How to make a Handle for a Chisel socket and tang

hey y'all I'm James Wright and welcome to my shop today we're making two chisel handles one of them may socket without a lathe and the other one a Tang without a feral let's Dive In [Music] So today we're going to start off with Walnut that actually looks like white oak okay it's actually White Oak because this is wood by right we're going to start with a block that I want to make about an inch and a quarter by about an inch and a quarter this is a rough size that I'm going to be whittling down in the future but I want it to be roughly Square so that I can make it an octagon in the future so we're going to measure out with the marking gauge after squaring up two sides to keep those at 90 degrees we're going to mark all the way around it and then cut off that piece and then repeat the process with the other side so we end up with a block that is the appropriate size it's easiest to plane two sides cut one side plane that one and then cut the last one and then plane that one rather than doing them all at one time or trying to mark off multiple sides at one time do them one at a time it just becomes a little bit easier so we're gonna rip this down and then we are left with a stock that is square and that will get us most of the way there except for I want this to be octave that is a shape that is very comfortable as well as there's a lot of history with that in mortising chisels so notice we have a square block now we need to figure out how do we turn this into an octagon there's a bunch of different geometric ways my favorite is just to create a circle on the outside that the circle just touches the outsides and then I plane it down until I just touch that Circle and if you're doing it at 45 degrees that's going to give you an octagon which is basically a circle with eight sides so I'm going to do one side and then I'm rotate it 180 and do the other side and then that makes it much easier to do the last two rather than doing it in sequential order around the block the other thing I need to figure out is then how deep will the the Tang of the wood be to go into the socket and so I need this to be about an eighth inch to a quarter inch longer than the actual depth of the socket we're working with here we want to leave a little bit of a shoulder work on this so that it can slide in a little bit deeper in the future as the wood shrinks as it dries so I'm going to measure what the inside diameter of the socket needs to be at the largest point and then I'm going to cut in a shoulder all the way around from this so I'm I'm going to basically take this down to the largest Dimension he needs to be and with good straight grain material and you do want good straight straight grain material for the handle you can just chisel down to create the Tenon here this Tenon will be round and cylindrical but we need to turn it into a cone this step is actually find very very very happy because you can get it roughly to shape with the Chisel and then you come in with a good rasp and shape it down into something that is roughly circular and you don't have to be particular here you just have to get it kind of close now I'm going to start at the top and start roughly turning this into a cone there's nothing particular about this other than I'm trying to take off even amounts from the same on the other side so that it roughly where it needs to be you'll see that I'm using the work roughly quite a bit here once we get that down close to it I'm going to drive the piece down on there and you'll see those places where it's been bruised those are the spots that need to come back in and remove more material and then I can put it back on again and see where it's being bruised this time and then I need to take off material and those spots I'm not going to hit the spots where it's not bruising I'm just going to keep working at it until I get down on there I can put a a pair of pliers on it to allow me to rotate it on and off because it's one of the easiest ways to take the handle out of a socket is you just give it a slight rotation and it releases you can put that bruising out a little farther and eventually you'll notice that I'm coming into a file rather than a rasp because I want to take off a little bit less I want to make sure I get a really nice Fit until it goes all the way down I want to leave about an eighth inch at the edge before it hits the shoulder that will give you that little bit of work with it and I'm getting closer and closer to the Fit until yeah that's right about where I want it to be and you'll notice that you pound it down on there and it's a really solid hit it now this handle is a little larger it needs to be for one of this style so I'm going to mark it roughly about that now you notice I'm not being very accurate anywhere the the actual length of it really doesn't matter I just want to get it roughly close the other thing I want to do is I want to taper the Octagon down towards the end so it's larger at the back and smaller at the front so I'm just going to draw where it needs to match up to the socket and then roughly clean it I don't want to hit the back end I just want to hit where it's running into that Circle that was drawn around there and then I can come in with the Chisel beveled down and then pair it back so I get a nice transition into the cone that we made on there working with it bevel down is actually a very enjoyable method and once you once you get used to working with a chisel bevel town you plan to use it quite a bit now I noticed as my chisel was getting a little dull and so it's quick to just take it over there and sharpen it