Anyone actually use a chisel wider than 1″ for making furniture?
joeleonetti
| Posted in Hand Tools on
I do mostly hand tool woodworking. As such, my chisels are in my hands constantly for joinery work. The widest was 1″ and I thought a 2″ wide chisel would be handy for wood removal for housing dados. After a few years, it became clear I didn’t like the 2″ wide chisel. I’ve thought maybe a 1.25″ wide chisel might be the sweet spot rather than a 1″ wide chisel for waste removal on housing dados. Anyone actually use a chisel wider than 1″ on a regular basis for furniture making? I realize this is likely a $50 decision so I’m not loosing sleep over it. Thanks.
Replies
Rarely.
As a restorer, I do mostly hand tool work. For decades all I had waere ⅛-1" chisels and always my 1" wore down first, by a lot. I got a 2" from Ashley Iles, which I love, and I use it almost as a plane, but when I want to take a lot of wood off. I then got the 1 ½" and then the 1 ¼" and I use them all, now taking some of the brunt that the 1" chisel got. I'm a chisel guy so I really can't have too many! I really like the 1 ¼" because it is much longer than the 1" as well.
I can attest, John wears them down to a nub.
I use a 2" a lot. Almost never with a mallet. It's nice when I want to pare a spot wide and flat, on both long grain and end grain. I actually used to use a plane blade to do the same. My older hands don't like that as much.
I have a set of NOS Stanley 750 chisels that I bought in 1975. 1/8-1" by eights, 1&1/4-2" by quarters. I definitely like the wider chisels when trying to pare a straight shoulder using a knife line. But my favorite is the 7/8" for size and feel.
I have a set of Stanley everlasting #40s from 1/8 through 1.75" and use them all. I added doubles of the 1/2" and 1.25" and have them sharpened steeper for paring. The widest ones get used mostly cleaning up mortises cut on the benchtop hollow chisel.
One other thought: Because the blade is so much wider than the handle, a 2" chisel can clean up rabbets or corners.
Thanks folks for the feedback so far. Looking like I will go with a wider one and see if I like it. In Oct or so there is a local vintage tool show. Likely wait till that and see what I can find.
For what it's worth, I find shorter is better than longer for a 2" wide chisel.
Thanks. I was actually considering a stub chisel for the 1.25" because my 2" chisel was awfully big.
I probably have 150 chisels and if I consider carving gouges certainly more than that. From 1/8" to a 4" slick and I use them all from time to time. I have some I baby and some I wouldn't give a second thought to prying a paint can open with. Most of my chisels are vintage as are most of my hand tools. I guess some that I bought new might be considered vintage now. My most babied chisels are a "set" of Bergs. I had a 2" chisel that I probably picked up at a flea market and one day while using it I realized that it very likely was the best piece of metal in my shop. It said Eric Anton Berg on it so I went about getting more. Complete perfect sets , original box, were sometimes $2000. I shopped ebay over a few months and managed to put together a set of good ones ,at least good enough, and probably averaged about $20 a piece.
I'm trying really really hard to limit my chisels. I have four good sets and two carpentry sets. More than I will ever use up in my lifetime.
I have a 2” Berg, wish I had a few more. Like you say, best piece of metal in the shop.
Wide chisels have many benefits in certain situation over thin width chisels. One is the planing that has been mentioned, the other is the ability to more easily see the blade tilt from side to side. This is useful for subtle angle adjustments, chamfering and blending.
1 1/2" is my preferred width.
Thanks. I suspect I'm going to get both a 1.25 and 1.5" chisel to see which of the two might be more handy. If I end up not liking one or the other or both, they can simply put along with the three other sets I don't use. When I die, my wife will grimace at all the chisels I own. Such is life. After all, she has a wall full of crosses and a cabinet full of miniature ceramic mice so she can hardly complain.
I've gone sour on wider chisels for most applications. The wider chisel, the more the force you apply to it is spread across the width. So you have to push twice as hard on a 2" chisel to get the same force on the wood as a 1" chisel. That can make it difficult to be precise. I do like wider chisels just for paring lightly on the sides of longer mortices or other uses along those lines. For serious chopping, no -- better to use narrower ones. For me, I find anything over 3/4" to be hard to control precisely. If the job doesn't require that, than have at it.
There is nothing that say you need to register the entire width of the blade with each cut.
Using a corner or small portion of a wide blade is often easier than using a small blade, for the reasons I mentioned above.
I don't recommend having too many tools and I do have too many. Saws need sharpened, edge tools need sharpened, planes need to be tuned. I dont even try to keep them all ready to use. The things I use daily I keep in useable condition , everything else I deal with if I need them. Some things like a 32" backsaw I never have a use for but if I ever need one I have it!
