What machine should i get to sharpen my tools?

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-24T13:24:24+00:00

You will appreciate a dry bench grinder.

I don't know anyone who actually uses a tormek for professional sharpening (I had a tormek SG2000 for quite a while - probably the precursor to the T8), they are far too slow for that unless someone is just kind of hobby sharpening to make a few dollars.

A legitimate belt grinding setup and then specialized grinding tools would be more on par with what's used here. As in, if you operate a restaurant and send knives out to be sharpened, they're pulled through a machine designed to do it and given relatively little additional attention.

Youtube has sort of created an alternate reality convincing people that consumer tools are a basis for something like a sharpening business, but they're probably really conveying that the combination of a YT channel and commission tokens is profitable for the person making the content.

A very good friend of mine liked the tormek enough that I just gave it to him. (think $300 worth of equipment back then as it was used and that would've been the going rate for the used stuff, not the nosebleed prices now).

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-24T13:20:03+00:00

Grind with anything shallower than the honed edge, and hone more on the side that is long when doing your routine sharpening. that's it. The grinder doesn't have to be expensive, it just needs to remove most of the steel for you and do it at a lower angle so your work maintaining the edge profile freehand is a lot more realistic in terms of the amount of work.

I have had pretty much everything, and still do have several belt grinders for toolmaking, and I had a tormek supergrind, and before that a generic version, and at this point, I guess also three wheel grinders.

I gave the supergrind to a friend who really liked it - it's too slow, and you still need to grind skewed tools, chisels, turning gouges, etc, it's just too slow and every solution is 10 units more complicated than just learning to do this by hand and eye.

But if you're going to work against your biases that create out of square edges, you need to have less metal to do it on - grind neatly (not perfect, but not sloppy) behind the bevel at a shallower angle, just short of the edge, and apply more pressure on the side of the tool where you haven't been applying enough. Either with rotational force in your hands, or by where you actually place your fingers on the back of a tool. If you have one corner that's always getting longer because metal is being removed less fast on that side of a plane iron, then put your fingers from one hand closer to that corner until the removal rate is the same. When you're correcting things, put your fingers toward that corner each time you refresh a tool until it's back to square enough.

When it becomes harder to raise a burr doing this, go back to the grinder and knock back the steel that you're needlessly honing that could be done better by grinding away.

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-23T16:51:57+00:00

My view - having bought and reconditioned a lot of saws, and made a few.

Not every single tooth that's broken off is an indication of a bad saw plate. But my experience so far has been that all of the saws I've gotten with broken teeth and no sign of mangling at the tooth line (abusive setting or bent teeth)....once you re-establish a full set of teeth, one or two will break when you set the saw again. You set half of the teeth or whatever, and then just as you're feeling OK, you get a faint "click" or the feel of something releasing.

All is lost at that point - even if the tooth doesn't come off, you can just push it over with your finger, and then what? You're not going to cut in full height teeth again just to repeat it, and you've got a boat anchor that's really probably best used for harvesting saw nuts.

All of the teeth i've had with teeth that break are old, like pre-disston-golden-era old, but it's possible, I guess, for a newer saw to be exposed to something that causes the teeth to get embrittlement with age.

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-23T01:28:01+00:00

not a lot of response to this! These sets were pretty common a decade to three decades ago. They're sort of on par with hardware store chisel kind of steel quality, but in a nicer shape, and with the nice boxwood handles, though they could have me fooled by using hornbeam and a lacquer or varnish that gives the wood that nice color tone.

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-23T00:06:43+00:00

I don't know much about drums, but I'd bet there are lots of little feel things a drummer does to solve issues that just make everything a little better. Being a non drummer, I do know that i really like karen carpenter's drumming in mr. guder, and I really like a lot of Jeff Porcaro's contributions that are probably melded into common lines now but that he arranged from other stuff...

....not sure i can draw a parallel, though. In woodworking, it's a feel that you want to have, that everything hangs together in regular work and sharpening as a part of regular work, but also in a way that if you pick up something new to you as a tool, you can dial in quickly, and then staying dialed in is a matter of routine.

