″ square blocks that were 7″ long. The photo above is more for this post than the actual process but let’s call it “planning and design” as I kinda sorta squinted and drew what seemed like a pleasing handle shape next to the old handle.
This went onto the lathe. I used a roughing gouge to create a cylinder and then started marking out the rough dimensions using a parting tool. At this point the idea was just to separate the various sections but the next step was to use calipers and increase the depth of the slots to reflect where I wanted the diameter to be at the various points. Once this is done I just removed stock between the slots to achieve the final shape. If I were really concerned about building a matched set of handles I’d probably have a couple more diameter positions along the main handle area but I just did it by eye as I wanted one handle significantly larger than the other and I had no idea with “best” is in any case.
This is what I ended up with after adding a bit of shellac. Not bad for less than an hour’s work. And just in time for the Super Bowl.
Cheers — Larry
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