Ray Iles Pigsticker review

[Tom Vanzant]

Patrick/Ken, lol... Isn't that the usual result? When the time comes, the 1/4" Ray Iles will be first.

[Pat Barry]

Interesting thread made me wonder what the only pigsticker I have was. It is stamped "GEBR. vom BERG CAST-STEEL". The steel is about 5 inches long and it is a 1/8" (approx) chisel with a very similar to the Ray Iles chisel with the integral bolster. I have never used it as a 1/8" mortice is a bit small compared to what I typically need.
chisel1.jpg

[Mike Cherry]

The Ray Iles chisels have a long primary bevel which is good for deep mortises but not for shallow ones, the fulcrum for levering is too high and leads to bruising of the mortise. The handles can split if one is overly aggressive, I've broken 2. Not something to be proud of but after 4 or 5 hours of chopping mortises I tend to hit harder than I should. The good news is that Bob Scott in Boston can make replacements.

I gotta say your the first person I've seen that busted one of these, much less two. Did you notice a relation to the lumber used when breaking the handles? What type of instrument do you use to to strike the chisels?

[Randy Karst]

Hey Keith, do you have contact info for Bob Scott?

[Keith Mathewson]

Mike,
I had made a large joiners mallet which as too large for the job at hand. While it took a couple of hundred mortises to break the handle, it was a case of force instead of technique.

Randy,
Send me a PM with your number and I'll forward it to him. Don't expect anything soon, he broke his arm a few weeks ago.

[Mike Cherry]

Ahh thanks for the additional info Keith!

[Patrick Chase]

Interesting thread made me wonder what the only pigsticker I have was. It is stamped "GEBR. vom BERG CAST-STEEL". The steel is about 5 inches long and it is a 1/8" (approx) chisel with a very similar to the Ray Iles chisel with the integral bolster. I have never used it as a 1/8" mortice is a bit small compared to what I typically need.
chisel1.jpg

Out of curiosity have you ever tried a lower primary bevel on that chisel?

That looks to me like ~35 deg. I saw a pretty significant improvement in mortising speed when I dropped my Narex chisels from 25 to 20, and the Ray Iles also ships at 20 deg. I use a 35 deg secondary bevel on both though.

[Robert Engel]

Why do I hate the term "pigsticker"?

It seem so "unwoodworkingish".

[Pat Barry]

Out of curiosity have you ever tried a lower primary bevel on that chisel?

That looks to me like ~35 deg. I saw a pretty significant improvement in mortising speed when I dropped my Narex chisels from 25 to 20, and the Ray Iles also ships at 20 deg. I use a 35 deg secondary bevel on both though.

I got this at a garage sales a couple years ago and actually have never used it, primarily because at 1/8" its a bit slim for the typical mortice work I have been doing it seems, but what you say sounds like a good idea. I'll give it a shot.

[Charles Guest]

Ian Kirby does describe the layered technique but actually uses what he calls the 'full depth' method (it is better IMO):

http://www.woodworkersjournal.com/ha...se-and-tenons/

[Patrick Chase]

Ian Kirby does describe the layered technique but actually uses what he calls the 'full depth' method (it is better IMO):

http://www.woodworkersjournal.com/ha...se-and-tenons/

I like (and follow) Kirby's advice on dovetailing, but he seems to have his head shoved somewhere when it comes to mortising.

The big problem here is that he insists that the chisel must have parallel sides, i.e. sash mortise configuration like the L-Ns (and you can see in the picture that he's using a lightweight sash mortise chisel). He justifies this by arguing that tapered sides will allow the chisel to rotate (true to some degree), and then insists that rotation will make the mortise WIDER than the chisel. 9th-grade geometry tells us that the cut width will be chisel_width*cos(rotation_angle), which can never be greater than chisel_width. Also, for a tapered pigsticker the maximum rotation angle (before it's stopped by the chisel side) is about 1 deg, so the minimum mortise width is 0.9998*chisel_width. Put another way, the worst-case error is 0.02% of the mortise width.

I recall seeing a FWW article that compared his opinions on mortising side-by-side to Klausz'. Klausz advocated side-tapered pigstickers like the Ray Iles ones, and pretty much annihilated Kirby's arguments. I suppose that his techniques makes sense if you limit yourself to toy chisels, though even then I'd probably go with Paul Sellars' technique instead (second half of the video).

EDIT: And then in his description of the "full-depth" method he doubles down on the rotation/width canard. Ugh. It occurs to me that with a registered chisel such as he uses rotation *does* increase the mortise width, so in that sense he's causing the very problem he claims to be avoiding.

[Warren Mickley]

I recall seeing a FWW article that compared his opinions on mortising side-by-side to Klausz'. Klausz advocated side-tapered pigstickers like the Ray Iles ones, and pretty much annihilated Kirby's arguments. I suppose that his techniques makes sense if you limit yourself to toy chisels, though even then I'd probably go with Paul Sellars' technique instead (second half of the video).

I laughed when I read Klausz's method for mortising back in 1979. It was obvious that he had been making mortises by machine and not by hand. Thirty years later he had a better method. Even an "old world cabinetmaker" can learn to do hand work here in America.

Whether or not a parallel sided chisel works well is dependent on how fine the tolerances are. A perfect chisel would be fine; you really want all four corners of the chisel involved. However a tiny taper helps insure that the chisel is not wider at some point than the edge or the back. And a taper in length likewise helps insure against clearance problems. A bulge an inch from the cutting edge would make the chisel difficult to withdraw from deep in the cut.

I like as little taper as possible (in both directions) for myself. And I work on the chisel based on how it performs in use, not some predetermined set of specifications.

[Patrick Chase]

I laughed when I read Klausz's method for mortising back in 1979. It was obvious that he had been making mortises by machine and not by hand. Thirty years later he had a better method. Even an "old world cabinetmaker" can learn to do hand work here in America.

Whether or not a parallel sided chisel works well is dependent on how fine the tolerances are. A perfect chisel would be fine; you really want all four corners of the chisel involved. However a tiny taper helps insure that the chisel is not wider at some point than the edge or the back. And a taper in length likewise helps insure against clearance problems. A bulge an inch from the cutting edge would make the chisel difficult to withdraw from deep in the cut.

I like as little taper as possible (in both directions) for myself. And I work on the chisel based on how it performs in use, not some predetermined set of specifications.

Yeah, it occurred to me that I should have heeded my own maxim that "there's usually more than one way to do it" when I wrote that post.

FWIW I've developed a preference for slight (~1 deg/side) taper in profile but none lengthwise.

[lowell holmes]

I have to ask . Craftsman style rocking chairs have 1" square through mortises in the front post to arm joint.

The largest mortise chisel I've seen advertised is 1/2". How would you chop the mortises through the arm?

Paul Sellers has been conducting classes for these chairs for 20 years that I know of.

[Warren Mickley]

I have to ask . Craftsman style rocking chairs have 1" square through mortises in the front post to arm joint.

The largest mortise chisel I've seen advertised is 1/2". How would you chop the mortises through the arm?

Paul Sellers has been conducting classes for these chairs for 20 years that I know of.

"Craftsman" style furniture was made a century ago by machine. A hand tool woodworker would usually do something different, like two narrower tenons or a round tenon.

In the hand tool era narrow mortises like 3/8 were done with mortise chisels and wide mortises like in timber framing were done with framing chisels while the bulk of the waste was bored or coarsely chopped out. If I were asked to make a 1"x1" mortise I would probably make two parallel 3/8 mortises and then chop out the 1/4 strip in the center.