Chisel Restoration

The handsome gentleman on the left was my maternal grandfather. Like a lot of working men in West Wales during the early to middle parts of the 20th Century he worked at the local colliery. However he was a very fine amateur carpenter and woodturner and, according to my mother, even got offered a job making furniture for a famous local department store – Pugh Brothers of Llanelli. He turned down the offer as he felt that employment in the coal industry was more secure. How times have changed. I never met him as he died before I was born but it would be fascinating to talk to him now.

A few years ago after my father died I inherited some old woodworking chisels which had originally belonged to my grandfather above. These were in a bit of a state but I picked out a selection ( right ) and decided that some restoration was in order.

( This is not going to be a YouTube worthy restoration where everything is polished to a mirror finish – and probably never used. I just wanted a functional set of sharp woodworking chisels )

First job was to get the old handles off and clean up the rust and general muck. The handles and ferrules were removed with a mix of an angle grinder and brute force and then cleaned up using all the abrasive products at my disposal. Mainly I used an abrasive flap wheel mounted in my drill press followed by a small wire brush in a Dremel type tool before finishing off with 120 grit wet and dry paper. There’s still a reasonable amount of pitting but I can live with that.

Don’t try this at home kids!

Ready for clean up

Shiny!

The chisels vary in length between 200mm and 80mm.

Once that was done it was time for some handles. I had a block of European ash ( Fraxinus excelsior ) which is ideal for this sort of thing but I first made some prototypes out of scrap pine that was destined for the firewood pile. The top one is a copy of the handle of my woodturning tools that I find very comfortable to use either with one or both hands. The bottom two are some variations on a theme that I tried but ultimately rejected as they weren’t as pleasant to hold. The ferrules are made from short pieces of 22mm copper pipe which polishes up rather nicely and works just as well as brass.

I was concerned about how to fit the chisels to the handles but I eventually decided on the following process:

1. Measure the tang at about one third and two thirds of the way up ( left below )
2. Step drill holes at these diameters on the lathe
3. Using the chisel tang as a reamer drive the handle on by hand until it’s about 10mm from the end ( right below )
4. Tap it the rest of the way with a mallet

Eventually, after a bit of work, and making a rack to hold them I ended up with:

A quick re-sharpen on my water cooled grinder and we were good to go. The mallets were an extra when I realised that I didn’t have anything suitable to hit the chisels with. The smaller carving mallet on the right is turned out of solid oak. The larger general bashing mallet has an oak head which is glued and pinned onto a sapele handle.

I don’t know what my grandfather would have thought but I’m pleased with the result and they’ve got the thumbs up from my mother 🙂 She’s in her late eighties and, as a little girl, remembers her father using these tools so they’re at least 80 years old. Whether they make another 80 years remains to be seen but I’m already using them regularly so I would hope so.

Footnote: Some of these chisels have manufacturer names still visible on them. A few are marked “Marples & Sons” who were a very famous tool maker in Sheffield, UK. My grandfather obviously had a good eye for quality tools.

3D Printed Dust Extraction

One definite aim with the 3D printer was to improve the dust collection on my woodworking lathe. I thought that this would be pretty straightforward but one problem with all lathes that I’ve used is that there’s never a convenient way of attaching a collection scoop that’s easily moveable to accommodate different turning situations. Ideally I want something like the hood on the right but with a much longer outlet pipe so that I can somehow clamp it in different poses.

Design

I thought about this for a while and came up with several grandiose schemes but I eventually decided that, being as the lathe is mainly steel, then some sort of magnetic clamping might work. For my prototype I dismantled an old hard drive that I had lying around and used one of the read/write heads actuator neodymium magnets. These are very powerful for their size and, having tried one on the side of the lathe, it was a devil of a job to get it unstuck again 🙂

Designing and printing the dust scoop was relatively simple and made heavy use of OpenSCAD’s “hull()” feature. However for my first attempt I made the walls too thin and the corners didn’t print properly ( left ). Making the walls thicker and forcing 100% infill fixed this.

 

I was initially going to mount the magnet on the 3D printed part but, having experimented with some designs, I decided that it would make the part too bulky. I eventually ended up with a scoop with a long tube ( left ) that would fit into simple wooden holder to which I would screw the magnet ( right ). I didn’t put the magnet in the centre as I wasn’t sure if just one magnet would be enough to hold it firmly and I’d need the second magnet out of the hard disk as well.

Testing

The final setup is shown on the right and so far it’s worked pretty well for bowl turning at least. There’s enough adjustment by just moving the wooden holder around and one magnet appears to be sufficient to hold it in place.

I was concerned about the robustness of the 3D printed part but it seems to have stood up reasonably well. The black hose to the dust extractor comes up from underneath and is a friction fit into the dust scoop.

The only problem that I’ve had is a slight cracking / delamination of the 3D printed layers at the point where the flare of the scoop transitions into the tube. It may be that this section has a bit more stress on it and needs beefing up.

Note: this problem and the problem above with the corners may have been caused by the PLA material not feeding correctly from the spool. I had some delaminating problems with a later build and it may have also affected this one. I fixed the cracking with some Araldite and it’s been fine since.

Overall I’m very pleased. I may need to tweak the design slightly for spindle turning but that generates less dust in my experience so maybe not. Watch this space.

One other point – old hard disk platters are very shiny and make excellent bird scarers for your vegetable patch. Much better than old CDs.