How To Use a Chisel (The Correct Method)

in woodworking there are many different tips and tricks you can explore to further your knowledge however in my opinion finding tips and tricks that are actually useful then learning how to perform these tips and tricks using your tools and then finding a project or a process you can actually implement that tip it's rather difficult i believe that it is far more important to learn the principles and the fundamentals of any given process in woodworking in this instance chisels because understanding a process is far more effective than simply relying on rote memorization so with that in mind let's get into principle number one don't be a idiot these chisels are very very sharp so why why do people get these chisels and chisel towards their hand there's no need for it yep that's right we are kicking things off with safety because your passion in woodworking is going to be severely impeded if you cut through a nerve and you're unable to use a digit or two so why is it that when people work on a piece of material they do so like this or like this or like this in 99 of cases it's down to one of two or even two of two things your chisel isn't sharp or you're taking off too much material if you don't abide by the rules of a chisel being sharp and taking off a sensible amount of material none of the lessons in the remainder of this video will matter remember them next we'll look at improving the positioning of your body hands and eye line in relation to the two most common chiseling tasks pairing and chopping in a nutshell pairing can be described as cutting close to parallel with the grain whether it's across the grain along the grain or across end grain and pairing operations are usually carried out simply pushing by hand chopping operations on the other hand are often carried out perpendicular to the grain with a mallet so first we're going to focus on body positioning when pairing and we're going to be using this cross-halving joint as an example so we've got some cleaning up to do in the bottom of this socket now remember first rule sharp chisel second rule don't take off too much so regarding your stance there is a couple of ways you can do it the first one is simply standing straight on like this and just going for it this is all right for rough material removal but you might find that when you approach your lines on the side just relying on that can be a little bit risky and this is because you're not locked in very well and also you're quite off balance if i try and take a heavy cut like i was doing before i start pushing back and so if you want a little bit more control it's best to do this instead of standing straight on like this stand side on brace on your back leg lock your arms into your body and push off your back leg you'll find that you're able to generate so much more power thus control from your back leg rather than just stabbing away and letting your arms unfold and letting the chisel go wherever standing sideways bracing off your back leg and pushing off your back leg is so much better one of the problems with cutting joints is if you lose control and you slam through the back end like that you end up getting huge amounts of breakout so to control that if you choke up on the chisel like this there's only so far the chisel can go before your fingers stop it usually you want this to be around halfway in a joint so i'm choking up on the chisel my finger's actually hitting the vise here however in most cases it'll be resting on the component itself so we'll get on the line and then push through give it a wiggle it's funny with this vice it's actually causing the chisel to slide up like that which i guess is giving the intended use but at the moment this is a finished edge so the last thing i want is to slip and go all the way through and screw it up like that choking up on the chisel when pairing is a very good way of controlling the cut so all in all it looks like this standing straight on just stabbing away like that if you want to do rough material removal however if you're doing your final cleaning up cuts go sideways lock your arms into your body and push through while choking up on the chisel much more control now saying all this if you can't be asked to get the piece in the vice or you've just got a quick bit of cleanup to do and you want to do it in your hands this is where choking up on the chisel can really help because it prevents you from accidentally pushing too far and sliding out the back end of the joint and catching your hand on the other side having your finger as a depth stop like this should help reduce the risk of you catching yourself and so if you're doing any chiseling in your hands make sure you're not holding it out here like this because you are asking for trouble this idea of choking up on the chisel to prevent it cutting too far is such a valuable and versatile skill to learn and you'll find that once it's ingrained in your muscle memory you will use it all the time which is why it's such a good principle to learn let's look at hand position when chopping now here we've got a chisel we've got a mallet and we've got a dovetail joint that needs to be cleared out when cutting dovetail joints you often need to chisel down to the marking gauge line here to get it flat square and clean and the best way of doing that is with a chisel chopping down into the bench like this and there's a reason why this is the best method of removing waste between dovetails and many other joints for that matter i'll explain why in a minute because for now all we're focusing on is hand positioning so when chopping down to this line if it's flat on the bench like this you can only see the top one you can't see what's going on underneath and so what you need to do is when you're chiseling down you need to stop halfway flip the piece over and go halfway this is for the same reasons as the cross halving joint earlier it just stops you getting break out on the back