Making chisels from O1 stock

[nick brigg]

I was just thinking the other day, i've seen a lot of people making their own plane blades, well what about chisels? has anyone out there made their own chisel from scratch?

[Mike Henderson]

You certainly can make your own chisels. After all, blacksmiths made the chisels for our ancestors.

But unless you have all the blacksmith tools (including a forge) to make and heat treat the chisels, those will be the most expensive chisels you can find.

Mike

[Jon Toebbe]

I'm not so sure about that, Mike. Precisely sized bar stock is pretty cheap. A hacksaw and a lot of hand filing / grinding in the annealed state just takes time and patience. I've been futzing around with a thick piece of 1/4 inch wide O1 that's starting to look suspiciously like a mortising chisel. There's lots of info on home heat-treating available out there.

Seems pretty do-able for the interested hobbyist. A good investment of your shop time? Only you can really decide that. I like making mortises more than I like making mortising chisels, so I haven't messed with my little project since getting some chisels as a Christmas present. Of course, what with work lately, I haven't had any shop time for mortises or chisels.

[nick brigg]

thats what i was thinking, i was looking for new chisels and i'm already ordering some metal to make my own plane blades...i just started thinking, why not chisels too?

[Dave Burnard]

It's simple enough (maybe time consuming) to make smallish chisels via stock reduction (grinding/sawing/filing away whatever doesn't look like a chisel). You can do simple heat treating with a propane/mapp gas torch or in the bbq with some extra air. There's lots of how-to's out there if you do some searching.

The usual warnings about slippery slopes and money pits apply to this potential hobby, so be careful!

[Joe Chritz]

I used to grind knives from precision ground o1 tool steel and send the blanks to a heat treat shop for pro treatment.

At that time minimum was $20 and I think that did something like 6 pounds of steel.

Stock removal isn't hard or time consuming but does take a bit of learning curve to get down right. I much prefer a 2" belt grinder for a task as such.

Joe

ETA: These are hunting knives not woodworking knives by the way.

[Greg Israelsen]

Prehardened and a wire edm worked very well for me.

[Ron Brese]

Actually chisels are a more feasible endeavor than plane irons when it comes to home heat treating. The amount of metal that has to be heated to critical temperature is a lot less than on a plane iron, so the results will most likely be more consistent than they would be in home heat treating a 2.25 wide 3/16 or 1/4" thick plane iron.

The other thing that needs to be considered when attempting home heat treating is that one mistake and you have a really bad burn. The ER visit alone would pay for a lot of professional heat treating. So if you intend to save money "be careful out there!"

Ron

[Ron Petley]

This is a great thread, I am going to give it a try this summer. You could make a 2 brick forge for quenching and heat treat in your kitchen oven, or with a propane torch. 01 would be a great steel to try it with, if you miss the hadening you can re do it untill you get it right.
I had posted a photo of a inexpensive forge in this thread;
http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthre...=757960&page=2
What I would like to know is what rockwell hardness is good for a chisel, and a lathe skew chisel, which I would think would have to be softer. Cheers Ron.

[Cliff Rohrabacher]

O1
Heat it to Cherry red. Yes you can use your eye.

Quench it in any oil - use a lot of oil

Shine it up to get a shiny surface and play heat across it till you get a slight straw color. That's about 56on the RC scale great for chisels
If you go to Peacock you'll have a 46 RC spring temper.

You can also temper to 56 RC in a good oven at 350-Deg F for a few hours. That'll do it rather nicely.

If you screw it up you should toss it or anneal it. Simply recycling the heat treat process is the wrong thing.
Annealing relaxes the crystal structure and lets you start over. Going straight to cherry red again sets up lots of internal stresses that tempering won't eliminate.

[nick brigg]

Now...what about getting the tang or whatever it's called into a chunk of wood? One technique i saw in david finck's book was to re-saw a blank, router a groove for the metal, then glue it all back up together, then shape the wood to whatever. hows that sound?

[Ron Petley]

The easiest way is to make it tapered and put a copper ring around the end of the wood, a short piece of copper plumbing pipe will make enough for a whole set, and will look good, the ring does not really have to be copper, any metal ring will do.
Cheers Ron.

[Trevor Walsh]

+1 to Ron Petley, I have a square taper on the tang, this gets burnt into the handle at a black heat little bits at a time until it's close. Then it gets happered the rest of the way in and done! I'm picking up some 3/32" O1 tomorrow to start on a tiny tiny chisel for dovetailing. I'll post some pictures here while I work.

[David Weaver]

I haven't made any chisels...well, at least not any intentionally nice ones. The thing that sticks in my head is that unless you're making push-carving tools or push chisels - light duty type things, a chisel that has a fairly substantial shank and a bolster is nice to have in a tanged chisel, and a socket and a tapered profile in a socket chisel. Those are hard to duplicate, and good chisels - probably better than you can make - can be had for cheap.

As Ron B mentioned, if you're going to heat treat a plane iron and it is relatively thick and wide, you need to have the heat to heat it from the interior to the edge, which is likely going to mean getting something substantial, like a weed torch. I haven't used a small furnace, so I don't know if you have any control over the ability to heat steel any way other than thinnest parts first and then wrap it with foil to prevent decarb. The process is intuitively pretty easy if you have a big enough torch and a dark enough room to see what's going on with the metal. But you need to have enough oil to swoosh around a hot plane iron, too, and that's likely a gallon at least, even if you're doing only one (don't put your hand in the oil to see how hot it got even after one iron, the hot oil circulates to the top of the can).

Specialty chisels (fishtails, etc) are great ones to start with, where a bolster or socket won't matter, and the tang being thin won't matter either. In fact, I can't think of a reason not to make the little specialty chisels with the cost that they fetch new.

George - I'm assuming you have made tanged chisels with a nice forged bolster before, how do you do it - is the bolster forged, cut and then tapered for a tight fit on the chisel shank, or is it all forged as one piece? Presume the handles are burnt in then up to the bolster?

[Jamie Bacon]

I've also thought of making chisels from time to time. Like some 18th century style square sided firmers, but not knowing how to make the bolsters without having a forge has always stopped me. I'd love to know how bolsters are made.

Jamie