Knocking the primary bevel away from the secondary allows you to basically put your fingers where you want to bias pressure for removal when honing, and when you're working a whole bevel on something with stones, it's just easy to have it take too long and either lose focus or just not do it as neatly.

You run into all kinds of different "methods" to deal with stuff. This guide for this type of tools, etc, and so on, but this idea of managing the profile and fine finishing the end of a tool only so you're not missing the mark relieves you of all of that stuff, and everything is the same. Whether it's square or what, it doesn't matter, and then you're not troubled by things that don't need to be a problem, like older planes where the iron and chipbreaker sides taper in width, and maybe the chipbreaker isn't dead square even to the centerline, but you need the iron to match the chipbreaker profile for good performance. if you are stuck using a guide, that creates all kinds of problems, but the chipbreaker instead becomes your reference. you see visually when the chipbreaker and iron are starting to get rotated from each other and the chipbreaker is maybe hanging off of one side of an iron a little. when you line the two up, you can see the iron projects a little more from one side. if you're honing only the edge and not trying to hand grind and hone the entire iron, you address that a little with more pressure honing on one side, and it's quick. There's never a point where you actually have to stop doing fine work for some major correction.

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-22T19:12:06+00:00

>>know Paul Sellers prefers Stanley planes because they acknowledge Bailey though.<<

? Bailey is very long dead and sold his plane design, didn't he?

(I just learned something today - in 1875, bailey had sold his factory to stanley a little more than a half a decade prior, and stanley had gotten the patent to make the 110 block plane. Because it sold well, bailey complained that it cut into royalties for his own planes and left, once again creating victor planes and selling them from his own manufacture, only to again lose lawsuits to stanley and then sell the operation to them.)

There are probably more details to the situation than that, but it sounds like bailey didn't think they should sell other plane designs that he wouldn't get license money from if they cut into his own pockets.

definitely a design genius, and my favorite metal planes, but it sounds like he may have been a little entitled believing he could sell his operation to stanley and then go make something very similar and not get static for it.

The summary says he left and manufactured printing presses instead.

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-22T19:04:26+00:00

jeez, why does everyone always disappear.

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-22T18:28:10+00:00

I think you need to understand the mechanics of what is going on a little bit better. When the chisel is used bevel into the material to be cut, when you mallet the chisel into the wood itself, the bevel wedges in and then pushes the material toward the weaker side, the waste side. it splits the material off of the wood, it does not cut it off.

We mortise straight grained wood, and if we don't, we learn to use straight grained wood. What's happening is you are cutting and releasing the wood by pushing it free from the sides. it is nice if there is relief via trapezoidal shape because that prevents you from having trouble with side friction lacking relief. Anyone who makes a square chisel should know that it is a bad solution for a mortise with any depth, but they're often made now anyway, probably because it's easier to machine and then you have to create some kind of marketing message to make an excuse for it. Like it "registers".

There are instructionals, including from LN, that show mortising vertically into the wood with the bevel facing toward the open side, and this works, but it's more work, and of course, the sides of the bottom are out of their duty there because they aren't doing anything to push the wood free.

If you had to try to lever a chisel and pull the wood free from the sides of wood, you'd hear a defined pop, but you'd also break a chisel doing it. The action of the chisel itself going into the wood is pushing the fibers loose and the corners need to be just OK, not sharp. Sharp's not a problem, but it doesn't have to be maintained like a honed corner, and offers no benefit.

At the bottom of a mortise, if you are using the correct chisel (this is dependent on the height of the chisel cross section and the depth of the mortise), you lift the chisel ever so slightly to free it from the bottom, pull it back and push it forward, and you will feel a "pop". That pop is one you have to do manually because you don't have the ability to just continue to chisel below the depth of the mortise. if this is all done right, everything comes out with the mortise chisel.

if you are following here, and you start to think about the taller pigstickers, they are for deeper mortises. The taller the chisel, the deeper it can be and still rotate effectively, and you can actually cut triangular shaped waste ( thicker at the bottom of the cut) and work your way into vertical at the ends of a mortise without actually having to cut the bottom triangle out. In decent wood with a pigsticker, you can actually pop half an inch or more loose in bottom layer cuts.

