#chisel rescue

Ok so I left those poor old boys soaking in vinegar for like 20hrs…and they looked like this;

I also soaked the small GPO screwdriver which you can see in there, and a Marples Screwdriver I found in my garage collection of poor abandoned items. Marples are a very well respected and sought after tool maker, yes from Sheffield, even today. Apparently the new stuff isn’t quite as good as the old but it’s still top notch. I’d love some Marples chisels and gouges - even old ones covered in rust coat a pretty penny. Anyway back to the ones I have.

I removed the chisels one by one from the vinegar and wiped the residue off until no more black marks were left on the paper towel - the black stuff is dissolved steel. After that I sprayed them with WD40 to protect them before I clean them up further, as it’s going to be a long manual process. I strained the vinegar from this set to use again on the back saw blade when I eventually manage to free it. I used a coffee filter and it looked grim.

Now the white stuff floating in the big crate is god knows what, possibly some of the plastic surface from the handle of the hacksaw-so that vinegar went down the drain. As mentioned in the 3.0 you’re not meant to leave cast iron for more than 8hrs - it was fine. These lumps of fireplace were so rusted it wasn’t going to get to the surface to pit them. The stuff in the tetanus crate is going to require hitting with the brass brush on the bench grinder to get the rust back, so I coated that all in WD40 and put it back in it’s old blue crate to rest until I finish up with the chisels.

So ignoring the big guy at the right of the pic who we will come back to momentarily, this is how things are looking. The orange gaffer tape on the left was part of a Kilner jar system I ended up using to soak the long mortise chisel (second from right) which wouldn’t fit anywhere else as it’s so long. I made a round Gaffer replacement for the Kilner jar lid insert, and put a slit in for the blade so it stood upright in the vinegar-and I forgot to take a picture. It was reasonably successful and protected the handle, but you can only do one at a time. But I’ll definitely use it again for single items.

So I decided to get to work on the big Registered chisel first, as I want to use it to remove bark from the stack of ash I have in my workshop, and also a slab of oak I’m planning on using to make a small hall bench. Registered chisels are designed to take a beating - literally, hence the double hoop in the handle, they’re for chopping and levering out wood in timber framing. After rubbing down with fine grade steel wool, and 400 grit paper on a block it was clear that the pitting was not going to be removed that way. I also made the decision that as I planned to use it as a brute force chop and lever tool - as it is intended, I wasn’t going to polish it all the way up. Just enough to make it functional. I’m not trying to make flat square perfect sides with this guy - so it can be retain a little character on the non cutting surfaces.

So as you can see in the first image there’s quite a chip in the edge. In the second image you can see the sharpening situation I’ve got going here. It’s a glass cutting board as float glass, with 280, 400, 600, 1000 grit wet and dry paper double sided taped, and then masking taped down. If I could find a high tack double sided it would be the answer to my prayers but there’s a weird dearth in the uk. I chose to sharpen and hone manually as my bench grinder wheels are aggressively low grit, so it’s ok for re-grinding a ruined edge, or re-profiling, or for tools that I don’t mind ruining by accident…I.E. not these. It’s not a water stone, so I have to keep dipping them in a jar of cold water as I go so they don’t lose their ability to keep an edge, and it’s not worth the risk with these, as for all they cost very little they’re irreplaceable at that cost if I mess them up. So to me the extra time it takes is worth it. I don’t use an angle honing guide for sharpening my tools manually, I have one but it’s super crappy, I’ve found it’s easier to just grab my protractor (which you can see peeking out under the glass in the second pic here) and set my body up right. I instinctively tighten all my upper body, like I was taught to when throwing pottery (which I suck at btw), and then move using my legs. A while back I was pleased to see that Wille Sundqvist recommends that way of approaching sharpening in his brilliant book Swedish Carving Techniques - felt good to be like, yes, I’m doing something right!

In the first pic you might notice a couple of shiny spots, from where I began to flatten the back, which has some fairly entertaining high spots due to the years of pitting, I don’t need a totally flat back for my purposes with this one so I didn’t go all the way with it. If I want to mortise massive logs with it some day I’ll go back to it and fully flatten it. It was a long slow process, I think about 3 - 4 hours.

I took some more off the back and when I started on the cutting edge realised it had definitely been hit hard with a grinder at some point - as you can see it has a very obvious dip in the centre. The profile is 20° for some reason which is unusual for a chisel of this size and pattern, and honestly again because of my use for it I decided to leave it at that and put a 25° micro bevel on the edge. If I were planning on using it for its original framing purposes I’d regrind to 25° and give it a 30° bevel as it should in theory have, but I do love the idea someone was using this absolute monster as a paring chisel. Taking the chip out took a lot of time, and I had replace the 280 and 400 grit papers as they filled with slurry and began to ripple and shred with the water.

By the end of the day I had an almost mirror finish on the cutting edge, I took it up to 1800 grit and it was sharp enough to take sweet edge curls off a piece of scrap beech. I’ll hone it again and strop it before first use, but I now need to clean up the handle so it’s smooth and comfortable. I’ll be sanding it to 280 grit and then oiling it with either boiled linseed or tung oil.