Mortise Chisel - Lie Nielsen vs. Narex

hi i'm rob cosman welcome to my shop today we're going to do a video on mortise chisels and i'm going to review what you might consider to be the more expensive versus the far less expensive that being the lee nelson and the generics and the results may surprise you when you see the differences between the two stick around i'm rob cosman and welcome to my shop we make it our job to help take your woodworking to the next level if you're new to our channel make sure you subscribe and hit the notification bell which will alert you whenever we release a new video anytime we use a new tool or technique we'll leave a description down below so that make it easier for you to find all right let's get back to work if you chop mortises by hand or complete the mortise and tenon joint primarily with hand tools then you're going to need good chisels in fact the mortise joint mortise and tenon joint is determined when properly done by the mortise chisel that dictates the width of the mortise and obviously the tenon you're not going to go in and cut a 5 8 mortise with a half inch mortise chisel most important thing in chopping this is that those sides remain parallel what i'm talking about is this side and that side of the actual mortise so if you have a chisel and you cut it to that size ideally you're going to come up with sides that are not only square to the face but parallel to another why is that so important well that means that when you put this tenon in you're going to actually get positive contact on both sides with the walls of the mortise that gives you a good glue surface makes for a strong joint but how do you know there's not a lot of information out there because this is not a very commonly completed joint anymore at least by hand it was a time and i would think it was the standard in the industry that all good furniture was built with mortise and tenon joints any time you had two pieces coming together an example of a stretcher and a leg or particularly on chairs so we're going to tear these apart i'm going to give you some of the things to think about i'm going to tell you why i think certain features are critical in order for that chisel to work we'll do a little bit of sharpening on it and we'll actually show you the process of chopping a mortise or at least how the chisel uh works in that particular procedure so sit back get a notepad these are some things that you may want to write down so when you go shopping you get the more so that's going to work best for you now in offering a disclaimer i actually have a history with lee nilsson i represented them in canada from 2000 to 2008. i was actually around when the chisels were being developed and i got to put my two cents in particularly on the mortise chisels however i no longer sell them so i don't benefit financially from that now we run a program called the purple heart project where we bring in combat wounded veterans and we treat them to a week of hand to a woodworking we send each vet home with several thousand dollars worth of tools and tommy nielsen has been very generous in giving us a couple of mortises for each vet every time we teach the class so i'm not going to let that i'm hopefully not going to let that cloud the information i'm going to share with you but i want you to be able to see through it so i'm going to tell you the hows and the whys then you can decide for yourself lee nilsson is on my right the narex is on my left the lee nelson is a half inch it's made in maine in the united states the narix this is a 12 millimeter and it's made in the czech republic the lee nelson cost 65 us dollars the narex is 25 us dollars and you'll see the reason why the difference in price now the handle on the lee nelson this is referred to as a socket style chisel so if you tap the handle it'll come off so you have a socket on the steel portion and you have a part of the handle that has the exact same shape and it's literally a friction fit so you just wrap it in there and it'll hold it's in place now the downside to this it's nice that the fact that when you're pounding on it the shape the socket keeps it from splitting and it's traditionally always been the way good chisels have been made the downside as i mentioned is that sometimes the handles fall off especially if you don't use it for a long time the wood is constantly moving absorbing and giving off moisture and i've had it happen you're carrying your chisel after sharpening by the handle and of course always over a concrete floor the metal falls off and the point hits first so that is the downside that i've experienced the narix has what we would call a tang style so the handle pardon me the steel actually goes up into the handle and there's a ferrule here that keeps it from splitting so as you're pounding on the end of this there's another ferrule here that keeps this from splitting and the pressure from the mallet is being transferred mostly due to this shoulder in here where it meets the steel but then also the tang inside when you're pounding on the lee nielsen you're driving that piece of wood down into that socket tighter and tighter so not that much of a difference in terms of how they actually transfer the force okay let's talk about what most people would consider to be the most important personally i think the ergonomics are far more important i'll save that toward the end but most will look at the steel and say well that's really going to be the determining factor now i'm very familiar with the lee nelson so i can explain that one to you right off the bat this is cryogenically treated a2 steel now cryogenically treated you may not have heard that term you should look it up because it's actually an interesting process in a nutshell if you want a hardened steel you heat it up to a certain temperature and then you quench it or you drop that temperature rapidly if you drop it to room temperature you attain a certain hardness if you drop it down even lower that's why the cryogenic bit comes in then that serves to harden it even more now this is hardened to a rockwell of 6062 and if you're not sure what that is well this is a very simplified way of telling you but they have a device that a certain amount of force is pressed onto the steel and depending on how deep they can penetrate with that amount of force that determines the rockwell hardness so most woodworking tools are going to be in the 60 62 range you get much above that and the steel becomes brittle now if you're thinking about a hand saw that you're going to sharpen the file that's closer to 50 but chisels plane blade 6062 seems to be the sweet spot and this is also by the way double heat treated or double tempered which helps to spread out the carbon particles which helps to eliminate any soft