edge trouble is if you're holding the chisel way up here on the handle and you're just hitting it there's a chance that you're accidentally going to go too far not only that but before i retrained myself to grip the chisel low when i was holding it up here sometimes it would even bounce out of the cap and then chop out the back edge of the component and go below the marking gauge line absolute nightmare so instead what i trained myself to do was grip the chisel down the bottom like this easiest way to think about this hold it like a pencil it's literally exactly the same grip the other thing to think about is the orientation of the workpiece below the chisel now i'm a left-handed with the chisel so those of you who are right-handed can literally just mirror this off the screen if you want so at the moment i've got the tails on my left hand side and i hold the chisel in my left hand as well this means that when i put the chisel in the line my hand is resting on the workbench below and i can very clearly see the marking gauge line here whereas if i were to flip the piece around keeping the chisel in the same hand i have to turn the chisel round so the bevel is now on this side but now the material i'm choosing away is somewhat shrouded by the bevel here and so to me it kind of feels like a little bit of a blind cut i don't like doing it this way i like flipping it around so my hand rests on the workbench chisel goes in the line and then everything just seems a little bit clearer so pay attention to the orientation of the piece below your hand because if you're getting variable results there's a chance you're stronger in one of those orientations you're just unintentionally flipping it without realizing so when using your hand to prevent breaking out to the other side think of it as more of like a indicator rather than a break because it's easy enough to twist the chisel down and hit the bench below especially when being hit with a mallet from behind there's not a chance your hand is going to be able to stop that so think of it as more of an indicator we're going to put this into the line and as i'm hitting it i can sort of feel that that's exactly where i need it and if there was some sort of deflection going on or something like that i could be sure that my hand probably would have stopped me from going too far or at least there's a much higher chance of it stopping it than holding it up here now while we're sat down we've got these two joints in front of us we're going to focus on one more important principle which is line of sight now when chiseling down to the baseline one very important thing about this is the chisel needs to be square and if we're looking at it from the direction that i and yourself are looking at it from we can very easily see if we're cutting down square contrast that to looking at it from this angle and you've got no idea sure you can see this angle going on but that really doesn't matter at this point we're wanting this to be perfect focusing on where you place your body and eye line in relation to a piece you're working on when chiseling can be hugely beneficial so let's look at it in a few other examples this cross-halving joint for example if we want to chop down to these lines the best way to look at it is like this sighting along the line to see if the chisel is going down 90 degrees if we go anything less then that socket is going to taper down and when the other piece goes in it's going to get too tight if we over cut it we're going to end up with a little gap open up at the front here after the piece is inserted so chopping down at 90 degrees here is hugely important which is something you're not going to be able to do if you look at it from this angle another example might be chopping down these outside shoulders on a dovetail if i'm looking at it from where you are now i can very easily see if i'm chopping down at 90 degrees and i can follow that line down the front whereas looking at it from this direction gives you absolutely nothing here's another one so with mortise and tenons if we just knock this apart within this component we've got a mortise and that's been chopped out by hand when chopping this out you've got to really have it in two orientations the first one is going to be this way because when chiseling it out we want to make sure that we're actually chopping the mortise straight chopping the mortise at an angle like this or like this is going to result in a tenon that goes in at an angle which is obviously not ideal so by sighting a longer piece like this we can very easily see if we're going to be chopping in plum when it comes to cleaning up either end of the mortise however we obviously don't want these tapering in at all because for the same reason as the cross halving joint when the tenon goes in the tenon's going to get too tight so in this instance i would hog out the majority of material here by sighting along the piece like this and then when it comes to cleaning up either edge i would turn the piece 90 degrees and then clean it up like that same again for the top here i'd spin it round so i'm still using the chisel in my left hand because that's the strongest one and then i'd knock it down like this that way it's very easy for me to see that i'm chopping down at 90 degrees line of sight is hugely important when chiseling it's why trying to clean up joints like this is so inaccurate because as soon as you put the chisel into that line and you try and whack it in sideways it's very difficult to see if i'm going in at 90 degrees i've got absolutely no idea but line of sight isn't the only problem with this setup in particular next we're going to focus on power transfer now this next section isn't going to be as relevant for someone like myself who has a nice thick workbench like this however those of you who are working on thinner work benches firstly be sure to visit matt esley.com shop if you want to upgrade your workbench to something big and chunky