Wood Chisel

[Brian Dougherty 1,422]

I haven't been very active at the forge for the last year, so I thought I'd give myself a kick in the pants by doing a WIP for my KITH entry this year.  I've learned that unzipping the preverbal fly in front of the all-mighty interweb seems to motivate me to do my best work.

 

Having never played with wrought iron before, let alone welding a piece of high carbon steel to it, I thought I'd do a simple wood chisel.  Everyone needs a good 1" chisel, right?

 

I started with a piece of 3/4" square wrought That I ordered from a guy up in Canada.  I was advised to forge it mostly to shape before welding on the steel.  I didn't get any pics of that process, but I did think to snap a quick shot of the 1075 sitting on the wrought as it was coming up to welding temp:

 

 

After a little bit of shaping, this wad of bubble-gum is what I had.  It is sitting next to a piece of the parent bar of wrought iron.

 

 

Then the grinder-smith and file-smith took over to try to find a 1" chisel in there somewhere.  As forged, it had swelled to about 1.25" wide.  I did a quick etch to see where the steel bit ended up.

 

 

 

 

I'm not particularly good at trying to grind/file an octagon free-hand.  After thinking on it for a while, I decided to just throw it in the mill and "eyeball" a square cross section that would be in-line with the centerline of the chisel.  I think I can manage to clean up the rest with files.

 

 

I'll clean up the curved transition area up to the first line on the bolster. (Is that waht it is called on a chisel?)  The other line is where I plan to grind down to the tang as the bolster came out way too long as forged.  I'll do that after the octagon is shaped just in case I want to leave it longer.

 

Stay tuned...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Joshua States 2,573]

Looking good Brian!

 

[Brian Dougherty 1,422]

OK, back to work on the chisel project.  After looking at it sitting on my bench for a few weeks, and contemplating filing in the bolster, I decided to cheat.  I just threw it back on the mill with a v-block, and evened up the short sides of the octagon.  (I'll report to the mast for 20 lashes later...)

 

Then I ground off the majority of the excess bolster material with the 2x72, and used a file guide to even everything up:

 

I left the tang a bit thick while filing so I could come back with a round file to create a fillet at the tang/bolster transition.  This creates a bit of an undercut on the tang, but I ground that back out later.

 

 

A little draw-filing and grinding to smooth out the faces and to create the side bevels...

 

 

And then grind in the edge bevel.  I'm making a paring chisel, so I eye-balled in a 20-deree bevel.

 

 

I do my heat treating by looking for the decalescence (phase change).  I wasn't sure if that would work with such a small piece of steel welded to a big old wrought iron heatsink.  However, I could see the shadows, so I just went with it.  Here we are during one of the normalization passes...

 

 

And here we are post quench.  I've already tempered once at 350F for an hour.  I'm not sure what my final temper temperature is going to be yet.  Probably pretty low since I want this to be hard, and I am assuming I lost a lot of carbon from the 1075 to to migration into the wrought iron.  However, a files skates on the steel, so I achieved some hardness.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited July 16 by Brian Dougherty

[Alan Longmire 3,887]

Looking really good!

[Joshua States 2,573]

Absolutely looking good.