Busted a Japanese DT chisel

Denis, Jim will send you a replacement! ;-)

HC Sakman

>

Just a question...

Dan Donaldson

>Why did you have to hit it that hard? I hit my DT chisels, but don't wale on them. (were you cutting some of that Australian concrete that looks kinda like wood ;-))

Because I'm stupid?

Denis Ch�nard, Orl�ans, Ont.

>The wood was birch, and I was in a hurry to clean the waste off that board before having to go make dinner...

DC

Maybe you can get a replacement

Jim in Burlington On

>Even Tim Hortons will give you a new cup of coffee if you drop it as your leaving:)

Re: Maybe you can get a replacement

Jim Shaver Oakville, Ont.

>Hi Jim,

I did not know that....but will they honour one spilt in the car??

:-)

Take care,

Jim

I'm sure I could

Denis Ch�nard, Orl�ans, Ont.

>But I feel that it would be wrong, given that I believe I broke it as a result of abuse. I don't think that would be fair to LV...

DC

Never had that happen

Jim in Burlington On

>I would think they'd have no problem replacing your coffee. Ss for cleaning the car well....

Dennis, I've pounded on my LN's with a steel hammer. Beat on chisel's while doing home demo never had one break. Couple have even bent. I can't see how you could destroy a chisel unless you beat on the steel. It had to have had a flaw in it to break.

You Should

Jim Shaver Oakville, Ont.

>Hi Denis,

I think the folks at LV would want to see it actually. It will be a failure mode for others potentially and I am sure their quality staff would like to see it and understand how it happened. They might even want to pass it along to their supplier so they can see the failure and maybe understand something about their chisel making process.

When I was a quality manager in Automotive part supply I used to have quality engineers doing this evaluation on failed parts as part of our continuous improvement imitative, in the end you can learn from what fails.

Take care,

Jim

Re: Busted a Japanese DT chisel

Dave Burnard

>Bad luck Denis - can you post a photo of the chisel back? On the bright side - Maybe it becomes a much shorter chisel now, often desirable, without you having to wait all those years for it to eventually wear down. Er, um, or something like that.

Not specifically for Denis, but a general thought...

Something to keep in mind when pounding on chisels, is that eventually they wedge themselves to the point where they just can't go any deeper and sharpness is irrelevant. How deep that is depends on bevel angle, wood species, etc - and it often varies from piece to piece of the same material. If you keep wailing on the chisel to cut just a little deeper the wood can exert enormous loads across the face/bevel of the chisel. You can pretty easily distort the cutting edge out of line which is why we can't just flatten the backs once. Better to hit hard two or three times and move to a different spot with the chisel than to pretend we are driving spikes.

My personal chisel horror story is from timberframing - I was using corner chisels to clean out the corners of large mortices I was boring out. I was about 3/4 finished cutting the frame when I encountered the 6x6 from hell. Drilled and pared just fire - but it had a thing for corner chisels. It put major chips in three corner chisels in a span of 20 minutes. My only explanation is that the way I had been working and the amount of hammering I was doing was fine for all the other posts and beams I had been cutting - but that piece of wood was somehow very different and it grabbed and held the chisel much sooner than the other beams. I switched to number 4 (there was no number 5) and very gingerly proceeded to finish that beam but then resorted to my regular vigor for the remaining posts and beams without incident.

Re: Busted a Japanese DT chisel

Chris Scholz

>Denis

Do you know what material the hard insert is made of? Many modern alloy steel types do not stick well to the soft backing and the lamination can only be done using a hydraulic press. Heat treatment of laminated steel (forged or laminated via hydraulic presses) is not a trivial task (guess why nobody over here makes laminated chisels any more. Considering what in involved in making these types of tools, 50 bucks sound like a bargain).

Without detailed analysis (X-ray, ultrasound, etc.) it is hard to say if this crack relates to manufacturing problems. It is conceivable that the crack is a result of residual stress from heat treatment, possibly related to delamination but certainly initiated by large transient force (technical term whacking the chisel like there�s no tomorrow). If the manufacturer has reasonable profit margins they will simply replace your chisel.

Chris

Re: Busted a Japanese DT chisel

Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX

>Meine Gott, not only do you have one corner chisel (I suppose a lot do until they find out how useless they are :)), but you have 4 of them! And you use them all! What's this world coming to?

And here I was feeling guilty because of all the duplicate slicks I bought on the way to finding a couple of good ones, was ready to sell a few. Maybe I'd better hold onto them all for a while longer.

Pam, shaking her head as she walks off to make dinner, mumbling to herself about close shaves

Re: Busted a Japanese DT chisel

Todd O. Cronkhite Maine Native, Presently Away

>of all the duplicate slicks I bought on the way to finding a couple of good ones

What do you mean by this Pam? Was you finding the blades of the slicks to be inferior/poor edge retention?

Todd O.

