LN vs. Barr Chisels, recommendations?

Re: LN vs. Barr Chisels, recommendations?

Adam Cherubini

>No experience with either, but I'd like to say that if you intend to do furniture work and will be chopping dovetails, the basic LN set (1/8,1/4,3/8,1/2,3/4) will be more useful than Barr's 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, 1. Again, if you do cabinetwork and buy into tool slaving, I recommend having a lot of sizes in the area of 1/2" So at least, 3/8", 1/2", 5/8",3/4". I'll bet you could ask Barr to make up a set for you.

I'm thinking specifically about dovetail chopping and sliding DT cutting. I'm coming to the conclusion that I use the 1/2" sizes for chopping and joinery. I'm grinding hi angles on them (30deg). The small sizes and the big sizes I typically use for paring.

Adam

Re: LN vs. Barr Chisels, recommendations?

Ross Canant

>I have used Barr's timber framing chisels for years, as have most of the professional and ametuer timber framers. There is a reason, they get sharp and stay sharp. Barr Quarton will make anything you want. I haven't had the pleasure of trying the LN chisels. I'm partial to old Witherby's in my cabinet work.

Re: LN vs. Barr Chisels, recommendations?

Dean J in MN

>John --

I have the LN bevel edge, which I find to be great for chopping dovetails. I'll echo what Adam said, the 5 piece set supplies a nice range of chisels, and you can fill out the set with the 5/8 and 7/16. Like Adam I find myself using those chisels in the 1/2 range a lot.

I needed to put a 30+ angle on them to hold up to chopping tails, of course that depends on the wood at hand and the width of the chisel. So my LNs are set up for chopping tasks rather than paring.

They are pretty short, which I personally like as I hold them like a pencil while chopping. On the down side, the shorter length isn't as nice when I pare out the waste after the chop, but then I use that crazy Moxon method to pare...

My 2 cents...

-Dean

Re: LN vs. Barr Chisels, recommendations?

John Clifford

>I agree with you Adam on the sizes. I had a set of Ashley Isles from 1/8 to 2" and I NEVER used anything over 1" with the bulk of the use in the 1/2" range. The LN set is more compatable (size wise) to what I'll use but Barr offers the in between sizes so I don't mind buying a few extra sizes. I know both would be good I guess I'm just looking for someone who's had experience with both to give they're opinion. It's not possible to got to a Woodcraft, for example, and see for myself. My main preference is for the ones that would take a keener edge and would hold it the longest. I love LN tools, I have about a dozen of their planes, but I'm not hung up on brand name I want the better set of chisels. I think I saw a post somewhere else by Bob Smalser saying he liked the Barr over the LN but didn't say why. Thanks for your comments Adam. By the way, love your Popular Woodworking articles, keep them coming. John.

Re: LN vs. Barr Chisels, recommendations?

ThomD

>I haven't tried the LN, but their steel is usually really good, though I don't like A2. I own almost identical original chisels to the ones LN has and find them a little big. Dovetails are very similar to micro morticing work, it doesn't really pay to be towering over them, and the cuts are pretty rugged. More serious to me is that every set of chisels I have bought that had turned narrow waists above the blade, like the LN, have felt underpowered. The transition on the Barr is ugly but powerful. That is a dealbreaker on the LN for me.

I own the barrs, and I would buy them again. I tend to try to forget what these things cost, but the price difference is not justifiable at 80 vs. 50. However the Beckworst chisels are the best format wise, though I wish they had the more streamlined handles that Barr puts on his own designs. I have some Chryo Barrs, and some non-chryo, and they don't seem any different. My first set of chisels was a Japanese set in 1/8, 3/8/ and 5/8, like the Barr filler set. I have several chisels sets in 1/16" increments, but it just gets confusing (one has to switch or take mutiple cuts on the tails, so what is the big deal about perfect fits. If you use western saws, side angles don't mater much), but the 1/4, 3/8, 1/2 are the business end of the deal.

A bought the Barrs to have something a little more "normal" for seminars. But I have come to really like them. I am moving most of my tools to O1, since it blends perfectly with my cast steel for sharpening purposes. But if you don't have those kinds of interests, it is impossible to justify either of these brands as against Japanese chisel. Even if you power sharpen and buff, the HSS japanese chisels are fine for grinding.

