How to use a Chisel CORRECTLY

chiseling it's one of those things that looks deceptively simple when you first start off woodworking yet as soon as you take this thing to your work you end up mashing it up so much that it looks like a dodgy kebab so in this video I'm going to be sharing various tips tricks and techniques to make your chiseling more reliable safer and just a bit more enjoyable really so let's go now quick disclaimer before we get started everything I say in this video is in the context of fine woodworking and furniture making it's not in the context of rough carpentry or timber framing so if you're one of those two people and you want to give me grief the things that I'm saying here saying are you wouldn't see that going on on site and things like that this disclaimer is for you so without further ado let's get started so very quick lesson on the anatomy of a chisel you have got a perfectly flat back on there needs to be dead flat and you've got a bevel on there so this has been sharpened with a 25 degree primary bevel and a 30 degree secondary bevel so if you haven't seen my video on how to get a deadly sharp edge on the chisel I will put the link to it up here because in order for these tips and techniques and things to work you need to have a sharp chisel so tip number one don't be stupid and if I'm going to elaborate on that a little bit what I mean is don't hold the work while you're chiseling it you know there's only one way that's going to go and that is through your finger and yes I know this sounds obvious why would you have your hand behind the workpiece while you're chiseling towards it that just seems absurd but in all of my evening classes and when I was starting off woodworking myself included we still feel a need to do this sometimes and the reason for this is simple it's because when they're chiseling they're pushing their bodies back along the floor and as a result we're having to brace themselves against the nearest possible thing usually the timber that you're chiseling in order to hold their feet in place but if you boil all of this down to one thing it's because you're asking too much of the chisel one thing you need to know about these is that you want to be taking off as little amount of material as possible with them because of the wedging action of this there's only so much material that this can travel through before it wedges itself in place so if I try and take off I don't know about five mil here no matter how hard I press that is not going to go in and my feet are skimming across the floor whereas if I take off half a mil straight through like that you'll see I'm able to get both hands behind the chisel like this once again five millimeters off feet skimming along the floor and as a result when we're trying to hold myself in place and as soon as that chisel slips all that pressure what its gonna ya know fingerprint scanners for you anymore now some of you might be saying well I am only taking off half a millimeter material yeah I'm still doing the moonwalk along the floor well the answer to that is also quite simple your chisel isn't sharp if I have a nice sharp chisel it just glides through like that nice and easy whereas if I was to get this file for example it hasn't got a sharp end on it it's not gonna cut now I know what I'm saying here probably sounds like I'm taking the mick a little bit but you will be surprised how many people I have seen stab themselves for no reason whatsoever other than the fact that cheese always blend or they're attempting to chop down a tree with one of these things there is no need for it by either sharpening your chisel or taking off less material there will be no need to hold the workpiece from behind and stamp your finger off the only exception to this being if you're working with a very very hard and dense wood and you've got your chisel nice and sharp you're still taking off minimal amounts yet you're still being pushed along the floor that is probably down to your stance so when you're chiseling instead of doing it like this with your feet side by side there's more of a chance to just be rocks back like that and I can't get as much force behind my chiseling if you stand sideways like this put the chisel into work and then literally just press off your back leg you will get so much more control and also a little bit more power behind what you do as well so all I've done here is hand is on the back of the chisel like that wraps around it and then elbow is locked into the side of my body and then force is just being transferred from my back leg on there now even by applying pressure from your back leg just showed you you're going to get more control from that but there will still be the odd instance where you slip and it goes all the way through firstly thank God your hand isn't there but secondly a way to prevent this is to actually use your finger as a depth stop on there so you'll see that I'm mostly holding it in the handle here but then this one is holding the chisel underneath it like this and it's actually acting as a depth stop so if I press really hard if it slips you see in this instance it made the chisel ramp up like that before it hit the back edge that's because I've got this lovely sloping surface here if I move it up a little bit to give myself a bit more clearance and now I can use my finger right up against the wood like this