**Managing Chisels: A Tool Tip**
I'm currently working with a three thousand stone, so I thought I'd take it up to a one thousand and see how that affects the edge. Oh, hello there, okay son, now that's a pretty respectable face I know that. There's way farther I can go because I watch that YouTube channel of the guy who makes knives out of everything from tin foil to paper towels to dog poop or whatever. Um, but that is about where I take all my chisels.
Start with the 600, move to the 1000, then to the 3000 and that gets me the edge that I'm looking for. Let's cut something. Hmm, nice it bites well it's very consistent. And that's how I manage my chisels again. I use chisels all the time for dumb stuff but for the like super fine woodworking stuff they're really meant for. I do that very infrequently, um so I keep my better chisels in reserve and I keep them as sharp as they were the day I bought them and may have touched them up here and there.
But this garbage chisel right here, I'm able to keep sharp enough to supply like 90 percent of what I do with chisels. Here in the shop. And if I ended up with some recalcitrant pair of things that could not be separated, I would not be above hammering this five dollar chisel into the middle to separate them, knowing that I might harm the tip but I would never do that with a nice Japanese chisel.
Yeah, this is a weird tool tip right because I, I don't have a lot of information to impart to you except how I manage the sharpness uh and utility of my chisels. Thank you guys for joining me for this tool tip, I am so sure there's going to be all sorts of advice in the comments about sharpening and about stones and about your favorite products.
Thank you so much for all that advice, I really appreciate it. Uh and if I come across something that's life-changing I will share it with you. Thank you guys for joining me, I will see you next time. By the way, I use this handy device also for sharpening the blades for my planes, same exact procedure, log it in here, make it flat, start with the 600, go to the one, then the three um and I'm I can report to you that my planes are all of them in terrific working order.
And again, you know my favorite one is this little Craftsman uh finger plane just to be the one you could buy at Ace Hardware maybe it still is. Um, this is uh I used to work with uh the legendary ira keeler an amazing wood carver and model maker worked to dial um's model shop ira carved the uh wooden bucks for the for stormtrooper masks so that they could be vacuum formed.
Yeah, he carved a storm trooper out of basswood uh to be vacuformed ira is amazing and he did 95 percent of everything with one of these chisels uh he modified it in a couple ways he flattened to the bottom because the bottom does not come uh nice enough uh and he keeps the blades really sharp and the form factor is not amazing but this is a great little chisel for emergency pickup work.
Um, I have lots and lots of little differences in chisels but again differences in planes just like the chisels, I have the same lack of point of view as to what makes the right plane what makes the worst plane. Uh, I don't know uh I don't have a point of view about that but I do keep them all sharp using this same little doohickey.
Oh no, that one lives chiseled oh do you want to see the chisel drawer just before I go there's all my good chisels there's my main baby
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody adam savage here in my cave and i've got a tool tip today thati try and give tool tips for things i feel like i have a distinct point of view for and some useful information for you and in this regard i'm about to do a tool tip about chisels and i'd say it's a question i get all the time what kind of chisels are your favorite i have lots of chisels i probably got 40 or 50 chisels of different kinds in this shop i have many different kinds i've got spoon chisels and i've got carving knives and marking knives and i've got japanese chisels this hollow ground face and beautiful steel i've got some cheapy cheapy cheapy uh uh hardware store chisels that were like five bucks i've got your medium grade hardware store chisels um suffice to say oh got a corner chisel um okay sochisels are like chisels are like this weird area of tools i think a lot of people uh me included are intimidated by the idea of a chisel yeah i'm intimidated by the idea of a chisel cause i look at this thing and i look at this thing and i'm like i can't really tell the difference and and i feel like i should but honestly i can't i mean i recognize that the japanese chisel here is uh functionally different in its metallurgy and i understand that metallurgy uh and this is this like i mean this is my go-to garbage chisel i try and keep it sharp but i don't mind making it dull this one i would never get it into a situation where i might make it dull because it's beautiful metal and it deserves to be well kept but so that's that that's like people are like well