Pleased with this ebay bargain
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rogxwhit
Established Member
I feel for your pig ...
And hope that the epoxy flavour won't leak into the bacon ... ;-)
And hope that the epoxy flavour won't leak into the bacon ... ;-)
G S Haydon
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Funny how a tool designed to do the works so well!
Kudos on the find, lovely chisel.
Kudos on the find, lovely chisel.
I've never even heard of a Pig Sticker. Looks very cool, what do you use it for? It reminds me slightly of one of my most used tools, on the right here along with my the other thing I use a lot.
Anyone fancy having a guess what these two are...?
ajs
Established Member
It's simply a very robust mortice chisel. Used for mortices obviously, generally banging out larger mortices in harder wood in short order. No, you don't need one, but if you're doing a lot of that kind of work it is a time saver.
This was a slightly unfair question tbh...
On the right is a Morihei Japanese oyster shucker. Which they grind with a single bevel, like a sturdy kiridashi / marking knife.
The left is a Meuchi spike. Intended for nailing the heads of live eels to a board, to stop them thrashing about too much when you skin and gut them alive.
Though I use both of them for kinda carving purposes, especially when working with vine wood.
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Sorry for the slight derailment there OP!
Jester129
Established Member
Nice! 
Jacob
New Luddism. Awake and resist!
Actually for smaller mortices and soft or hard wood. You don't get the trad "oval bolster" mortice chisel above 3/4" wide (though I've never seen one) but they do go down to 1/8". They are designed for a very specific fast morticing technique which just gets too difficult as you go above 1/2" the most common size, as were used in millions of doors and window frames when hand tool using was the thing.
cotedupy's chisel doesn't seem to have the oval bolster and the handle would split very quickly if you tried morticing with it!
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Rob, if you cut bigger deeper mortises, you'll really find the benefit of a chisel like that. If half of the mortise is below the level of the roundover at the top of the bevel, you can "slip" the chisel up and down in the cut more easily and in the corners, take enormous amounts of material out instead of little stripes of 1/8th to 1/4th of an inch...whatever it would be depending on what the wood allows. I think they were intended for production and small production work with deep mortises.
For the mortises you showed, you may find that a firmer is faster.
The fact that OBM chisels are hard to use in smaller mortises is probably why there are still many available. I fished a nice sort of matching set of chisels (same owner, same brand, but bought at different times) from the UK a few years ago for something like $25 each. I don't often find a need for them, but could certainly make a couple of them on a smaller scale (not as tall from bottom to top of thickness) and a little lighter for cabinet work.
I'll try to explain this corner trick that I mentioned in big mortises.
Inevitably, you can cut mortises fast bevel down because you're cutting "up grain" instead of directly across. That leaves some deep fat corners short of the ends.
Keeping an OBM bevel down and striking so that the chisel travels vertically ( as in the, the chisel won't be vertical), you can take out the entire corner in one pass, even if the bottom of it is a stripe of wood 3/4ths of an inch thick or maybe more).
The slipping that I mentioned, and rotating is this:
* as you start, the cuts are small, no big deal
* as you get deeper, you are splitting more and more wood off of the side of the mortises, so you do this:
- a solid whack to drive the chisel a little deeper, but levering right away is detrimental to the edge, so you
- jiggle the chisel a little (like a partial rotation) to release it and pull it up slightly so that the edge isn't tightly wedged in the bottom of the cut
- then rotate the chisel so that pushing the chisel forward rotates the top curved part of the bevel on the wood side of the mortise (toward the ends) and you'll find a huge long piece of wood will split off - effectively you've broken it from the sides and the bottom at once
If you have to force the rotation too much, you may break the tip off of the chisel, so you have to get a feel for this. it's more important to get the feel for this than it is to "never ever break the tip off of a chisel". What's more important, you or the tool?
This is a skilled move - it's easy to do it inaccurately, but I think production mortising in deep mortises would not have been a piston fit exercise.
If the top of a mortise chisel is not rounded, this slipping is difficult to do (the slight release before rotating). The top of the chisel digs into wood and you will become very tired trying to tug the chisel around.
Inevitably, you can cut mortises fast bevel down because you're cutting "up grain" instead of directly across. That leaves some deep fat corners short of the ends.
Keeping an OBM bevel down and striking so that the chisel travels vertically ( as in the, the chisel won't be vertical), you can take out the entire corner in one pass, even if the bottom of it is a stripe of wood 3/4ths of an inch thick or maybe more).
The slipping that I mentioned, and rotating is this:
* as you start, the cuts are small, no big deal
* as you get deeper, you are splitting more and more wood off of the side of the mortises, so you do this:
- a solid whack to drive the chisel a little deeper, but levering right away is detrimental to the edge, so you
- jiggle the chisel a little (like a partial rotation) to release it and pull it up slightly so that the edge isn't tightly wedged in the bottom of the cut
- then rotate the chisel so that pushing the chisel forward rotates the top curved part of the bevel on the wood side of the mortise (toward the ends) and you'll find a huge long piece of wood will split off - effectively you've broken it from the sides and the bottom at once
If you have to force the rotation too much, you may break the tip off of the chisel, so you have to get a feel for this. it's more important to get the feel for this than it is to "never ever break the tip off of a chisel". What's more important, you or the tool?
This is a skilled move - it's easy to do it inaccurately, but I think production mortising in deep mortises would not have been a piston fit exercise.
If the top of a mortise chisel is not rounded, this slipping is difficult to do (the slight release before rotating). The top of the chisel digs into wood and you will become very tired trying to tug the chisel around.
Jacob
New Luddism. Awake and resist!
Is yours actually 5/8" wide it looks less in the photo? They are intended to cut a precise mortice exactly the width of the chisel. If you then get set up to make your tenons all the same size and an easy push fit it saves a lot of fiddling about.
I did a bit of a demo here Getting an Old Pigsticker Ready for Work sorry about the background noise it got a bit argumentative!
The key thing is no levering needed at any point, except the little wiggle to loosen the chisel. Each cut is vertical and takes a slice off the face of the previous cut. It matches what you would do with a non-powered hand-operated mortice machine, where every cut is vertical.
You might need to lever a tiny bit at the end to get the last chippings out, if it's a blind hole.
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Jacob
New Luddism. Awake and resist!
Rounded bevel is just a byproduct of normal fast freehand sharpening on an oil stone but it's actually useful on mortice chisel for cleaning out the corners of blind mortices.
I guess he was saying keep the chisel vertical, as that is the normal practice, but not obvious if you don't know how to do it. But he might have had ideas of his own!
The bevel is vertical, as in you ride it into the corners. how you get from the center to the corners can be a matter of riding the bevel or it can be progressively moving toward vertical to finish the corners and avoid the "move" that I mentioned.
The more you're cutting "up the grain" and not directly across it, the easier the chisel will penetrate.
The idea that there's a really tall chisel and the back of the chisel is ridden on the wood side is a modern idea.
the entire bevel isn't rounded on a pigsticker, though - just the tip and the top. The area between is flat.
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The bevel goes to vertical in the corners as you get moving along, not the length. Nobody would've held these chisels vertical along their length with the back (flat side) against the wood 125 years ago.
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