and just push it through like that and now I can't go beyond halfway so in this instance I'm using my hand as a brake while being pressed against the material but if you're just working with a quick-release voice for example you could shift your hand back and use the jaws of the actual device to act as a brake instead but what I'm saying here is just don't attack it like this holding the chisel with both hands at the back because you just can't you can't really get any control from that part from anything holding the chisel down the bottom here allows you to really focus on where you want to be taking that material for whereas back here it's just not quite as precise might imagine trying to write with a pencil while holding it up the top here like this what's going to give you more control holding it up here or holding it down the bottom like this which moves swiftly on to our next topic which is chopping down so we've just covered paring now we're gonna do chopping so paring is usually when you're working across the timber like this with two hands on the chisel it's not limited to that but in most cases that's what paring is our cross chopping as when you're using a chisel in conjunction with a mallet because then you'd be chopping down into the timber perhaps you're chopping across it like this I don't know I think it's one of those gray area things but as I said before just because there's a handle top of a chisel here do not feel inclined to hold it up here while you're working we have a very very precise knife line here to work too if I've got the hand up here it's difficult to get a chisel into that line whereas if you hold it down the bottom like this exactly as you would with a pencil exactly the same grip straighten the line like that no fuss needed and you might be able to see the other benefit of this being because might--and is closer to the bottom of the chisel it means it can also act as a break or depth stop similar to how we did with the parents so they go chisel it down now while chopping down into that timber what that's done is left me with a little bit in the corner that needs to be cleaned out in order to clean out you need to pare it out with a chisel but instead of me going background and clamping it in the vise and things like that sometimes I get lazy with it and it's very easy to just remove that with a chisel and this is the only exception where I will hold the material while I'm pairing it and it comes down again to holding the chisel down here as oppose to it the handle like this so I've got this little bit material I want to remove I'm gonna hold the chisel so about 20 millimetres of it is exposed and then simply just going to press it through like that you see my hand for starters isn't behind that exposed bit of the joint just a little bit of the chisel exposed to be on my hand and then I cannot go out the other side of that joy my finger is acting as a death stop so on this so clean this out as well flip it over how much do I need sticking out about that much so come in from here there we go done very safely you still need a nice sharp chisel to do this if it's blunt you're gonna be pressing too hard and you know it's simple you need a sharp chisel to do that another great example of using your hand as a death stop is when chopping out the center of dovetails because as some of you know I like to do an undercut on these which means chopping down 90 degrees for a few mil so and then angling the chisel out like this to provide a small dip in the middle which helps the joint go together however if I held the chisel up the top here and start chopping down did we undercut what I've done because it hasn't been a depth stuff on there you see on this opposite side I have cut way below the baseline on here whereas if I hold the chisel down the bottom here firstly it's a lot easier to get into that line and I can just easily get a feel as to what depth I need to be out on these then get hit halfway there are the waist and it's perfect on both of those faces so now we're going to focus on chopping back to a marking gauge line or a knife line and we're gonna get the old macro lens for this that's what we have here is a knife line going along here and then we've got a wall that has been cut down with a saw and we need to chisel back to this line now remember what I said before about taking off too much material same rule applies here but for different reasons because we're chopping down into this we're not gonna be scooting around the floor like we did before obviously but you need to be aware of the cutting action of a chisel when you're chopping into material with these that angle on the end being 30 degrees the chisel is going to try and bisects that angle and as a result when it goes down it's gonna want to try and push back like this into the material that we want to keep so if I try and take off all of this material we've got here give it a few whacks yes it has gone through it yes it helps that I've got a very sharp chisel but what is done on a very very small scale is push that knife line back into this material you might be able to see it ever so slightly on this back bit here you've got the knife line and then it steps back a tiny amount now this is only because I was taken off about two millimeters here if I was taking off three millimeters of material that's gonna be pushed back even further so