like this and secondly make sure to listen up because this is really going to help you now i'm going to demonstrate an extreme example here of what it's like chiseling into a thin workbench firstly let's chisel into mind for comparison we're going to take off quite a lot of material obviously sighting along the line to make sure it's at 90 degrees and there we go we've bottomed out already now let's do that same thing but we're going to put it on this thin workbench top like i said it's an extreme example but this is going to demonstrate what is going on with you guys come on i'm actually going to need my ear defenders for this that actually hurts that was blooming awful like i said this is an extreme example hopefully your work benches are thicker than a quarter of an inch but it does demonstrate the advantages of working on a solid surface for much the same reason as it was a bad idea to clamp this up in the vise and chisel backwards into it not only am i unable to see that 90 degree angle but also with this deflecting in the vise you're losing so much power chopping down into a workbench will give you much better power transfer than up in a vise but that still doesn't answer the question how can you guys with thin workbench tops get around this problem well fortunately you guys have four solutions to this problem and those solutions can be found in each corner of your workbench i'm of course referring to this the area above one of your workbenches legs if you're doing something that requires heavy material removal let's use a mortise again for an example doing it above a leg in your workbench is going to be ideal people like myself who have thick workbenches like this can still be caught out if i was to chop out this mortise it would probably be clamped in my wagon vice like this i'm in a good position here when i'm chiseling i can see if i'm chiseling down at 90 degrees it's at the right height it's at the right distance it's very comfortable the problem being all the power that's being transferred down into that mortise is going into the wagon vise here and then dead space below a better solution would be for me to come around to the front of the workbench clamp the piece down and then i can sight along it and i can benefit from all of that power focusing on power transfer will also give you a cleaner cut this is the cut i got from chiseling down into my workbench this is the cut i got from chiseling down into a six millimeter workbench but do remember that effective power transfer is only required when power is required for example if you're just doing light cleanup with a chisel it's perfectly fine to clamp a piece up right in the vise like this and then pair it across and remember if you want extra control when doing this do it off your back leg next we're going to move on to some techniques you can apply when using the chisel because what i want to teach you now is how to efficiently remove material using the shape of the chisel and using the grain direction to your advantage so we return to our cross halving joint and this time we've got a line we need to clean back to now everything we've covered so far is focused on where the material is placed sighting along the line and what action we're going to choose in this case chopping but at the moment that is a lot of material to remove and so the next principle i want to share with you is not very succinct but it's this keep halving until you can't halve anymore it's good enough if i was to put a chisel into this line and attempt to whack it down and you can be damn sure i'm going to do it i'm just going to put your defenders on there's a couple of things that is going to happen here the first problem is that that was needlessly difficult the second one is this that cut has gone half a millimeter or so below the baseline so why did that happen because there's a bevel on the end of a chisel it doesn't necessarily want to travel down straight even though the chisel itself is perpendicular to the wood because there's a bevel on the end of this chisel which is currently at 30 degrees if we place this in a line and there is enough material on the bevel side that material is going to start pushing on the bevel and it's going to want to make the chisel travel like this and so our aim with this is to actually reduce the amount of material that is pushing on the bevel before taking that final chop thus not providing enough pressure to push the chisel back and so in practice what that looks like is this instead of taking off the whole lot we're going to take off about half of it don't be too exact with it and with that done we're going to halve it again and then we're going to see if we can halve it just once more to get it really close to the line and now looking at this we have got barely any material on the way side of that line and there's almost certainly not going to be enough material there to provide enough force to push the chisel below that line let's give it a go so i'll pop the chisel into the line [Music] and tap it down at 90 degrees there we go look at the difference in that finish now despite doing the halving method which is actually a more succinct name thinking about it despite doing the halving method that still took a fair bit of whacking because we're using a wide chisel for it and this leads us on to a problem that a lot of beginners make and this problem usually begins when they realize that it's much easier to hit a smaller chisel into a piece of wood than it is a big one and so as a result they will do 95 percent of their work with a small chisel to demonstrate this i'm going to work all the way along this side of the halving joint using a quarter inch chisel and then i'm going to do the exact same along this one working with the three quarter inch and then we'll take a look at the difference [Music] all right and next the three-quarter inch now not only was the three-quarter inch much quicker sure i had to hit it harder but it was still