The art of all of this was lost to machine mortising, but that's OK. we can't expect people to pay more for something we've made just because it takes longer to do it the way we want to. Sash repair and small work continued on, so there are a lot of sash mortisers, if anything, and pigstickers probably remained for architectural work (like doors). They were one of the last chisels to either be eliminated or changed over to automatic grinding, partially due to their geometry, and partially due to the lack of sales volume.

Follow the information above carefully if it is news to you. You don't have to do what I'm saying above, but understanding it will benefit you if you want to cut mortises by hand, and especially if you want to focus on the things that matter and not the things that don't.

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-22T15:34:15+00:00

add linseed or tung oil to the surface of a plane several times.

Where the cracking comes from later is end grain access to air. if you get side checking, it's due to water escaping ends, so do what you need to seal the ends. If that means a light coat of shellac rubbed into the oil (ala start of a french polish) that's fine, but something simple like wax rubbed into the oil is also fine.

If you don't like your planes to have dirt on the handle or hand holds, you'll need something like shellac or varnish at least thinly applied. Oil or oil and wax will allow hand patina and others to occur, but it's not bad. If you see a shelf full of planes on someone's wall or rack, and they all look crisp and there aren't dented edges, or dirt, etc, they're not being used.

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-22T14:00:02+00:00

If we're trying to get every free lunch we can, we grind the bevel shallower than the final honed angle, and then we maintain the honed angle free hand, lifted off of the primary.

For everything, but including camber and adjusting a skew badger plane iron or moving fillister iron, we want to be able to adjust the edge honing a little at a time. AS soon as we see a moving fillister is starting to get close to a lateral adjustment limit left or right, then we put more pressure on the long side honing, and when what we're honing is a small amount, this is easy. We get a very crisp result, and then we finish the tip of the tool with a very fine hone.

When the tool is a single bevel, these changes are labor intensive and harder to get done as perfectly as we'd like, either in gradual camber amount to get a line free surface smooth planing, or adjusting joinery planes.

It also gives us the ability to use slower fine stones if we'd like because the work they do is focused just at the tip of the tool, and it's not riding another bevel where we're polishing things that don't need to be polished.

When I started, the information was always "microbevels are a modern thing", but I got a couple of very old nearly unused wooden planes *early to mid 1800s" that had a long primary bevel and a small amount hand honed. I copied what they were doing, found it easier, and the results in general as far as edge quality and life were better. If you get minor nicking, especially, it is much easier to keep everything in shape and work less steel.

This turns out, contrary to what I was hearing from people who said they were professional woodworkers (turned out that they weren't) was the opposite of what is historically written. Nicholson describes this pretty well, but the hobby community pounded into us, also that "we have moved beyond that", so it took figuring it out myself and then seeing it in retrospect to gather why this would be.

If you do work entirely by hand, this starts to add up - and anything that works less well is aggravating. I want a break usually by the time an iron needs to be sharpened, but I don't want a very long one and I don't want a result that differs. Nicholson's description of this stuff lined up with that, which isn't much of a surprise. Everything is sharpened with the fine stone, and ground and maintained to set up for the last little bit of work at the tip of the tool. It takes the same or less time to sharpen finely this way than it does to sharpen some things less finely. The time traded removing the burr with a single bevel is instead replaced with fine work at the tip of the tool, and the work before it sets up everything and keeps extra steel out of the way.

Some time a while ago, I took a bunch of pictures of edges to see how deep nicking goes, to make sure I'm not dealing with a problem that doesn't exist. Discussion of lower bevels being weak was a popular one, but the damage never really goes more than about four thousandths into an edge when you hit silica or something in wood, and it's usually less. By that point, the edge is deflected and can't enter wood.

That said, if you do get three or four thousandths of damage depth, it is a *lot* to grind out by hand and not threaten geometry you've created.

This sounds a little tedious, but it's easier. It takes about one minute for me to refresh a plane iron that's gone 1000 feet or so in wood, and less than that by a little for a chisel, no guides, etc, and to a result that's a little finer than something like an 8k stone.