spots in the steel and i don't know much about metal but i do know that it holds an edge well and it is easy to sharpen contrary to what people tend to say about cryogenically treated steel so that's the lee nielsen now the narex they use chrome manganese steel and it is hardened to a rockwell of 59 so right off the bat you're comparing 59 to 60 62. is there much of a difference well there's going to be a difference might not be a tremendous amount but certainly there's going to be a difference and if it were a matter of which one am i going to choose based on that well i'm going to go with the one that's a little bit harder it only stands to reason that the less i have to sharpen the more time i get to actually spend using the tool i would say right off the bat that the difference in the two steels is going to have a big impact on the actual cost of the tool and that's the reason why the lee nelson is almost three times the price of the narex at least that's what i'm suggesting the next thing that you would expect to encounter when you're looking at comparing the quality of two tools where there's such a vast difference in price should be the quality of the machining but there's also a school of thought difference here as well i gave my opinion when these were being made that i wanted the sides to be parallel why well you'll notice that a mortise sizzle does not have any taper on the side when i say that if you look at a beveled edge chisel where the sides are relieved that purpose or that is done so that you can get in between two tails on something like a dovetail and not bruise the side of the tail while reaching into that corner when you're chopping a mortise you actually want that chisel to prevent twisting as you go down if you use a mortise chisel pardon me a beveled edge chisel when you try to do that there is no reference on the sides whereas on a mortise chisel if the sides are square to the back as you're chopping those sides help to prevent this from twisting one way or the other as you're chopping now the narex actually has tapered sides now i checked them and they're not evenly this one is tapered by about a degree and a half and this one is tapered from the bottom by about three degrees no not my favorite or not my ideal mortise chisel i as i mentioned like to have those sides parallel some say this is to prevent it from jamming i've chopped a lot of mortises and i've never had a situation where my chisel jammed and i couldn't get it out of the wood so i say buy your mortise chisels with parallel sides and in particular sides that are square to the back so when you're setting it on there and you're using the point as your reference you know that the sides are going to remain parallel to that scribe line that you've used and if you've watched my video recently on chopping a mortise we'll leave a reference below you'll see how when i draw some little square helper lines along that long parallel marking gauge line it helps as you set that chisel on that line to make sure that the side stays parallel to that long mark again i'm going to say this is the better option now the more the bevel or the angle of the bevel as it comes on the lee nelson is usually 30 degrees and the narex is 25 degrees now when you're using a mortise chisel unlike a beveled edge you tend to be really whaling on that you're using a mallet and you're pounding it down through particularly a piece of hardwood you're really hitting this thing with a lot of force so a 30 degree bevel is going to provide you with a little more robust edge so i would say you're probably going to be better off with a 30 degree than you are with a 25 and for most folks they're going to be using a grinding wheel if you're using a grinding wheel an 8 inch wheel and you're trying to determine well when am i at 25 degrees you're going to adopt part of the part of the shape of the wheel on your bevel and the thicker the chisel is this way the more pronounced that's going to be so all you can really do in determining 25 degrees is touch at the tip and touch at the back well in doing that on a thick chisel this really dips down and provides a very thin edge here where you're absorbing all that force so you can see this is better on here because i've actually done this on an eight inch wheel you can see the hollow grind so by keeping that at 30 degrees you get a lot more material out here which is going to mean your edge is going to last a lot longer you still need to keep these nice and sharp because in the final process you're actually going in and you're paring down that end grain wall to get the two ends of your mortise square to the face and also parallel to one another so it has to be sharp even though as i said you're going to be really wailing on it with a chisel and you want to have a little more of an obtuse angle out here as opposed to what you're finding over here so in this case i'm going to say stick with the 30 degree you can easily go in and re-grind this to make it match that's not as big a deal there's a fairly significant difference in the length so the lee nelson is going to be somewhere including handle around 10 inches and the narratics is 11 and three quarter now i'm just looking at this and let's talk a little bit about quality if you look at this it's it's well made nicely shaped nicely finished and i really can't say anything about this to where i would say okay that needs to be improved if you look at uh if you just look at the way where this cone meets this bulky part of the chisel everything looks very symmetrical see that i don't see anything there that says uh this was not carefully machined if you look at this one first of all the ferrules are made out of some kind of a tinny wood which doesn't look terribly appealing you've got the end where it was turned the point still thickened this thing is sticking in out there the handle has been turned on a lathe it's got a shape that's been added to it but you can see the sanding scratches it's been stained i wouldn't call this top quality by any stretch but then again you're only paying 25 so what do you expect and then you can look at the grinding here and it's it's okay it's not bad but i always uh i always like to be able to work the back of my chisel and not have any kind of an interruption so if you see on the lee nelson if you're flattening and polishing the back of your chisel where it droops down here you've got some area in here that you can easily work keep the entire chisel on your stone and not fear hitting this part with the edge of your stone you've got a grace area that's about an inch and a half yeah maybe an inch and a half long whereas on this one you literally have to stay away from the back because at some point you're going to hit that raised area and now you're