Chisels are a very personal tool, I would buy one of each and proceed from there. I have done this on a number of occasions and been disappointed with a chisel I had high hopes for. Occasionally I even buy them to see what the fuss is about.

Re: LN vs. Barr Chisels, recommendations?

John Clifford

>Thanks Thom, an interesting idea to buy one of each and see how they preform. I may just do that, buy one of the in between sizes so when I buy the set I won't have any overlap. John.

This is a great comfort

Bill Houghton, Sebastopol, CA

>because I find myself reaching for my 1/2" chisel (neither LN nor Barr - Pexto, and I've got a Witherby I need to put a handle to) more often than any other size. I thought it was because I'm wimpy.

I will comment that I've got a 2" paring chisel, maker unknown, that I've used more often than I've have expected to, usually for, essentially, planing - final paring over a large area.

I have the LNs

Thomas Skaggs, Foothills of Mount Level

>I do not have experience with the Barr chisels. I have the 5 piece set of LN chisels and I really love them. I have used a friend's Two Cherry bench chisels and while they were great I would not trade my LNs for them. I made a big leap from Marples Blue Chips to the LNs. Not surprising, the difference was noticeable.

I don't have big hands so the LNs are perfect for me. They are well balanced and comfortable to my hand. I think fit and shape are important factors to consider too.

Tommy

Re: I have the LNs

Paul Kierstead

>Certainly everybodies hands and methods are different, but I found the handling of the LN's to be exceptional for paring and 'adjusting'.

Re: This is a great comfort

Adam Cherubini

>I too love a 2" wide chisel for paring. I'm not sure that 1/2" sizes are so perfectly sized for furniture work, or if its a physics thing. Wood is so hard, steel is so hard. Wider chisels just need a lot more force to effect a cut. I guess I'm the wimp as I'm unwilling to hit a chisel that hard. Tapping small chisels can be like driving nails.

Adam

Re: LN vs. Barr Chisels, recommendations?

ThomD

>Thanks

For me the format issues are really important, but if you were mostly steel obsessed, one option would be to buy the Barr filler, and an LN push chisel, or something similar.

I would recomend getting the exact Barr you want to try out. I notice some inconsistancy in his tools. It isn't a quality issue, it is more like he optimises them for particular uses. Mostly I am thinking of the fact that his timber chisels are not the same as some of his other tools. They feel softer and less edge holding to me. I have two bar timber chisels, the Beck. chisels, and the small drawknife which is large by indoors standards. The drawknife is the best I have had the pleasure of using.

Chisel sizes

Derek Cohen (in Perth Australia)

>For dovetails I find I use 1/8" to 5/8" in 1/8" increments. At the other extreme, my 2" Berg (it is a monster!) gets a frequent workout to pare away the ends of the pins and tails after the box is glued together. Like the dovetail chisels, it is honed at 20 degrees. I think anything greater than this and pushing it through hardwood would be too difficult. Its heft really helps.

Picture below is of some of the old Bergs (you can see the size of the 2" in relation to the others) and 1/4" - 1" Witherbys. One nice thing about vintage chisels is you do not buy them by the set (and get unneeded sizes).

Regards from Perth

Derek

Re: LN vs. Barr Chisels, recommendations?

James Watriss

>I went first from my old blue chips to Swiss made, to Lie-Nielsen, and I have some very nice japanese chisels, too. And recently bought 2 of the Ray Iles mortise chisels.

I'm not too concerned with how the joint looks between handle and bit. If it's a good chisel, the connection will hold up just fine. A good chisel will hold up... particularly if you're really hammering away on somethign that's only 1/4" wide. I'm not saying this is always the case, sometimes it's best to have a really beefy connection; I once watched a friend of mine pounding timber framing chisels with a hornbeam mallet he'd turned himself. That mallet was at least 6 or 7 inches in diameter, and probably weighing 6 pounds or more. He was really giving it hell, and making the whole bent shake. Something like that you really need all the beef you can get. For chopping dovetails in regular hardwoods, I haven't really felt anything that was "underpowered." If it's not cutting well, I sharpen more, or use a heavier mallet. These days I'm using a brass-headed mallet from Veritas, for which I turned a longer handle than the stock piece. Brass hits hard, and solidly, and doesn't rebound, so pretty much all of my chisels will do what they're told.

