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
Mallets From Pallets
I have a nasty habit of working with old tools, well past their prime, if they ever had one. There’s nothing worse than hammers and mallets in that regard as I’ll use an old stone if it’s available.
This is the mallet I’ve used for at least two decades. It never was much to look at but it could find the back of a chisel so I used it, and used it, and used it some more. But I decided to replace it and this is where I always say to myself “If I’d known how little time it would take, I would have done it a long time ago.”
I took a piece of what I believe to be white oak that I got from some pallets a friend of mine brought me. It was 3 3/4″ x 3 1/2″ in cross-section. I figured it would make a decent-size mallet for tapping on my LN chisels without insulting them with ugliness as my existing mallet was doing. My tools talk to me and they had complained – honest.
So, the first thing I had to do was to heat up the shop and so I did. Nothing like a Disston D8 and a big chunk of white oak to warm things up.
Then, I’m sad to say, I failed as a blogger. I was so excited about being in the shop that I forgot to take photos. I took my blank (which was nothing more than a foot long piece of the oak) to my chopping block and I lopped off the corners, somewhat rounding it up. It’s much faster to do this than to chuck up a big square stick and then spend forever being beaten around by my roughing gouge.
Once finished, I chucked it into my lathe and turned a cylinder. I used a parting tool to mark the two ends of the mallet-to-be. Note that I changed its length when I got to this point. I’d originally guesstimated a length where the pencil line is but decided that I didn’t need the handle that long once I got to the point where I could actually wrap my hand around the stock to see how it fit my hand. This is the real virtue of making your own hand tools. One can buy a mallet like this for not much money but I was able to fit the handle to my hand as I refined the shape.
At this point all that was left to do was remove everything that didn’t look like a mallet. I ‘designed’ it on the fly, putting a slight taper into the head, fitting the handle to my hand and turning a knob on the end. I actually had to shorten that knob just a bit as there was a nail hole that I didn’t want to include. Roughed out it looked like this:
I’d gotten to this point using a roughing gouge and then a spindle gouge. The surface, however, could be a lot better and so I smoothed everything up using a skew chisel. I sanded it a bit, particularly in the curved places where it’s hard to create a surface with a skew. then I applied a thin coat of #1lb cut shellac to bring out the color and followed with a layer of Renaissance wax, which is named after the Renaissance Woodworker, I think 
The result looks like this and my chisels approve. It was embarrasssing to listen to them giggle.
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
Just a Little Turning Project
Hi everybody! I hope everyone had a great holiday season and got some shop time along the way. I have to confess to becoming what might be affectionately known as a ‘lard butt’ over the holidays, doing some reading, watching my navel and eating way too much.
In one fit of activity I was cleaning up my shop and came across a kit to build a scratch awl. I’d bought it quite a while ago and believe I got it from Penn State Industries.
I looked around and found a couple blocks of some unknown hardwood that I’d picked up years ago, mostly because of their “Special $1.00″ sticker price. And so, with the flick of my Wenzloff carcase saw, I was stuffing a block of wood onto a lathe mandrel and removing everything that didn’t look like the handle of a scratch awl. Here’s the result.
Cheers — Larry
Bowling Alone
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, by Robert Putnam presents the notion that we’ve become an antisocial bunch of loners and that this has caused a disintegration of grassroots social networks and organizations that are the basis for our society. The specific reference, “Bowling Alone” refers to one of many examples in the book. It seems that while more people are bowling these days than every before, fewer people are bowling in organized leagues than ever before. It’s a great book and certainly thought-provoking.
I was “bowling alone” last night myself. My kind of bowling, however, is to stand at my lathe, wood spinning, and me trying to remove everything from that block of wood that doesn’t look like a bowl. Here are the results.
Cheers — Larry
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