bumping into this which if you did it without knowing you elevate your chisel and all of a sudden you're losing your flat back right out there at the tip where it matters most how does it feel in the hand well i've always said i think lee nielsen chisels are fantastic in terms of the ergonomics they just feel really good easy to use well-balanced this i'm trying to be honest without showing any favoritism but this is just bulky it's uh i can't say a whole lot of good about it i don't find anything appealing about it i i don't like the fact that you're not nearly as if you look at the thickness you have a full half inch here whereas you don't over here so you've got for the actual function of the mortise chisel and as i mentioned keeping it from twisting when it's down into the mortise you're going you've got more reference surface here than you do here the overall grind and the fit and finish is going to be better in the lee nelson but again you're paying for that but who really cares what i mean by that is this you're only going to pay for it once you're going to use it and this you're not going to wear one of these out in your lifetime so in two or three years time you're going to forget what you paid but you're going to remember how well you like it every time you pick it up and if that brings pleasure to you well then that was a smart move if you pick something up and every time you use it you think i hate the fact that it has this this and this but i bought it i got to use it well i don't think that's money well spent this is probably the single biggest difference between inexpensive tools and expensive tools or chisels as we're talking now i i said we're not going to go through and do the sharpening on this but in preparation or in the process of preparing these chisels to at least use them to show you that part i want to show you the big difference so there's the lee nelson that i just started i'm working on a 500 grit shopkin and shopped and sharpened equipment as far as i'm concerned is the best that you can get as soon as i started working on this i'm essentially touching over the entire back now there's the narex so if you look closely i'm touching here not all the way across i've got about an oval shaped area here and i'm touching back here now what's alarming is i'm not i'm at least 5 16 an inch away from the tip now i'm far fussier with my beveled edge chisels than i am with my mortise chisels because number one the mortise chisel no part of what it does actually has ever seen it's inside the joint unlike a beveled edge but it's also used with a lot of brute force however if i want to get a decent edge i need to have this contacting this and i need to have this back flat well i'm that represents a ton of work to get rid of this high area so that i finally get down and bring that polish right out to the tip i look at that and i said there's no way that i'm going to spend this amount of time on a 25 chisel completely a complete game changer for me i'll do my best to at least put a quick edge on so we can test it in the wood but that would be that would be the game changer that in my opinion this is worth 10 times the price just to avoid having to spend the next hour and a half trying to get that back flat now i'm using a what most would call a carver's mallet we actually make these they're maple resin impregnated so increases weight about 30 percent makes it a lot harder just so that you know i've got my gauge line on here on my right i've got some perpendicular marks to help align it so what i'm going to do is come in here and set that so that the cutting edge is parallel to that line and i'm holding it so that i can see plumb now i'm not going to chop a whole lot with this i just want to get some a quick feel of how it is in the hand now you can't see it but the chisel has a tendency to want to slide off to my left and i don't quite know why i wouldn't say that it feels great i it's almost a little bit clumsy now my ability to keep that on the line for some reason and this just came out of the box so i haven't done anything to it other than what you've watched it wants to slide off to the left and i don't know whether that's because there's more relief angle on one side than the other i really can't but would i choose that for this job you know let's see try the lee nielsen i've used this a lot so this is uh might be a little bit unfair but i am very familiar with the chisel you've got to get a little relief spot first before the chisel can start to penetrate any [Music] depth [Music] now i like right off the bat i like the fact that this is a little smaller it just it feels so much better in the hand there's really sharp edges on this this as i said earlier is a little bit clumsy um if it weren't for the fact that the sides are not parallel and they're not square to the back i'd say if you're if you're faced with a budget this would do the work that it would take to go in and correct that size is beyond what i would even want to bother trying and the fact that the back is so far out of being flat the amount of work involved not not interested absolutely not interested i'd say save your money until you can find you can buy a chisel that all of that hard work has been done for you all you have to do is come in and just do some light work on the back getting it prepped sharpen the edge sharpen the bevel and you've got a chisel it's going to last you for life and make you happy every time you use it this is by far the best of the bunch you don't need a ton of them in fact i would suggest if you had a quarter and a half you would probably get by when you consider that the rule for cutting a mortise and tenon is typically one third of the thickness of the piece and the two types of the two dimensions that we most commonly use in building furniture are three quarter or inch and a half that would either make for a quarter inch mortise or a half inch mortise so you don't have to go out and buy a full set that's my two cents worth if you enjoy my method of work and like my style of teaching click on any one of these videos to help take your woodworking to the next level now i've always said better tools make the job so much easier if you click on the icon with the plane and the chisel it'll take you to our website introduce you to all of our tools that we actually manufacture right here as well as our workshops both in person and online good luck

Channel: RobCosman.com

Views: 28,519

Rating: 4.8483033 out of 5

Keywords: mortise chisel, mortise chisel review, lie nielsen mortise chisel review, narex mortise chisel review, mortise, mortise and tenon, hand tool woodworking, Rob Cosman, traditional woodworking

Id: kIoBiw5AjLc

Length: 22min 38sec (1358 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020