That said, after looking at the pictures of the mortising chisels, their stock handles look a little wimpy in that application. I know they're socket chisels, so they'll be fine, but they do look funny.

For dovetails, or anything else that requires chopping, I almost always stick with something around 1/4" or maybe 3/8". When it comes to waste removal, I want to maximize the amount of pressure being applied. Less frontal area means the chisel goes in farther, and even though it's a narrower chip, I think the thickness ends up making it a bigger chip. Waste removal is waste removal, and I don't think it has to be pretty. If it looks like an old woman with two teeth chewed the thing out, I'm fine with that, since I'm just going to go back and finish pare the thing anyway.

Dollar for dollar, for the steel you get, the swiss made chisels are an amazing bargain. You may have to grind back a little bit, because I think they buff some of the temper out of the blades when they polish them. I had issues with them at first, and that was something I was told by someone in relation to their carving gouges... that sometimes you had to go back a little bit to get to the "good steel." it held true, and now those chisels take a pretty damned good edge. For the money, that's really hard to beat. But after I had my LNs for a while, the swiss handles felt a little longish and awkward. Still, for paring and shaping, I always reach for my 26mm swiss. It's a hair over an inch, and the length feels like a combination of a bench and a paring chisel.

The LN chisels are expensive, but I think the price is justifiable, for a few reasons. Fit and finish is very nice, which is almost to be expected from a Lie Nielsen tool anyway. I heard tell that Mr Lie-Nielsen wasn't satisfied with his original prototypes, and wanted something that cleaned up a little bit better and easier after the original casting process. The result is a set of chisels that took me little to no time to flatten before working on the bevel. But I also think they feel a little more controllable. First, because the weight feels very well balanced in the hand. That, and the sockets are a little bit bent in relation to the bits, and it means that a blow in line with the handle is closer to in-line with the direction of cut than on a regular chisel. What I mean is this: if you bisect the bevel angle, and follow the line out, the handle is closer to being in line with the direction that the edge is pointing. Chisels, if left to their own designs, will always cut a little bit away from the bevel, since that's the direction the bevel is pushing. The bend of the LN chisels seems to help alleviate this, so they feel, to me, like they're cutting mroe accurately. They handle a little more intuitively. That, combined with a minimum of first-sharpening tune up time, and the durability of the edge, defines them in my mind as some really nice chisels.

The Ray Iles chisels, designed apparently after his father's mortising chisels, are mutilation tool without parallel as far as I'm concerned. They cut through wood like a panicked mother cuts through mall crowds at christmas-time, trying to get her hands on the very last one of whatever the must-have toy is this year. These chisels just don't take any crap... they're amazing.

And this is where things just sort of break down. I used to think that one set would be good enough for everything. I mean, you can cut, pare, and chop with a blue chip, right? But specialized chisels just make too much of a difference. The Iles chisels chop with impressive authority. But they're too narrow, I think, to pare worth a damn on normal sized work. And the handles are too beefy to be handle in such a delicate fashion as paring requires. Generally, I like a wide chisel to pare with, so I can be sure I'm slicing across the whole plane of whatever it is that's being fitted; dovetails, tenons... And I've recently found I like a really wide chisel when I'm shaping something liek a cabriole leg. The width provides a good visual cue as to what's going on, and it helps with the general shaping stuff. So then I reach for the wide Swiss. I'm about to tune up a japanese chisel I bought that's over an inch and a half wide, to see how it performs, and the bit (Like the bit on the swiss chisel) is thin, across its width, so I have faith that it will get between tightly spaced pins better than my 3/4" lie-nielsen. I kinda wish LN would bring out a 1", for shaping and paring. But at the same time, I wonder if the blade profile would be a bit too thick to feel as well balanced.

