Originally Posted by
david charlesworth
I will muddy the water by suggesting that the grips you show are unhelpful.
I control a chisel with the thumb and forefinger of the left hand. (I am right handed.) A pinching grip with the thumb on top.
This controls position and tilt, say for slotting into a knife line.
All I want from the right hand is shove or push, which comes from legs via the palm!
I try not to grip the handle at all, just finger tips resting on the shaft.
This approach applies to horizontal paring.
Much the same logic applies to chopping. The left hand positions and engages the knife line, it then moves to the top of the chisel, but does not grip. I just resists the diving tendency. Grip might twist the edge out of the line.
Of course some people like vertical paring, where there is considerable grip, but I do not like this technique.
These techniques may be seen in my chisel use DVD.
Originally Posted by
david charlesworth
I am rushing to a class, but for me thumb and forefinger are at the sharp end!! not the handle.
Reading these quotes, it occurs to me that chisel handle preferences will vary a lot depending on how we actually hold and use the chisel. In David's approach, which involves things like switching hands and gripping the blade, the handle seems relatively unimportant; it almost doesn't matter what the handle design is.
However, I think some of these techniques are problematic. It is very slow to use both hands to position the chisel for chopping, as described above. When I watch fast, fluent woodworkers, they never do this. I admit I do it sometimes, but I regard it as a bad habit to be broken rather than an acceptable technique.
Similarly, holding the chisel at the tip, while it gives good control, gets very tiring if we do it for long sessions. It's also harder to keep the chisel perfectly perpendicular; slight movements at the tip translate into large angular variations. Holding at the handle is a lot less tiring and more precise in terms of angle. It's hard to criticize this technique too much because lots of great woodworkers do it (Frank Klausz, for example), so YMMV, but speaking just for myself I regard it as another bad habit to be broken.
Concerning paring, I don't see how one can avoid vertical paring. How would you make an odd-sized mortise, or a through mortise? I pare both vertically and horizontally all the time and regard them both as essential.
All of these things are hard to learn and require a lot of practice (I'm still practicing), just like shooting a ball or playing an instrument in tune. Fortunately chiseling is easier than both of those pursuits, so we don't need to be Steph Curry or Yo-Yo Ma to do good work. But, getting back to the point, I think the more you use the handle, the more the handle will matter.
"For me, chairs and chairmaking are a means to an end. My real goal is to spend my days in a quiet, dustless shop doing hand work on an object that is beautiful, useful and fun to make." --Peter Galbert