Re: Busted a Japanese DT chisel

Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX

>No, nothing wrong with any of them. I had two problems: 1) I found several western slicks, in two lots of 3 or 4 each, at least one Witherby each, that were cheaper than any of the single Witherby's on ebay; 2) after this, I found a beautiful Japanese 2" slick for very little money, like $60, that I simply couldn't turn down. So I've got 5 or so that I thought I could spare, keeping 3, maybe 4.

But maybe I should follow Dave's example and keep them all until construction is finished, could be very handy to start each day with 8 or so tuned slicks ready to go, then work my way through them.

Pam

Here's a pic

Denis Ch�nard, Orl�ans, Ont.

>For an idea of scale, the chisel is 12 mm (close to 1/2") wide. My bad, the break didn't go to the hollow (guess I was too mad last night to see clearly...)

DC

Re: Maybe you can get a replacement

thomd

>"Even Tim Hortons will give you a new cup of coffee if you drop it as your leaving:)"

They don't want to associate Tim's with a feeling of inadequacy or embarassment, they know their demographic.

Denis, that's too bad, you obviously don't know your strength!!! A 20D nail... That would be a fullllll swing with a claw hammer weighing around 24 ounces. The front on those chisels is not strong with all that meat removed, It's not that great a design, If you think about it, why would you narrow the center of the front of the chisel to a line when the area you are trying to clear is the corners of the back? Mostly I don't use 'em. I mentioend this a few months back when there was a lot of hoopla about them. I like bench chisels with the properly angled sides. Anyway, if you were able to compress or take that area out of column then the back could snap. Japanese chisels are often stiffer than western, but given the nature of the materials they are not stronger, always.

For LV this will be like returning to the moon, they used to have a bucket full of Japanese chisels that customers had finesed, back in the 80s.

Re: Here's a pic

thomd

>That looks savable. Just nonchanllantly say you do a a lot of 1/2" dovetails.

If you don't have a belt grinder I can take that out for you if you want.

Re: Here's a pic

Joe Rogers, Northern Virginia

>I once read a website that was devoted to chisels and that type of break may have been caused by a forging fault. I don't remember which site it was.

Any one remember reading something like this?

I would at least contact the vendor to see if thay are interested in seeing this failure. They might replace it and if they want to I would go for it with no heart burn on my part.JR

LV article about chisel faults *LINK*

GolfSteve in Calgary

>This might be the article you're thinking about:

http://www.leevalley.com/shopping/TechInfo.aspx?c=1&type=a&p=43965

Even though it sounds like you slightly abused the tool, the article and your picture suggest a defect in the steel to me. Nevertheless I hate taking stuff back.


Lee Valley Article on Good Chips and Bad Chips

Re: LV article about chisel faults

Denis Ch�nard, Orl�ans, Ont.

>Thanks Steve, I'll check the chisel tonight to see if the crack matches what's in the article.

DC

Thanks...That was it! JR

Joe Rogers, Northern Virginia

>

Re: Busted a Japanese DT chisel

Dave Burnard

>A corner chisel is like most specialty tools, it's sits unused in a drawer somewhere until you have a need for it. I don't use them much because I rarely predrill mortices in furniture sized projects. However for the timberframe I knew from past experience that I would be boring out the mortices and how useful a corner chisel is - in large mortices there's quite a bit of work left in the corners. A corner chisel isn't absolutely necessary - but I find them to be faster.

Re: Here's a pic

Dave Burnard

>Impressive break Denis!

If you think about the forces involved as various chisel shapes are pounded into a piece of wood, then this is sort of what you might expect as the catastrophic failure mode for a triangular chisel profile. The corners of a triangular dovetail chisel are not reinforced by any soft iron - thus making those corners more susceptible to breakage. Really hard to say if that break shape indicates a mfr defect - here are some things to check. Look closely at the mating surfaces of the break. If it's a "fresh" break the exposed surfaces should be clean (of course they are granular), but if there was a preexisting cold shut or crack in the steel you'll see some blackening of the edges inside the crack. You can also check to see if the steel was not properly laminated to the soft background material - but since the steel appears to be hanging on in your photo, the weld is probably good.

Unless you see some sign of a mfr problem, I'd chalk it up as a learning experience and take thomd up on his offer to help you grind it out. One of my favorite planes is one of my first, I left it in a bad spot in a class and it fell onto a concrete floor and it lost a 3/8" deep chip off of one corner of the blade. It took a lot of grinding (makita waterstone machine) to remove that chip, and I had to learn to tap out a blade that was only a few hours old, and refit the dai since the shorter blade was now effectively thicker. When it was all done and making wispy shavings - it really was a special plane for me.

Re: Busted a Japanese DT chisel

Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX

>Thanks, Dave. I truly appreciated your previous post as it taught me a couple of lessons: about keeping multiple copies of tools ready to go and about how a tool I'd thought more trouble than it's worth can, in certain circumstances, have tremendous value.

Pam