Do you guys know of any studies on actual "best" quality old steel chisels to answer questions about what made them good?
alloy including carbon content
actual grain size of the steel within he tools after heat treatment
Heat treatment and hardness?
Reason I ask is that I keep reading over and over about how good some of these old tools were. And no doubt some percentage of them were exceptional.
And we we don't see anybody really taking a swing at making really high end chisels like they are doing with knives. A $100 western chisel is currently "high end" where $2,000 is hitting "high end" with hand made knives in the USA..
and I find it pretty ironic... Flesh is exceptionally easy to cut with a very coarse edge. Bushcraft stuff is more challenging.. But a fairly coarse grain structure and relatively soft steel cut exceptionally well. But yet chisels - which really can make actual use of the benefits of steels, grain structures, and heat treatments are "crude cutting tools"....
I started thinking about this after reading the PMV11 alloy threads - and reading a bunch of knife making info by fellows like Ed Fowler - who has been making hunting knives out of forged 52100 to a 14.5 grain size (ultra small) and a hardness in the low 60's... But it doesn't seem like anybody is doing anything like this with chisels... And nobody seems to be connecting the dots.