what I tend to teach people here is when removing this material keep holding it until you can't have it anymore so we have about two millimeters we'll take off one millimeter of it now we have one millimeter so we'll take off half a millimeter of it when you're about half a millimeter away that usually means that it's safe to go into that line so holding the chisel near the bottom put the chisel into the line and then tap it through and because there's less material pressing on the bevel here it's a lot less likely to press the chisel back into that knife line now chopping down into material like this can be quite a tough job but it's usually made a lot easier as always by not taking off as much material or sharpening your chisel but what a lot of people resort to is using a smaller chisel to do it because there's less surface area on the end of the chisel it's a lot easier to just whack it through that makes the process a lot easier and they just work their way along the line like this looks pretty good doesn't it until you look at this inside face here the camera might not be picking it up but look at all these facets in here so by this point they'll go back and try and just fish it all out like that but then you end up creating more facets in there and if this chisel isn't very sharp then this is what I meant at the start where it makes you work end up looking like a dirty kebab that you pick up after a night out it's so easy to absolutely Moeller the work from this point whereas on this other side if you're using a nice wide chisel you can see how different that surface looks in there we've got this little area in the middle where I demonstrated taking off too much material at once you can see that it's a little bit chopped up in there and it is a little bit steps back from these edges which are spot on the line but overall the cleanliness and crispness of that face is a lot better than what we saw in the opposite face and on the side note if I wanted to clean up the area that I chopped with the chisel that was too small instead of chopping down to it as I was doing just then I would have it upright in the vise like this hand on the back of the chisel like this back foot behind me and then just push it through like that taking off very very small amounts at a time and just clean up that inside face with a nice wide sharp chisel the only thing to look out for while you're doing this is that you're not massively undercutting this shoulder here because if a bit materials going in here you're gonna take out too much material on this bottom section here and there will be a gap which then moves on to our next subject now this next tip is focused on the positioning of the workpiece and the workpiece in relation to you so I have realized some lines on the lap joint here and we're gonna chop down to them again now remember what I said in the voice over there about undercutting the shoulders that's going to give you a gap positioning yourself so that you can see the chisel descend vertically or plumb whatever will prevent you from undercutting the shoulders or prevent you from I guess it's over cutting the shoulders undercutting the shoulders would result in a gap being exposed whereas over cutting them would result in the joint getting tighter as it goes into the cavity because essentially the walls are slipped in like this kind of like a backwards dovetail sort of thing so when I'm chopping down to these lines what I want to be doing is standing here so then when I put the chisel into them I'm looking directly down that line there and I can see by the right angle created here that the chisel is going down vertically whereas if I was to stand here you can see that there is no way of me telling if that is not in degrees or not yes I can see if it's going in at a slope this way but it's that really that important not at all in the instance of this joint what is important is that it is going down at a perfect 90 degrees so by positioning myself so I can look along the line chisel goes into it you can actually put a square against the back of it if you really want to act as a visual guide and then and you have fits it a perfect 90 degrees down like that now standing yourself in a position so you can see the chisel descending is something very important for most joints however it's probably the most important for things like mortise and tenon joints so this is one that I cut in one of my tutorial videos about a half a year ago I'll put the link to it up there but let me briefly explain this to you so what I have in front of me here is the mortise component for this mortise and tenon the mortise being the hole in there and when I chop this out I did it with a chisel and by standing at the side like this I could see if I was chopping down vertically with the chisel which is all very well but what I couldn't see at this angle I'm currently standing at is this angle I couldn't see if the chisel was going down parallel in reference to the sides here so as a result if I positioned myself here while chopping out the mortise when the tenon goes in it could have gone in at an angle like this because I might have been over angling the chisel or I might have been under angling the chisel if that's even up for us but there is not a chance that I would have got it imperfectly straight so instead what I did was stand here looking along the length