Am I the jerk here?

[Edward Weber]

To me as one who has worked in more than one stockroom, it indicates a person who wasn't paying attention to what they were doing or possibly didn't know the difference between a bench chisel and a mortise chisel. When the rep said, "they’d take special care to find one that meets my expectations." Someone somewhere dropped the ball, BIG TIME.



Slight ding from handling? Is this chisel made of soft butter?

My heavy chisels are bashed with heavy mallet and do not have such slight dings. Some of my chisels have been dropped on a cement floor without getting such slight dings.

jtk

Once again, I'm agreeing with you Jim.
All this talk of, all you have to do is take it to a stone or break all the sharp corners, is all well and good, if you are buying a used or cheaply made tool, you should expect to do some tuning to get the tool ready for work.
If you're paying a premium price for a tool that advertises their specs, it has to meet them or what's the point of the premium price?
Things happen during the manufacturing process, that's understood. The issue is how customer service responded to the OP's situation.
You're not a jerk for expecting to get exactly what you paid for.

[Tony Zaffuto]

Getting a most perfectly fine Narex mortise chisel, for 1/4th the cost (maybe less.), you might expect a few imperfections. Paying the price for this IBC chisel, I would expect not only for it to be within all STATED specs, but that, without my assistance, magically do the mortises.

Gentlepeople, I have to say, much of our thinking has been seriously corrupted by YouTube “influencers” that hawk goods. Where has skill building gone? Why do we think we need (almost) aircraft tolerances on our plane soles or sides of mortise chisels? Why? Because an influencer told us it is important and a vendor has stepped selling the spiel. The chisel tolerance won’t make us better. TableSaw Tom has said it best on forums, that more plane soles are screwed up by improper flattening methods

In any case, if I’m paying $150.00 for a tool and the vendor guarantees a tolerance, the tool had better be in tolerance.

[Pete Taran]

Here is what Henry Disston said about quality back 175 years ago:

[Rafael Herrera]

This thread and the chisel in question has been interesting. I don't really know whether the specs of the chisel make it a better one or not. The vintage cutters designed to cut a groove I've seen, plough plane cutters, mortise chisels, Stanley #50 cutters, all have a relief angle, ie not square sides. So, I lean on the "doesn't make it a better tool" camp.

What I guess is that the marketing gimmick is the vendor makes something with a trivial feature that the customer can "verify". What's simpler than taking a square or a straight edge and measure "something"? Steel composition, hardness, toughness, handle shape, etc. characteristics that one can argue are of far greater importance are ignored. Obviously, we can't measure the exact % of carbon or chromium or whatever is in the steel so we have to live with what we get and content ourselves with obsessing about how square some angle is.

It's also true that for $150 the vendor better damned well deliver the tool with the silly specifications they trumpet.

[Jack Dover]

It really depends where exactly it's out of spec. 0.005" is about half of a pencil line width, so yeah, it's quite a perceptible tolerance. If a cutting edge is this much out of square for example you'll notice your mortises aren't plumb.

[Jack Dover]

To me as one who has worked in more than one stockroom, it indicates a person who wasn't paying attention to what they were doing

Slightly offtopic: I'm in retail for as long as I can remember it and I'm yet to find a picker\packer who would be paying attention. Not that they're brainless, it's just it's impossible to pay any attention when you've got literally thousands of things to be put into thousands of boxes. For a packer to reject an item it should be obviously damaged, like snapped in half or a box is badly damaged, etc. Pickers\packers are not responsible for quality of items, it must have been ensured before and all inventory going to customers assumed to be of acceptable quality by the time it gets into a box. Quality control is responsibility of whoever accepts inventory into a warehouse, but I really doubt that anyone would check every incoming chisel with a filler gauge. And I think what really has happened after "we will pay special attention" is customer support just filed an order replacement and a packer just grabbed a next chisel out of a source box.

So the actual issue is probably somebody overpromised and now can't go back on it. Happens all the time.

[Jim Koepke]

Slightly offtopic: I'm in retail for as long as I can remember it and I'm yet to find a picker\packer who would be paying attention. Not that they're brainless, it's just it's impossible to pay any attention when you've got literally thousands of things to be put into thousands of boxes. For a packer to reject an item it should be obviously damaged, like snapped in half or a box is badly damaged, etc. Pickers\packers are not responsible for quality of items

It depends on how a company is structured. I've worked in manufacturing where everyone was in a position to stop the process if something wasn't right.

I've also worked in places where no one wanted to be responsible for anything.

Some companies have stock numbers that can actually describe a part. Other companies just assign the next number on the list to parts randomly. At one company the engineers and designers were "too busy" to look up previously assigned part numbers and would just assign a new number to a part that already had a part number. This caused more than a few problems (that company is no longer in business).

