Timber framing chisels

[AJB Temple]

Surely if you are timber framing and want to do deep mortices, then a chain morticer is the tool for the job. I have a Makita chain morticer and there is no way I would hog out with a chisel. I have the 60mm sorby chisel but mine is the socket version and you can belt it with a wooden mallet no problem. It is not soft - handles old oak (not green) fine. I also have the much wider framing chisel (4") which is useful for cleaning up big tenons but not much else. What I mostly use for chisels is old, wide Ward tools (up to 2"). These have brass ring handles that will take a lot of punishment, and superb steel that takes a very good and long lasting edge. Mine were cheap as chips on eBay.

 

[Harry581010]

Thanks for the replies guys. I am looking for a framing chisel, not slick, for chopping green oak. I have a Barr slick and chisels up to 50mm but want to try something bigger. D_W thanks for being so up front about what it is you do. The abuse the chisel would be getting (60mm width chopping down shoulders over 100mm deep) is something i cannot imagine a non socketed chisel would be capable of taking

 

[Adam W.]

I'm going to have to ask - what difference would the extra 9.2mm make ?

 

[Inspector]

I was going to suggest a custom tool maker and found one in central British Columbia on the West Coast until I saw their regular socketed timber frame chisels made of truck springs and sawmill blades are in the $1000Cad range. Maybe someone closer to home would be better for you.

Would Barr tools make one for you?

Pete

 

[--Tom--]

Josh Burrell would be worth a shout to see if he’d consider making one

 

[D_W]

Thanks for the replies guys. I am looking for a framing chisel, not slick, for chopping green oak. I have a Barr slick and chisels up to 50mm but want to try something bigger. D_W thanks for being so up front about what it is you do. The abuse the chisel would be getting (60mm width chopping down shoulders over 100mm deep) is something i cannot imagine a non socketed chisel would be capable of taking

Making one that could tolerate the abuse wouldn't be that difficult. I'd just need to know every single thing that makes the chisel good before I'd make one. I don't charge for tools, so I don't have any desire to make one that wouldn't be the one you'd choose just by feel and sort of non-verbal pleasures that you'd get.

That may sound backwards - since I don't charge more than materials, then it has to be as close to perfect as I could make it.

I've seen a lot of explanations for socketed tools over tanged (the japanese timber tools are tanged, and they don't have a particularly robust tang design despite the internet wisdom - I've made the bench chisels fail before when tempering the metal parts and seeing what their limits are - apparently, they are beyond the limit of the handle/tang junction). Maybe the most believable thing for me is that the socket allows you to swap handles when you break one. I've seen two people suggest the socket is good because even when you've lost the handle, you can use the chisel as it's socketed to finish a job, but that's a potentially costly move.

When I make a chisel, it's fully hardened up to the shoulder, and then partially hardened through part of the tang just short of the bolster and then mostly unhardened above that - it'd tolerate anything shy of putting a cheater pipe on the handle - it's the aspects (The profile, the weight, the proportions, etc) that I'm less sure of.

thinking off of the top of my head - the lack of tanged chisels in really large framers may also have something to do with how it dictates handle shape (you can still have a nice taper into the socket. The handle into a tanged chisel with a tang that's around 1/2" square at the bolster would be very strange and straight, and that's not very comfortable)

 

[D_W]

Here's a bit of a buzz kill on my thinking about taking something like this on ..

....2 1/2" x 18 x 1/2" O1 bar stock - about $140 with tax and shipping.

I do think that laying in wait to find something of this size vintage is a better idea. I could make something with a heat treat as good as you'll find, but I don't think most people who forge tools will do that for you. The last thing you want is an overpriced lump of rubbish that fails to hold an edge well and please you.

Something with a 1/2" tang, though, would be *robust* and not that hard to make. If you were local and could bring me a good example, i'd take this on.

 

[Something catchy]

Try Etsy site , there are a lot of blacksmiths on there that make some slick and framing chisels at a great price

 

[D_W]

I'm warming up to this - give me an idea of weight and lengths on a 2" wide chisel. I can do it with 3/8th stock and I'll see how it turns out. If it's strange, I'll just sell it on ebay and recover the costs.

3/8th stock is 1/2 the cost of 1/2" thick stock. I figure materials cost for the amount of grinding and gas will be another $10 or so.

I need measurements of chisel thickness below the socket, the length of the chisel from the middle of the socket down and from the top of the socket down (in proportions, socketed chisels are designed to be held with the bottom of your off hand on the socket - I've noticed on vintage chisels that a socket chisel of length need (like parer) will be the same total length, but the steel will be about the same below the bottom of the socket as mine will be from the bolster.

It wouldn't actually take me that long to make this, and just to dispel a myth about forged chisels, I do shape my chisels with a hammer, but I don't do heavy forging. The steel that's rolled is already forged by the rolling and the carbides are just elongated (the steel has a grain direction) tubes instead of balls. These can be made to balls with thermal cycling but there's nothing wrong with the tubes (the translation of this is that when I sent steel samples treated in the open atmosphere to a well known metallurgist here, he was a bit stunned by the quality of my heat treatment results but the reason they were good is I didn't try to do too much). It's unlikely that most chisels will be very good if they're heavily forged because the maker has to have a serious interest in refining grain size and forgers don't really do much of that - they want to forge instead.

My parers can be malleted full force like you would a firmer or mortise chisel without hurting anything, so a larger chisel like this for framing isn't going to have any issue with being hit hard and used deep.