I guess at the end of it all, I have to agree that buying multiple brands of some chisels is a good idea, depending on the sorts of work you're doing. But I will warn that it's a very expensive road to take.

The rest of this is for general people who are lurking, looking for information. It's entirely possible that you, whoever's reading this, are just doing general work, and not doing heavy chopping, or delicate shaping. Or maybe you're still something of a beginner, looking for a review. I get the impression that the more experienced voices in here have already found their way to their favorite tools. "Yup... found this one in a box at a yard sale. Covered in White paint and chicken turds, but I recognized it as an early ________, and I cleaned it up good, made a new handle, and..." Or "This is quite possibly the most expensive chisel that I never wanted to buy, but as soon as I picked it up, I knew..." If you're starting, I say start simple, and pick up some blue chips. After all, it's just as important to aquire skill with your sharpening stones as it is with your chisels. And if you're just starting, you have a whole host of other tools to buy anyway. Once you're acutely aware of the fact that the edge is breaking down, and once you're past the "eureka!" moment, where sharpening starts to make sense, then think about fancier. Once you're past being a beginner, everything else is a balance of money and patience. I know guys who went with less expensive chisels, like crown or marples, and they're content to sharpen them regularly. Some have Ashley Iles or Swiss or Two cherries, and they touch them up once in a while. I also know some guys who have enough money to afford the very best, and they bought them thinking that they'll never have to sharpen them again... or at least not as often. Barr, Lie-Nielsen... both are very good names, though Barr has been doing chisels for much longer. There are also japanese chisels, which can be yet another step above and beyond when it comes to price. $200 a piece for a mortising chisel, that sort of thing, forged with wrought iron that was recovered from old chains found in shipwrecks, and relieved sides that form a sort of hourglass profile, so they don't get caught int he mrotise as easily.

I say try em all out... find a store or someone that has the chisels you want. Pick them up, play with them if you can, and just see which one calls to you. After a while, it's not about the "best" tool. There is no best. It's which one works best for you. It's entirely possible that you'll pick up a $300 japanese chisel, hand forged by a master who trained under a long line of cratsmen dating back to master swordsmiths... and something about the chisel won't feel right. It's also possible that you'll pick up a $12 swiss or two cherries, something will click in your mind, and you'll start seeing dovetails. (the equivalent, I suppose, of hearing wedding bells for some of us.) It's all in what makes sense to you.

None of it matters until the tool is in your hands and doing the work. It's true that some metals will sharpen better than others, (see the post above on accidentally planing with the chip breaker) and some will hold an edge for a lot longer. It's true for some of us that Marples happens to make a very nice screwdriver. But once you move up in price, after a while the steels are all pretty nice, and the companies are reputable enough that their product can at least be relied upon. After that it's up to you.

Look up a post or three, and you'll see a post on irony, talking about the rise and fall of certain woodworking magazines. I wonder if this whole "best chisel" idea is partly a result of too many magazine articles. I know a guy right now who does absolutely beautiful work with Marples chisels. If you read enough magazines, for long enough, you'd already know in your soul that this is absolutely impossible. All the wrong rockwell numbers, steel alloy designations, name brands... all of them obviously have conspired against him to ensure that his well-intended work would never come to such happy fruition. Yet there it stands. I say this, of course, after retiring my marples chisels a year and some ago, but it's proof in my mind that the difference isn't just in the new tool. If you've been using chisels for a while, you'll be more skilled than you were. The performance from the latest in a line of wonder-products may very well be nothing more than proof that you've been learning. Materials and metallurgy aside, how much innovation can you really pour into a chisel? Given that, how much difference can a new chisel really make?

Jeezus... I really should have just gone to bed. :-p

Re: LN vs. Barr Chisels, recommendations?

ThomD

>"Look up a post or three, and you'll see a post on irony, talking about the rise and fall of certain woodworking magazines. I wonder if this whole "best chisel" idea is partly a result of too many magazine articles. I know a guy right now who does absolutely beautiful work with Marples chisels."

I was reading in the archives that Franz KLaus' says his favorite chisel is the blue chip. Because the handles are bombproof.

I used to use a similar chisel in one part of my dovetail seminar where I did fast joints in pine. You could cut joints all day long in pine.