like really good chisels like 25 bucks and a cheap chisel is like five bucks which one should i get and my answer is i don't know i have no point of view about which one of these chisels is best for one thing or another i suspect the more expensive chisels will hold their edge longer but in the hands of an amateur all chisels get dull pretty quickly and in the hands of an expert many chisels can hold their edge for way longer than you would imagine all this is true so what is the information that i have to impart to you about chisels i am currently in the state of mind that i really don't care which chisel i am going to use for a specific thing i just want to use the sharpest one now in my drawer of chisels this japanese one and it's two mates a large medium and a small these are my go-to like i'm working on a nice piece of wood working like my end tables that i made my partner for christmas and i want to like make a corner really perfect i'll pull these out when i want to peel off some glue of something and i want it to be a nice precise operation i'll grab this thing maybe there's a staple in the way i'm not gonna worry about it too much so if it doesn't matter which chisel if i don't feel like it matters that much which chisel i use um like i said i mean i kind of allocate these for this but i i don't really notice the performative difference what i do notice in the performative difference is when i keep my chisels super sharp they are awesome to use so i thought i'd show you how i keep my chisels really sharp and this is like this is the point of view of i'm effectively a chisel neophyte um you know i've watched sharpening videos on youtube but sharpening man it's like coffee the signal to noise ratio of what is the way to do it is almost one um and that makes it really complicated but i don't for me personally it's not that complicated um i've got some let's see here i think i've got some even some knife in hereoh wait a second i know where that might be there we go i have some sharpening stone oil um and i prefer to so here's how i keep my chisel sharp i use one of these and this is a see do i have another oneno i don't that's what i did um okay so this is effectively a little cart that oh here let's go there we go this is a little traveler that holds blades in a specific orientation and this brass wheel at the bottom lets you maintain that relationship to the stone uh let's see what's uhoh this is just my 600 grit stone that's great this is the main stone i use for my chisels um this is 600 grit made by um ohishi and i love it it's a japanese waterstone um should i not use oil with it i don't know but i do uh so this is this is again your results may vary my information may be only tangentially useful to you but here it is so when you're sharpening a chisel what's really really really important isthat face needs to be super flat and that face needs to be super flat you don't want to sharpen this with like a file you're going to end up with a convex blade profile uh you want this edge to be super flat um and i'm just gonna sharpen this stone and show you how i do it um oh you know what yeah i've just used three in one oil on that in the past i only just got the stone cutting oil um so let's uh just get a little bit thereokay and then so the difficulty that a lot of people have is sharpening is that relationship right how do you make sure that that is flat and to be sure you can get a feel for doing it my uncle paul's the first human to teach me carpentry talked about how you can push it down until you see the oil squeeze out and then you know you're flat and then you can just slowly work at it but frankly i have found myself way too impatient for that kind of operation and these operate much better so here's how this works i i get this closeand i'm just there it is it's just a single right hand thread left hand thread you turn this and both of these ends move towards the middle and they grab your blade now once they've grabbed your blade you want to make sure your blade is flat against the surface you want to make sure that this is where most of my grinding happened almost all of my grinding happens right here so i want that part to be perfectly perfectlyparallel to the stoneand if i remember correctly i got to go all the way towards the oh okay actuallyi'm gonna give that one more tighten because this relationship is super importantoh not quite i can see a little air there you really can see you can really dial this into an impressive level ofparallel parallelity parallelismwow yup okay that feels really goodlet's take a look at this blade because i've used it a bunch recently so you can see i've got a little a little nick right there that's from my misuse in fact when i run my finger over it i can feel a little burr sticking up from there um yeah so i'm going to try and get rid of that and i'm hoping the after picture for this chisel looks much better than this one wow look at my messed up finger all rightso i'm gonna put