Wood Chisels and Their Use - Beginners Woodworking #26

well I have a question for you today what's one of the most used tools in the workshop well if you said chisel you might be correct and that's exactly what we're going to talk about today hello everyone called a cadet here for woodwork web today we're going to be talking about chisels here's the array of chisels that I own and the first thing you notice right away is that there's different widths of them and starting on this side here this very wide one this is actually called a timber framing chisel and it's a very wide chisel and often a woodworker wouldn't use a chisel this wide depending on what they're doing it's just a little bit wide for what a woodworker would use but woodworkers would use these chisels and it depends on the job that you're doing why you might want to select a different width but there's more than just width to chisels and here's an example of a square sided will show you close-up of that in a second square sided chisel compared to this one beside it which is a beveled chisel so there's a close-up of these two chisels and if we look at this one you can see that it's flat all the way along on both sides compared to the bevel chisel which obviously has a bevel on each side and you can tell quickly by the face of each one of these chisels which one is beveled and which one isn't now there's more than just the beveling if we turn this one you can see that it's also wedged all the way up it's much thicker up here than it is near the bottom this is a more rugged type of chisel and this is called this is a type of mortising chisel and they typically need to be a little bit more rugged compared to a beveled chisel and if we look at it these sometimes have a little bit of wedging this one has a tiny bit often they have no beveling at all they're there parallel all the way up so this kind of a chisel and not quite as rugged as this type of a chisel that you would use for mortising this is more of a general purpose let's have a quick look at where you might want to use a beveled chisel rather than a flat sided chisel and what I have here I've just cut a dovetail and I wanted to show you that you can tell a flat sided chisel is obviously not going to be able to fit into the corners to do a cutting if you if you needed to do some trimming it's just not going to fit in there because it's flat sided compared to a beveled chisel which obviously is going to fit in there just perfectly because it gets right into the corners and can clean out anything that you might want to do so there's an example of where a beveled chisel would be a better selection than a flat sided chisel now where you might want to use a mortising chisel is if you are in fact cutting mortises and I've started to make some cuts here and basically in it sort of I guess a traditional mortise they would put that in the end and cut that down like that and then keep moving along and cutting more and more each time and flicking out the last one and cutting deeper each time and you can see my woods driving down into the vise here because this isn't the best way of doing this but that's sort of the traditional way and that's why this is such a nice chisel for that because it's nice and firm for doing that now you can do this same technique with beveled chisel but you just need to be a little bit more cautious that you don't bend because often they are a little bit slimmer now the traditional way of making mortises these days is often to cut them with a Forstner bit or something like that in which case you're just trimming up and already cut and for that a bevel chisel works just as well as a mortise chisel so there's kind of a quick overview of different kinds of chisels and what they're typically used for and especial purposes why you would select one over another next I want to talk about briefly is just how to use a chisel and you know a lot of this is just plain old common sense but there's some things that you'll learn quickly when you use a chisel one of the things that chisel will help you do very quickly is to start reading the grain of the wood and it's particularly important when you read the grain of the wood for your jointer for your planer for your hand plane and even for your chisel and what we like to do what we call in the industry we chisel down we prefer to chisel downhill and what that means is we're running with the grain of the wood when you chisel uphill it means you're chiseling into the green and in this diagram if this was a chisel you can imagine that if we were chiseling this way you're what's going to happen is when the chisel grabbed some of this wood it's very likely going to split and if you've ever been cutting hinges I rabbit four hinges and you've dug something in and you've dug too much wood up that's because you're chiseling uphill so ideally what we want to do is chisel downhill and you can see that when you are chiseling in this direction you're just going to be skipping sort of the grain of the wood which means you're going to be just sort of planing it off and that way you get a much more controlled plane or chisel so that you're not going to be gouging and chipping the wood and taking off more than you need now because chisels are so sharp and they should be sharp it's the one tool in your workshop that you will notice when it gets dull because the dull a chisel just does not work very well at all and we always want to be working away from the where the the woodworker is standing so you want to be pushing and you can always tell that by the position of my hands if I was working like this I might be working pulling it towards me and you never want to do that the other thing you always almost always want to be using two hands and that's because you get a much better control by using two hands and it also means if you're using two hands on the chisel you're not going to be doing something like this and working the chisel and you know what if that slipped that's going to run and gouge right into your hand and I can't tell you how many woodworkers have had a chisel driven into their hand because they've been working like that so always use two hands on the chisel and that will avoid you getting caught by it okay I found a piece of wood and you can see I've marked how the grain is having a tendency to run down in that situation and what we're going to try is putting the chisel on there and just seeing how we can chisel from one side and what it looks like it's hard and what you'll notice is that it's kind of crumbly when you are going into the grate it wants to dig down in now when we turn around even with these little bits on here watch what happens when we're just clipping off sort of the top of the grain it just makes all the difference in the world see those little curlicues that come off of there that's what happens when you know you're running in the right direction if you get those little curls that come off just like a plain wood and it that you can even feel the chisel or the plane wants to run more smoothly when it's running downhill and just clipping off sort of the top of the grain well that concludes our short video on using a chisel and just remember a couple things work safely with them make sure you never put yourself in a situation where you can get cut because the chisel wants to be very sharp and you want to make sure that they're sharp because they're easier to use and it just make sure we're working that much easier when you're working with sharp tools if you haven't already subscribed we ask you to do that like us on facebook follow us on twitter i'm calling an ad for woodwork web thanks for watching you

Channel: WoodWorkWeb

Views: 66,827

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Keywords: chisel, wood chisel, using a wood chisel, bevel sided chisel, flat sided chisel, mortise chisel, timber framing chisel, log house building chisel, woodworking chisels, woodworking tools, furniture making, wood furniture, wood construction, Colin Knecht, woodworkweb.com

Id: x8Wn4zd1_fw

Length: 9min 48sec (588 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 30 2015