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>>Great chisels. It would be nice if you added some of your build photos. <<
I don't really have any build photos of these at least that I can recall .....could be a fib saying that, I just don't remember taking pictures.
There's no real magic in the making of them. They start as 3/8 metal bar and I hammer them down to near tapered thickness and then grind them and then forge weld on the bolster after forging the tang to a tapered point, and grind and heat treat.
the bolster is just a flat piece of metal drilled with a hole in it and then the chisel is hammered into it out to form and hammered from the sides. Once it's where it needs to be, the whole thing is heated at the junction of the bolster blank and the tang to near sparking temperature and hammered to set the weld and to make sure there are no gaps. and then the bolster is ground and then filed. It's not a whole lot different than woodworking other than I guess we don't hammer wood to shape, but the grinding and filing seems not much different than hand tool woodwork to me.
The handle is kind of a boring story - it's just a square beech blank drilled with a stepped hole and then turned around the tang - that kind of cleans up the steps and allows the tang to match the handle, but before it's totally just drilled out to size with the tang itself, you stop a little earlier and then tap it into place...sort of by feel. Too late, and the handle is loose - too early and tapping on too far, obviously it would split. But after that, i just form it with a belt sander and then plane the facets crisp and soften the corners of the facets with a file or plane and apply finish. No jigs for anything. Nothing wrong with jigs, but in one off stuff, it's just easier to work freehand.
I don't really have any build photos of these at least that I can recall .....could be a fib saying that, I just don't remember taking pictures.
There's no real magic in the making of them. They start as 3/8 metal bar and I hammer them down to near tapered thickness and then grind them and then forge weld on the bolster after forging the tang to a tapered point, and grind and heat treat.
the bolster is just a flat piece of metal drilled with a hole in it and then the chisel is hammered into it out to form and hammered from the sides. Once it's where it needs to be, the whole thing is heated at the junction of the bolster blank and the tang to near sparking temperature and hammered to set the weld and to make sure there are no gaps. and then the bolster is ground and then filed. It's not a whole lot different than woodworking other than I guess we don't hammer wood to shape, but the grinding and filing seems not much different than hand tool woodwork to me.
The handle is kind of a boring story - it's just a square beech blank drilled with a stepped hole and then turned around the tang - that kind of cleans up the steps and allows the tang to match the handle, but before it's totally just drilled out to size with the tang itself, you stop a little earlier and then tap it into place...sort of by feel. Too late, and the handle is loose - too early and tapping on too far, obviously it would split. But after that, i just form it with a belt sander and then plane the facets crisp and soften the corners of the facets with a file or plane and apply finish. No jigs for anything. Nothing wrong with jigs, but in one off stuff, it's just easier to work freehand.