I've also worked in a manufacturing situation where the quality inspector was receiving a kickback to accept parts that didn't met specs. He was fired.

There are all kinds of ways of running a business. Some can run it to a good position in their industry, others will run it into the ground.

jtk

[Mark Maleski]

It really depends where exactly it's out of spec. 0.005" is about half of a pencil line width, so yeah, it's quite a perceptible tolerance. If a cutting edge is this much out of square for example you'll notice your mortises aren't plumb.

I've never placed a square against my mortise chisel. It's a miracle I've been making square mortises all this time!

[Jim Koepke]

I've never placed a square against my mortise chisel. It's a miracle I've been making square mortises all this time!

Neither have I. Then again none of my mortise chisels came to me with a claim of being the best mortise chisel made by man at the cost of $150.

In fact there are four very good mortise chisels in my shop that all together cost less than that.

jtk

[Brian Hale]

I completely agree that is a product doesn’t meet stated specifications it should be replaced at no cost to the buyer as fast as possible. The problem here is the stated specifications.

From Robs website….. sides square to the back (+/- .002 of an inch accuracy).

There’s a picture of a square sitting against the side of a chisel. Since there is no mention of parallelism are we to assume that the specified tolerance applies to each side individually and if so then the width can vary +/-.004 from the back to the face, or worse yet the chisel could be a parallelogram.

Also from the website….. Each chisel is tested on a granite reference surface to ensure the back is flat to within .0005 of an inch.
Flatness is a measure of a surface, not an edge. You cannot measure the flatness of anything with shim stock on a surface plate. I’ve seen several folks use that method to measure flatness of plane bodies and sharpening stones. At best you’ll determine that the area where you try to slip the shim stock under the item meets the surface plate but not the area between the edges.
Watching the video on the site, a .0005 piece of shim stock is placed on the surface plate and the chisel laid on top it. He can’t easily pull the shim stock out so the chisel is declared flat. This test tells us nothing. Using that method the back could be concave by a large amount and still pass the test or to take it to and extreme, it could have an 1/8” groove, 1/8” deep that runs the length of the chisel and still be declared flat. The back could also be twisted and still pass.

Rob is a good teacher and does a lot of good for our veterans and I have great respect for him but he’s giving us incomplete and intentionally misleading information to inspire us to buy.

Buyer beware

[Richard Coers]

4 pages and almost 2 weeks of discussion over the tiniest amount of measurement, not performance of a chisel, confirms my belief in the futility of what the woodworking hobby has become. First in purchasing a $150 chisel, and then not even cutting wood. Our ancestry of noble craftsman must be spinning in their graves.

[steven c newman]

Or...just laughing their rearends off....( I am...)

Sounding like a "He said,She said" sort of much ado about.....nothing?

[David Carroll]

I don't really have a dog in this fight, but Brian makes a good point about measuring flatness. Attempting to slide a feeler gauge isn't a very good method to determine flatness of a surface. For that you would need a fixture to hold the tool parallel to a surface plate and use a surface gauge with a last word indicator or the like.

I don't understand how they call out squareness using a linear measurement. When I call out angular measurements in machine parts, I use an angular measurements in degrees and seconds. There are also "standard tolerances," meaning if whoever specifies the design doesn't require tighter tolerances, they revert to standard tolerances, which for CNC machining is usually +/- 0.005-inches. You can, of course, call out anything you like, but as you tighten the tolerances, the price goes up. Based on standard tolerances, the straightness of the sides on the OP's chisel would be okay (barely).

It is really getting into the weeds here, and like Richard implies, isn't really relevant to woodworking. Most woodworkers wouldn't notice these small deviations, as long as they are within an RCH. ;-)

Still, for those of us in manufacturing, who are also woodworkers, it is an interesting discussion. I don't think that RC is intentionally misleading anybody.

DC

[Mel Fulks]

I’ve seen old fine quality mortise chisels with slight imperfections and know from old-timers that was the standard. So even though
many say “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” , they do.

[Jim Koepke]

I’ve seen old fine quality mortise chisels with slight imperfections and know from old-timers that was the standard. So even though
many say “they don’t make ‘em like they used to” , they do.

It may not be whether they are made like they used to or not.

The situation seems to be they are not being sold like they used to be sold. It is doubtful chisel makers and mongers in the 19th century were touting their wares as being machined to tolerances in the thousandths of an inch.

Most likely looked at what was available. If it looked good and they needed it, they would buy it.

Many likely purchased via catalogs and purchased from companies with trusted reputations. That basic method has continued for well over a century.

jtk