a little oil there probably too much and that's tighti am not cutting on one stroke or the other i'm cutting on bothum let me i'm gonna put some sharpie on here so i can witness what i'm cutting awayall right here we gothat's nice i'm very very very close to parallel got to pull off a little bit off that uh the top part of this i'm maybe who knows half a degree a quarter degree offand i'm just applying lots of pressure right here and by the way this is a new one of these carriers that i've just gotten um the old one i had i literally paid like five six bucks for today's hardware and it worked for years for me i just saw this one which was considered a better one and i was like ah let me upgrade that onealmost so um if you take a look you can see is see that little dark spot out at the edge that's sharpie i still haven't peeled off so it's it was off by probably less than half of a thousandandall right let's take a look at this now so first upis that an artifact of the metallurgy of the chisel that i'm seeing there is that like a hammond line of the harder base where it holds the edge welded to the softer part of this chisel i mean that sort of line is very visible on this chisel right you can see the distinct difference in metallurgy between the tip and the body here that may be what i'm witnessing here but i'm not sure um but this edge is really nice i mean it's crazy sharp right now uh the base of this is in good shape yeah um and now i'm actually going to take this one step further that's a 600 grit stone and that is really pretty greati've got a um one thousand three thousand stone so i'm now going to take it up to a one thousandall right let's take a look oh hello there oh yeah okay sonow that's a pretty respectable face i know that there's way farther i can go because i watch that youtube channel of the guy who makes knives out of everything from tin foil to paper towels to dog poop or whatever um but that is about where i take all my chisels start with the 600 move to the 1000 then to the 3000 and that gets me the edge that i'm looking for let's cut somethinghmmniceit bites well it's very consistentand that's how i manage my chiselsagain i use chisels all the time for dumb stuff but for the like super fine woodworking stuff they're really meant for i do that very infrequently um so i keep my better chisels in reserve i keep them as sharp as they were the day i bought them and i may have touched them up here and there but this garbage chisel right here i'm able to keep sharp enough to supply like 90 of what i do with chisels here in the shop and if i ended up with some recalcitrant pair of things that could not be separated i would not be above hammering this five dollar chisel into the middle to separate them knowing that i might harm the tip but i would never do that with a nice japanese chisel yeah this is a weird tool tip right because i i don't have a lot of information to impart to you except how i manage the sharpness uh and utility of my chisels thank you guys for joining me for this tool tip i am so sure there's going to be all sorts of advice in the comments about sharpening and about stones and about your favorite products thank you so much for all that advice i really appreciate it uh and if i come across something that's life-changing i will share it with you thank you guys for joining me i will see you next timeby the way i use this handy device alsofor sharpening the blades for my planes same exact procedure log it in here make it flat start with the 600 go to the one then the three um and i'm i can report to you that my planes are all of them in terrific working order and again you know my favorite one is this little craftsman i think this is a craftsman uh finger plane just to be the one you could buy at ace hardware maybe it still is um this is uh i used to work with uh the legendary ira keeler an amazing wood carver and model maker worked to dial um's model shop ira carved the uh wooden bucks for the for stormtrooper masks so that they could be vacuum formed yeah he carved a storm trooper out of basswood uh to be vacuformed ira is amazing and he did 95 of everything with one of these chisels uh he modified it in a couple ways he flattened to the bottom because the bottom does not come uh nice enough uh and he keeps the blades really sharp and the form factor is not amazing but this is a great little chisel for emergency pickup work um i have lots and lots of little differences in chisels but again siri differences in planes just like the chisels i have the same lack of point of view as to what makes the right plane what makes the worst plane i don't know uh i don't have a point of view about that but i do keep them all sharp using this same little doohickey um oh this one is made by my tech uh but again i'm i've used the really cheapo ones and they've worked for me just fine oh no that one lives chiseled oh do you want to see the chisel drawer just before i gothere's all my good chiselsthere's my main baby\n"