much quicker let's take a look at the difference in cuts now both of these still require a little bit of cleanup but this is the edge left over from the three-quarter inch chisel the wider one whereas if we flip it over and take a look at the edge left by the quarter inch chisel you can see it's a little bit all over the place now there's a couple of reasons for this the first one is that there's not as much width on this chisel compared to this one the wider one is simply able to reference in more of the line therefore it's going to twist slightly less compared to the narrow one the second reason is because there's not as much meat on the back of the finishes or compared to the wider one it's much harder for the bevel to push the wider chisel back into the material you want to keep compared to this thinner one where there's not as much stopping it so what you'll find with a smaller chisel is it will take much less material to push on that bevel and push this back into the material you want to keep compared to the wider one like this hence why it's often good to use these wider ones for your final cuts now because i'm lazy and i like to avoid sharpening wherever possible i don't like getting this wide chisel battered up very much and so what i like to do is combine the advantages of both the wide chisel and the thin chisel into one operation and what that looks like is this we have got more material to remove here and we're probably going to need to halve the material once or twice in order to get back to that line well instead of going in straight away with the wider chisel and needing to provide some massive wax to remove the material all the way along let's use the thinner chisel to remove the bulk of the waste and then we'll use the wider chisel for the final cleanup this will mean that this will go longer between sharpens because you know it's not being used as much and secondly because this chisel is narrower therefore it's easier to plunge into the wood even if it starts getting blunt prematurely it's only being used for rough work so it doesn't really matter that much because we'll have the wider chisel at the end to do all the cleanup so let's work along now so there we go the bulk of the material has now been removed we can just get rid of all of that and now we've got one final chop to do back to the line which i can do with my lovely pristine white chisel there we go advantages of both chisels in one operation bulk material removal for rough work with the narrow one final precision cleanup with the wide one sorted all right so next we're going to move on to understanding grain structure more specifically diagnosing and anticipating potential problems now i'll be very straight with you here my soaring skills aren't as good as they could be so i make up for that deficit by being really good with the chisel and in order to be really good with the chisel not only do you need to have a good grasp of everything we've discussed so far but you also need to have a really good understanding of the material you're working on as well so in front of me here i have three components the first one is half of a half lap joint in the middle here we have got an uncut tenon a tenon that is yet to be cut and here we've got the sockets of a dovetail these two outside ones have been cut with a saw and require a little bit of cleanup with the chisel this middle one has got no saw cuts at all because we're going to be focusing on something slightly different with this the first one we're going to focus on is this half lap we've got a line here we need to clean up and we've got one down here now you've got a choice here whether you chop down this line first or you chop this line down the front first and while it seems like it won't make much of a difference there are advantages to doing it a certain way we'll chop into the sideline first so it's okay up here and then we'll get in with the shoulder it's all got very tight all of a sudden now that wasn't too bad considering i've got just less than a millimeter of material to remove it could have been a lot worse but now let's focus on the other side of the joint where we're going to cut the end grain first and then try and pair across the face grain so for this i'm citing along the line doing all the things we discussed earlier and we're going to chisel down at 90 degrees and now it's bottomed out we're just going to give it another hit let's work along a bit more and then we'll just get rid of this so as you can see we've cleaned up the end grain pretty nicely but we've actually given it an extra whack to create this little v at the bottom here which stops at the marking gauge line going along the side of the component this small v groove has severed the fibers and separated everything on this face from the fibers that can be found in the rest of the component meaning when we pair across now watch how easily these fibers pop out instantly separated from the end grain is therefore much easier to remove the material here's another example on here we've got the dovetail sockets and there's lines along the top that haven't been cut too accurately with a saw so we need to chisel back to them now when cleaning these up it's usually best to avoid going down from the end grain like this because when you do so it can split a little bit uncontrollably especially an oak like this like look at the state of it in there so instead it's usually better to work from the face like this and then pair across the grain that way your chisel is already locked into a 90 degree line that you've scribed down the front and as long as you get the angle correct from there it's just a matter of following the line along the top so let's give that a go i'm having to push this very hard at the moment very fast ow that actually hurt as you can see no control whatsoever now partly that was down to me taking off too much in one hit but even if you were taking off a sensible amount of material you could still run