of the mortise so then when i chiseled down I could see if the chisel was going in at perfect 90 degrees and then the turn when it goes in would be nice and straight in there and then with most of that meat removed so I know that it's going down perfectly straight I still had a little bit down the bottom here that I needed to clean up but by standing here I couldn't see if the chisel was going in straight this weight again if I went in an angle the tenon would have tightened up too much as it went in so with all of it removed I then swapped back here and took the final chop this way so then I could see if the chisel was going down a perfect 90 degrees or not if it was over tilting or under tilting it wouldn't have mattered too much by this point because the main meat of mortise was removed anyway and this chisel would have tracked it down so as you can see by simply changing your body position changing the angle of the material it can be the difference between making your woodworking a misery or an absolute joy because doing something like this where you have the material upright in the vise and then you just whack it through with a mallet you can't see that angle you just blindly remove the material and there's gonna be undercuts over cuts all over the place position yourself in such a way that you can see this chisel descending in the direction that you want it to and this demonstration here leads on to my next point and that point is power transfer now this isn't a massive issue with this workbench because it is just rock solid but those of you working on something less solid than this that I imagine is a large majority of you this will be a good demonstration for you so back to this having joint we want to chop down to these walls still not making very much progress at this alley so you've put this directly in the middle of your workbench and you're ready to start chopping down to it so let's do that see that bouncing going on that's making my chisel go in all sorts of directions and it's making me whack a lot harder than what I need to and that's because every time I walk into it this material below is collecting and it's making this bounce over the place and the power is not being transferred very efficiently it's going through this through this and then into dead space below whereas if I was to chop it directly above this solid bit here so it's going to go through the plywood into the bit of wood and then into my workbench you can see that you get far more control from it so on a workbench you have four of these areas that I've just demonstrated and that is above every single leg on the top of your workbench unless you have five legs obviously then you have five points so moving back to chopping out this mortise when I was doing it I had the option to have the material round this way so that it was closer to me as I work to it which would have been a lot easier the issue is that when I was whacking down into it it would have been whacking down into this dog block here which has a little bit of empty space below the mechanism is screwed into the workbench there's going to be all sorts of deflection going on and wasted power so instead what I did was put it directly over the leg on my workbench and then cramped it in place like that so now the power is going through the workpiece through the leg in the workbench which is connected directly to the concrete floor below me which then goes right down to the Earth's core sounds a little bit more robust than this area here doesn't it and I know that I'm lucky with a workbench like this and that the top is so thick that I don't get the kind of deflection that we have going on with this example that I showed you here however saying that despite this top being five inches thick I still notice the difference between working in this area here and working directly above a leg which is pretty astounding considering how heavy this bench is so there we go guys that is pretty much all I have to say about chiseling so in summary therefore taking off small precise bits of material they're not the heavy stock removal unless you mortising or if you're doing any strategic splitting of timber which is something that I did in my hand cut joint series quite a lot whereas cutting half lap joints such as this or dovetail carving joints things like that so I'll put the link to that series up there if you're interested in how to hand cut certain joints so we covered dovetails mortise and Tenon's sliding dovetail joints bridle joints there's all sorts going on and there and will be a great way for you to practice a lot of these chisel techniques so if you have any of your own tips that you want chuck them in the comments below and I'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Matt Estlea

Views: 432,294

Rating: 4.886692 out of 5

Keywords: chisel, how to use a chisel, using a chisel, chiselling, how to chisel, how to use a chisel safely, chisel safety, chisel technique, woodworking chisel techniques, woodwork, woodworking tools, woodworking tips, chiselling tips, chiselling for beginners, beginner woodwork, amateur woodworking, chiselling techniques, how to use a chisel correctly, using a wood chisel, wood chisel, sharpening a chisel, how to sharpen a chisel, furniture making, matt estlea chiselling, wood, diy

Id: Efxgvo36FiY

Length: 19min 31sec (1171 seconds)

Published: Sat May 26 2018