Often I figure that if I don't have it by now I probably don't need it but then I see something somewhere and I buy it anyway! The other day my neighbor was having a Saturday yard sale and Friday evening as he was setting up I stopped in. Looking around I spotted something laying on the ground ," Is that a Zyliss? " He looked at me like a deer in the headlights. He had no idea what it was. Next morning I popped over and bought it. It cost me a bit extra because by morning he did know what it was. It was all there, dusty and dirty but all the parts. Woodcraft years back was pushing them hard in their catalog , Zyliss got a whole page--but they were pretty expensive, looked handy ,but expensive. I don't know if they still make them or not. I had work to do on a turning the other day and was pondering how to hold it , well I have a Zyliss! Other than that,--if I don't have it by now I probably don't need it! So, where IS this vintage tool sale in October ?
Anyway, when it come to some tools you don't need multiples, they become a maintenance problem ,but I think for chisels one of each and even of each type and size is not a bad way to go.
More tools = more maintenance for sure. I can see a back up set to the main ones for most hand tools. Not in any rush to get rid of the ones I consider excessive. A good problem for the moment. The ones I consider daily users are maintained. The rest aren't. Fortunately, where I live humidity is somewhat low and stable year round so rust is not at all an issue. My father lives 45 minutes away and close to the ocean and things do rust more quickly there.
Am I the only one that just googled "zyliss"?
Nope
I looked it up as well.
I remember those Zyliss things. They always seemed really funny to me.
I lived about 30 minutes from the only Woodcraft there was, back in the late 70s. It was always a big deal to go and wander around the aisles. The only other place to look at tools, aside from an occasional yard sale, was Sears. May they rest in peace.
O.K. --- "Zyliss" a Swiss made aluminum clamping ,or rather, vise system with a bunch of attachments to facilitate holding weird stuff in a variety of ways.
Woodcraft promoted them in their catalog back in the 70 s as a sort of miracle tool. They were expensive for the time so if you had a vise already you didn't buy it. I had never seen one in real life until this one. There is even an attachment to make a small lathe using an electric drill but it must be some kind of Swiss drill because none of my half dozen electric drills will fit.
An older friend stopped woodworking and took several things to the church yard sale including a Zyliss and several other associated bits. I jumped on it for $5. After several attempts to find a use for it, I shoved it under the workbench till the next church yard sale. We got $10 that time.
My most used chisel is an unmarked 1 1/4" chisel, holds a great edge and easy for me to handle. I am sure if chisels had birth certs., this chisel's would say, father unknown, Winsted Conn.
I have a single 1.5" chisel, a clear-plastic-handle Stanley; I found it in the grass in my boulevard (thankfully right before I ran over it with my mower). I sanded the bits of rust off, gave it just a quick sharpening, set it aside, and then the next project I used it to scrape the semi-hardened Titebond off the joints, since it was a junk "freebie".
I still have it (26 years later) and it's my second-most-used chisel, reserved solely for cleaning up semi-dried Titebond to this day (it IS due for a cleanup/resharpening). A half-inch cheep Stanley would've done the job just as well, but it was not what I was "given". :D
Oh, and I do own one "Zyliss"... it's aluminum, crushes a single clove of garlic, and I've used it daily for at least 4 decades.
Some uses to which I put a wide chisel (having 2x25mm - one cranked, 38mm and 50mm):
* "Planing" off dried glue from large glue-ups of planks such as table tops. A wide blade acts more like a plane than does a narrow blade, which is easy to tilt so it gouges out a chunk of wood. A cranked chisel means you can get at all the glue lines in the middle. You can use the bevel side if you haven't got a cranked chisel but the crank allows a finer control and use of the large flat chisel back is a better jig than the small bevel. The bevel may not even be flat.
* Chopping out to make square the corner parts left in the rebates of doors made for housing glass, in a routed-rebate door. A long chisel edge is useful to put against the straight edge of the rebate leading up to the corner to keep the cutting part of the chisel blade in line. A large polished chisel back is also useful as the reflection of the workpiece can be used to get the chisel properly vertical when chopping out the corner waste.
* Making a small V-groove down a knifed line to help guide a saw when cutting housings in a cabinet side. A longer chisel edge is better at cutting exactly to the knifed line than is a short chisel edge, which can easily cut skewed or too far.
There's probably more but I can't bring them to mind just now.
Lataxe
I don't and I don't think many wider than an inch were found in extant tool chests of fine furnituremakers from the 18th and 19th centuries. If Chippendale didn't need one, you probably don't.
Seems also like people still use too much glue.
Chippy woulda traded his sister for a Festool domino.
Charlie, old imagineer,
Have you examined every tool chest used in those times? What if Sawhill the furniture maker had all his workers use a 2" chisel and you just never knew 'cos Sawhill wasn't as famous as ole Chip?