up and then we can chamfer the back end of this I could use a plane but I really enjoy doing these freehand chamfers with a chisel take your time and just enjoy the process it works out very well so there is the socket now let's do a tang and this is a massive massive pig sticker mortising chisel and I want to do some work on this it needs a little bit of work in here and I actually want to clean up the surface there are some Burrs sticking out that will cause problems when driving it into the wood so we're just going to clean it up a little bit I'm not worrying about being perfect I just want to uh to get a nice smoother surface on here first next thing I do is I'm going to measure out thicknesses and different lengths from the shoulder of the tank and this will tell me how big I need to make the holes and I want the holes to be a little bit smaller than then the length of the tang and then I can measure in how deep they need to go and this will all be stepped in so I'm going to start with the biggest bit and then go to a smaller bit and a smaller bit and a smaller bit each one going a little farther so I can measure the tang and how far in will it be set a mark on there there's nothing that has to be terribly accurate on this other than just be cautious at this point don't make them any deeper or bigger than they need to be you can always file them out and make them smaller so I'm erring on the side of making them too small you'll also notice I'm leaving the block very large because I'd rather shape this afterwards to make to match the Chisel rather than shaping it beforehand and oh I'm out of alignment the last one going in is a quarter inch bit and I'm going to round that one at a good bit farther than it needs to be and just uh give the very tip of the Tang a place to go rather than splitting in farther at this point we're just going to file things down you can see I use the rat tail there to kind of smooth out some of the transitions in those steps inside and then I can drive the tang in there and find out where do I need to go in a little bit farther and I'll realize that some of those steps it's really grinding on those very heavily and so I'm going to take that step in just a little bit farther and I'm going to work through these two or three times to try and get it close to it I want to leave that shoulder of the Chisel about a quarter inch away from the wood itself so when I really pound it down on there it'll sink down in and so a lot of it is going to be trying to find out where does that step need to go down a little bit farther drilling it out a little bit farther and some of it's going to be just filing those transitions from one to the other and eventually I'm going to end up with a new nice smooth transition all the way down now some of this work I can do with the Chisel But realize you're always going to be going against the grain because it tapers down towards the bottom and so the Chisel I'm going to use to take out some of the chunks and then I'm going to come back in with a file and really detail them up at this point you can see it's getting very very close I'm getting it down to almost where I want to be but I'm noticing the chisels ever so slightly out of alignment and what I what I realized a little later is that the bottom hole was slightly out of alignment and so I had to come back in with that and chisel it out and so I'm going way down in there trying to get that last little bit right in line with everything else in the end I wasn't able to get perfectly flat to the shoulder so what I ended up doing was taking it out and then actually planing the shoulder down to make it match and so I'm driving it down in good and hard to where it's almost touching I have about a 16th inch away and I'm going to leave it right there take it out and then I can use the plane to adjust the shoulder of it to match the shoulder of the Chisel and this way I'll get a nice even fit and I'm leaving it about that 16th inch away so it will be a final set once I actually get it all done you want that last real drive and pound down on there to be at the very end and you're kind of playing a balance point of making it too tight and causing the handle to split out and making it too weak and the handle to fall out and so this is a little bit more tricky it's something you got to kind of play with next thing is once I get the the handle on there I can draw out the octagonal shape on the end of it the oval octagonal shape and then we can start shaving it back down to match that shape on the end of the Chisel we can also cut it to length and get it roughly to the size we want it to be and at this point I could do a little more detail on it but before actually driving the handle down on I want to address the actual chisel itself and it needs a lot of work the tip on it was ground down and it is an absolute mess so what I do is I grab a belt sander belt and this is actually like a 50 degree belt 50 grit belt sander belt and I can put it out on a piece of glass and kind of use it like a grinder I ended up once I got it close to the shape I wanted I moved on to a larger belt that I had and this is somewhere around 100 grit and that's about as fine as I'm going to do it on this and I'm going to use this as a grinder to grind it down I find this actually to be a little bit faster than doing it with a bench grinder plus I don't have to worry about it getting too hot I'll still put some water on there because I don't want it to overheat I want to keep as much of the temper as I can but it's going to get much cooler on this I'm not going to worry about it now this is going to take some time but it's