Re: LN vs. Barr Chisels, recommendations?

Dave Anderson Chester,NH

>Well James it seems like you were suffering a bit from insomnia. That said, what you offer is a well reasoned and well written discussion. I recently upgraded from my mix of inherited chisels and a set of Blue chips to a set of 6 LN chisels. I bought the standard 5 and added the 5/16" since I like that size for a number of uses. Your comment about the angulation of the handle to blade is something I noticed right away and I appreciate this feature greatly.

As for performance of any tool compared to another, I suspect you hit the nail right on the head when you muse about increased skill and experience making more difference than the chisel itself. I do much of my stock removal on cabriole legs with a chisel since it is often faster than a spokeshave and gives me a better view of the work. Similarly I use chisels as the favored tool for carving the shape of the frames on my bowsaws. Control and clear line of sight are the major reasons. I've always thought that the true test in evaluation of someone elses intelligence is how much he agrees with you. Happy Thanksgiving.

I don't know, Derek,

Bruce, a MN Galoot

>seems like you've got pretty close to a complete set of those Shark brand. :-)

I'm still looking for 1/2" and 5/8" Shark brand. I have the 2" and I sure agree with your assessment of it.

Bruce, sharkless in MN.

Did you say Shark Brand!!!

Dan Clermont in Burnaby

>Got two more burled unused logo'd handles on the way from a friend digging through old boxes. I have all Berg's from 1/8" up to 2" in the socket version.

Pretty happy about it. Guess I am gloating a wee bit ;)

By the way, those are my crappy handles

Cheers

Dan Clermont

YOU SUCK!!!!! And I'm jealous!

Bruce, a MN Galoot

>

Re: YOU SUCK!!!!! And I'm jealous!

Dan Clermont in Burnaby

>Hi Bruce,

You looking for sockets or tangs? No, I don't have extras but I do live in berg heaven and like going fishing

Cheers

Dan Clermont

Tangs

Bruce, a MN Galoot

>I think the sockets are beaver brand or something like that. Anyway, I already have the mm equivalents of 1/8", 1/4, 3/8, 3/4, 1" and 2". It's been hard enough assembling this much, it would be a lifetime achievement to switch to sockets and start from scratch. If you run across the 1/2" and 5/8" and would be willing to part with them, let me know.

btw, do you have any experience comparing Berg chisels with the contemporary premium brands like LN or Barr?

Bruce

Re: Tangs

Dan Clermont in Burnaby

>Hi Bruce,

I meant to post this pic earlier but the image was too large for WoodCentral.

Berg made socket chisels although they may not be as common as the Tangs.

In response to LN and Barr's.... I have no experience with Barr chisels but have seen Rob Cosman at our local woodshow use his LN chisels and they have a nice feel, weight, balance to them. Also the sidewall angle on the LN's is low so you can dig into tight spots without bruising.

I do own a single LN mortise chisel which I have whacked several times and it still has the original edge. I will probably buy a couple more someday. My thought is that A2 steel would be nice in a chisel you are gonna pound

Will I ever sell my Berg's and buy something else?? No way, my wife bought me the Berg's from a chap who is retiring soon and he was the original owner, bought them in the 50's, wrapped them up cause they were too nice to use and sold them to my wife 2 years ago. This man and I have become close friends and e-mail back and forth quite often. He is incredibly knowledgeable and honest.

By the way, I recently sold the red handled set to a friend

I will keep my eyes open for ya on the 1/2" and 5/8"

Cheers

Dan Clermont

I had no idea that a set like yours eve existed

Bruce, a MN Galoot

>I also have a red plastic 1.25" but that's the extent of my holdings. It was my grandfather's, bought in Sweden in the 50's, and it's beat to smithereens.

Where's Burnaby?

Bruce

Re: I had no idea that a set like yours eve existe

Dan Clermont in Burnaby

>Burnaby is in Canada and part of "the Lower Mainland". It is located beside Vancouver. I happen to live within 3 blocks of Vancouver and you would have no idea you were in Burnaby.

Vancouver is 150 miles north of Seattle

Cheers

Dan Clermont