into issues doing that whereas now focusing on this wall we're going to do it slightly differently let's first sever the fibers at the bottom we're going to separate all this material from the rest of the component therefore making it easier to remove to do that we're just cutting into it with a knife make sure to go in from the front and get all the way to that line that you can see get it to the line on the back and then we're going to give it a very small tap from above just to separate these fibers as well very very small one there we go now we're going to get the chisel into the line on the front we're going to match the angle of the line on the top and then we just give it a small wiggle look how easily these fibers pop away you can get to halfway give it a twist they all come off because they have been separated at the bottom here then you flip it around and do the same from the back working to halfway and so here they are side by side this is the wall that we split just straight down from the end grain and this is the one that we've just done chiseling across by severing the fibers at the top severing the fibers at the bottom and it's very clearly at 90 degrees to the face whereas this one still needs a bit of cleanup because the grain just splits in a direction that i didn't anticipate saying that much better splitting that way into the socket so i can still clean up material rather than the other direction that would create a gap here and that leads us very nicely onto the next section which is reading and working with grain direction so in this example we've got the uncut tenon upright in the vice and we are going to attempt to split off this shoulder using the grain direction to our advantage i'll say now that splitting tenons out like this isn't something i would normally do it just serves as a good example now if the last lesson on severing fibres was anything to go by hopefully you can see that if i was to chisel straight in from the top like this there is nothing stopping that split from going all the way below the shoulder line we need to make sure we sever these fibers first going across before taking these vertical chops [Music] so now that we're down to the tenon i want you to focus on the grain of this component this is oak so it's pretty easy to see i'll track some of these lines down so there you go you can probably see they're traveling down from the top left to the bottom right and now i've identified this this should affect my decision making when splitting this out because if i try and split down this side of the cheek the chisel is going to start diving into the tenon and following the grain this side however as the chisel goes down the wood is only going to start splitting away which then allows me to come down and clean up the rest at a later stage let's give it a go now i'm going to cut slightly away from the line just to see what happens so we got very lucky with that it basically splits and stopped at the line very very lucky oh say that it splits the line on the side but i'm seeing what's happening on the inside now and it is not very pretty i'll show you that afterwards let's do this side now i'm going to go into the line here and as predicted it has split away from the line which has given me a little bit more i can clean back to and just keep going down splitting away beautiful here it is that is just silky smooth and it's very easy to cut with you can't really get much better than that the other side however is not looking very good you can see the saw line that i cut initially but then the wood has actually split beyond that and is cut into the tenon and give me all this fluffy wiry bit and of course we've got this very coarse textured edge here which you could say is better for gluing but there's no advantage to a good gluing surface if it's too narrow to touch the sides ah i love it when the demonstration pans out i'm going to continue chopping down this wall on this other side however because it's not going to play ball with the chisel this would be where you'd do it with the tenon saw and then to clean up that face left over by the sawing all you've got to do is go through the exact same process that we did on the half lap joint cut down the end grain first which will then sever the fibers on the face making it easy to pair across afterwards so hopefully now you can see how advantageous it is to be able to read understand and work with grain direction and using it to your advantage it is such a versatile principle to understand and it can be applied to so many things in woodworking particularly hand tools now the final thing i know i'm going to get a lot of questions about is when should you use the chisel with the bevel down and when should you use the chisel with the bevel up now i could do a whole segment on this but honestly after doing a bit of research before this video paul sellers has already done an amazing synopsis on it so i'm going to refer you to that there's a link in the top corner there'll be a link in the description below and so with that that covers how to use a chisel correctly as always thank you very much for watching i hope you found the video useful if you did please don't forget to press the like button please don't forget to subscribe and i'll see you in the next one thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Matt Estlea

Views: 166,980

Keywords: woodworking, woodworking tools, woodwork, woodworking projects, woodworking craftsman, woodturning, cool woodworking project., woodworking carpenters, wood, sawing, giant wood log, wooden flower vase, amazing, diy, machine wood, build, woodwork project, easy woodworking projects, beginner woodworking, learn woodworking, starting woodworking, woodworking tool reviews, best woodworking tools, tools for woodworkers, how to start woodworking, learning woodworking, furniture making, craft

Id: soMoIxJwj14

Length: 25min 33sec (1533 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 28 2022