going to be a little bit faster than it's going to be with the grinder I think in total I spent about 15 minutes or so and I had to take off um a good 16th inch of material on the whole grind phase of this which the face of it is three quarter by inch and a half or so once I get it down close to it then we can actually sharpen it and we'll start with our our heart and our hardest our coarsest grit there's the word and then work on from there this is an extra extra course you can see how the the plating bubbled off on this one I called them about that and they sent me another one well this one still works fine so I still use that occasionally and when it gets too bad then I'll pull out the other one they sent me so thanks so we'll go through our normal sharpening procedures coarse medium and then extra fine and then strop and it is always fun working with these these big big beefy things at some point here there's a difference between do you take the stone to the work or do you take the work to the stone this one's still close enough to do that once I get it fit on there and sharpened I'm going to then drive the chisel down onto the body itself and get it seated well and then we can actually shape it back and I want to actually plane these four sides down until they're almost touching the edge of that steel shoulder around the the Chisel and then we can plane the corners and plane those down until they almost touch it the nice thing about this is the measurements are already on there I'm just matching the shoulder on the Chisel itself and it makes for a really nice fit and you get this nice shape on there of course then we can come in and bevel the backs of it as well use it with a plane use it with a chisel this one I wanted to make it a little bit bigger so I ended up using the the plane on there and then of course we need to get them ready for finish and so that means I'm going to use some 400 grit sandpaper on here I'm just going to use this to kind of clog the pores with the dust this will allow the boiled lens to soak in a little bit farther the dust actually will Wick it a little bit farther down into it on the socket I'm not actually going to to put finish on the socket itself I'll get it up close to that but I want to leave that alone so I'm not running into any issues with that and then of course wipe it all off and install it and just like that we have a finished chisel you see how this one's still moving on here I haven't actually pounded it down on that setup it's slightly out of alignment so that it lines up with the back of the Chisel I'm keeping the handle out of the way of course we can always take these for a test drive and this big three-quarter inch mortising chisel is a ton of fun you can really wail on this and let it drive down in and it cleans out some heavy chips very very quickly I I had a lot of fun making these and yeah two different ways of making a chisel making a handle for your own chisels is a very enjoyable thing and a lot of fun so there you have it I've been wanting to do a video showing a couple different styles and methods for a long time so I reached out to McNulty tools who lives just a little ways north of me in Wisconsin and said hey do you have any chisels that need handles and he said yeah I've got a couple I'll send you really cool shot but he sent me a couple different ones to play with and so I had a Tang which we could do a traditional without the Pharaoh which you often see with big pick stickers or mortise chisels and then this one which is technically a mortise chisel but has a socket and I wanted to show making the socket without a lace you don't need a lathe as long as you just take off material where it needs to come off you can actually make them freehand I mean it's surprisingly easy you don't need the feral to make a good Tang as long as you have enough wood around it and particularly this one has a big shoulder so when you're pounding down the wood is pushing on that shoulder not splitting out the Tang any farther it can't drive out any farther and that's why this one can work so I hope you like this I'd love to hear your thoughts on this is there anything I could do better do differently let me know that down in the comments down below I read through all of them my answers many any of the questions as I get to and I do often learn quite a bit from that so thank you anytime you do put a comment down there it helps out the channel as well as hitting the like share subscribing all those things really help us out so if you'd like to find out more and do even more about that there are a bunch of names over here those are all of the patrons on patreon the wonderful magnificent and benevolent people who keep this channel going without patrons or members here who've clicked the little join button down below we wouldn't exist we are completely sponsored by you guys so thank you for that if you'd like to find out more about patreon there are links to that in the description or click the little join button and become a member here on YouTube I think they'll do it for now and until next time have a wonderful day astronauts took a really interesting drink to space but on all honesty Tang has been around a lot longer

Channel: Wood By Wright How To

Views: 25,058

Keywords: Wood By Wright, wood By Wright 2, Hand tools, Handtools, Woodworking, woodworking, Hand tool, Hand Tools, Hand plane, Hardwood, Hardwoods, tang chisel, how to hang a chisel, how to make a handle for a chisel, socket handle, no lathe, no farrel, morticing chisel, mortis chisel, mortising chisel

Id: S85v7ztNL6o

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 26 2022