It's nice to make up history to suit today's little beliefs and preferences, I know. Personally I try to expunge such habits from my wetware, though, as reality is more chewy and tasty. :-)
Mind, reality can be very hard to apprehend in the human world! We do love artifice, we humans; both physical and metaphysical.
We do have account books, probate lists, and all sorts of written accounts of 18th century tools. And "catalogues" that listed and illustrated every sort of hand tool you could want, including plane blades and chisels up to 3" wide. There was a MUCH wider range of tools than we have today.
And there are a couple of fairly complete and untouched chests from that era. The Benjamin Seaton tool chest had 8 chisels from 1 to 2" width.
If they had a need and a use for a 2 to 3 inch chisel, then we could too.
Check out the great books "The Tool Chest of Benjamin Seaton" and Joseph Smith's Key to the Various Manufacturies of Sheffield. There are engravings and price lists in the Key, and photographs and tracing of the tools in the Seaton book.
All of us should have the Seaton book. The second edition is much expanded over the first.
I have one 1-1/2" butt chisel that is great or registering along an edge to square a rounded inner rabbet corner left by a router.
I finally tossed a few Zyllis accessories when I had to admit that the main unit was lost to the annals of time during one move or another. I tried hard to give them away for about a year but no takers ;-(
“[Deleted]”
Some like them and some don't. Only way to know for sure would be to buy them and test them out for myself. Not a bad problem to have.
I don't know what Chippendale had in his tool chest and we don't have photographs to show us what tools were commonly used in the 18th century or before but there are eched drawings of men working and with tools on display. Those drawings often show wide chisels and in a splayed out pattern quite different from what we use today. Then, like now , there were many uses for tools not associated with fine delicate and probably expensive for their time furniture . There were millrights and shiprights, carriage wheel makers , builders of all sorts, coopers ,timberframers. A massive amount of heavy brutal work went into turning a tree into a board. Wood was used for everything and most people probably had some hands on experience working with wood- at least on some level, even if it was only Ma sending a 9 year old kid out to split some kindling or maybe someone earning some extra cash splitting rails to buy books before launching their political career.
I dismantled some old chestnut log cabins. The floor system was pretty massive timbers adzed down to resemble boards and big honking stopped dovetails attaching them into the rim joist which was a squared off log, no metal fasteners. I guess you could have chiseled them out with a narrow chisel if that was all you had but the way they were made suggested a pretty big hefty chisel ,and one that could take pounding at that, would be what was required.
We do have photos! See above.
I remembered that I have a book and just found it. Probably haven't seen it in 40 years. " Museum of Early American Tools" by Eric Sloan. There are many tools in that book that we never see today. Burn augers and block knives, mortising hatchets( now there's some hand to eye coordination!)and a vast array of tools for riving wood for special purposes. Many types of large and wide chisels. By the way I love those old photos of the French and Indian War !
Not sure about the others, but mortising axes are still available today from Gransfors Bruks of Sweden! The Swedish tradition of log building seems to be alive and well given the array of insanely specialized hatchets and axes still in production, including surface smoothing hatchets in pairs for right and left use kind of like a pair of matching skew planes.
Using chisels wider than 1" for furniture making can be practical, especially for waste removal in housing dados. A 2" chisel may feel cumbersome for some tasks, while a 1.25" chisel could strike a better balance. Experimenting with different chisel widths based on your specific tasks and preferences can help determine the ideal size for your needs. It's a relatively minor investment and a valuable tool to enhance your hand tool woodworking projects.
That's kind of where I have landed. Next tool collector show in Oct(ish), I will go looking for both a 1.25" and 1.5". Also want a compass plane.
I've been thinking about a compass plane for about 40 years. A couple of times a year I'll see one for sale and consider it. But i figure if i havent used it yet, i probably dont need it.
Bought a Kunz compass plane years ago at an antique store. Never used it and it’s gathering dust somewhere on top of a wall mounted cabinet.
Same as my Kunz scraper plane. That thing left more chatter marks than it removed.
I have a Stanley #113 compass plane (Type 1, passed down from my grandfather). I find that I use it more often than might be expected. For me it’s easier to produce a fair curve such as on the bottom of aprons than when using a spoke shave. And it is very satisfying to take a fine long shaving. A few things I have learned (mostly the hard ways of course):
—It works quite well for any relatively uniform radius curve, inside or outside, but changing radii are a bit more of a challenge.
—It helps to work with the part a bit longer than finished length since starting the cut can chatter a bit (skewing isn’t really an option with a curved sole because it changes the effective radius).
—I use the original iron and cap and with a bit of honing it works just fine. Aftermarket irons aren’t compatible with this model’s geometry and depth adjustment mechanism.
—Definitely beats the whine of a powered router…
I agree with JEarch on the compass plane, especially on inside curves of a band saw. A lot less dust than an oscillating sander. I have an old Fulton/Sargent scraper plane. It chattered badly till I started skewing it a few degrees. Most of the chatter went away