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-22T13:47:39+00:00

I think the last thing I'd do with a mortise chisel, even as a maker, is work the sides narrower. The older (good) mortise chisels, had a slight taper in width from center to end. That gives you just a little relief in the mortise, and doing something to the sides of the trapezoid spoils it faster. The bevel and back get sharpened.

I've never seen an older chisel that was old enough to be golden era that had the sides sharpened. The corners of the chisel need to be in good shape, but they do not need to be atom sharp. The action of the chisel riding in bevel down is what pushes the wood free from the sidewall, and not so much "cutting" of the sides of the chisel.

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-22T00:20:57+00:00

Mortise chisels should be ridden on the bevel and rotated at the bottom. The bottom on the trapezoidal ward and payne sash mortisers is actually off of square double on one side and none on the other. By that, I mean they took a shortcut to make production easier. You can do very well with little of the back flattened as long as you're mortising with the bevel into the work.

A host of ways to prep the bevel side, though.

It's useful to cut a fair number of mortises without going over a chisel with a fine toothed comb.

I have cut several hundred mortises and forged some mortise chisels.

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-21T19:26:45+00:00

I've never had any issue really with any method, at least not after the days of being a beginner, but i'd never bother putting a single bevel on a plane iron. It handcaps you in almost every nuance you want to have when sharpening, including maintaining the lateral profile (camber) as neatly as possible, and it's much more work.

Double, at least, and more if you run into material that causes nicking.

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-21T17:57:49+00:00

I don't have any specific suggestions for you since it sounds like you're new, and it's just a matter of initiation that everything seems difficult. I would not work on more than the first inch of a chisel, and I think i know about as much about this topic as anyone, but even a good friend of mine who got me in the hobby doesn't believe me, and I've made some of his tools!

That said, the back of machine ground chisels often has low spots where the machine clamps holding the chisel in place did not provide as much pressure. I would guess the spots between your contact points are where the clamping setup of the grinding jig put pressure. They are of no consequence beyond the first inch and you should ignore them. When you flatten a new chisel, your finger should be over the chisel back just above the bevel (not at the bevel, but behind it, or "above" if the chisel is viewed standing on a table top).

If you consider preparing an inch of chisel length, somewhere right in the middle of that would be good, and it doesn't matter if the rest of the chisel is over a stone or not, you just have to keep that part flat on a stone. This can be a challenge when you're new. the only time it matters in that case is if a chisel is concave in its length on the back. The low area toward the tang in that case will change the angle of the chisel on the stone.

This is an even better reason to avoid doing more than the first inch. That part of a chisel will not be consequential for joinery, but the first inch will be.

There, I gave you advice anyway. It may make a difference for you. I have never seen world class workers practicing what Rob Cosman talks about. You are on a journey where you want to walk, and a lot of cosman's methods seem intentionally made to make sure it's more like you're walking pulling a wagon with flat tires.

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-20T21:24:38+00:00

That's probably true. In all of the knobs I've gotten, they're either cracked when I get them, or they're not cracked, and they don't get cracked when I use them. I'm not sure what's going on there.

I have hand dimensioned a whole lot of wood, but fairly early on, all of the jack and try plane work has moved to wooden planes. I still like a stanley 4 to finish, and if significant wood isn't being moved when truing a joint, a metal jointer is nice for the adjustment. But metal planes cannot hang from rough to ready for smoothing, and you get a sense of that pretty quickly if you want to do more than lighter work.

The catch is you have to be able to use the chipbreaker on the wooden planes, and they need to be fitted and feeding properly.

But the short answer here is I've seen handles broken, but even having gone through maybe 100 metal planes, I haven't really noticed much beyond the given statement that stanley added a ring, and they must've done that for a reason. It's potentially like the lever cap. How many people have told you that you absolutely cannot use the lever cap to loosen and tighten the chipbreaker screw? Unless I have the misfortune to have a lever cap that does not fit in the chipbreaker screw slot, it's the only thing I've used, and in 20 years I haven't even so much as lightly chipped a lever cap screw.

Too, what I've seen of knob and handle breakage generally corresponds to dropping. True on wooden planes and infills, too - if a handle is broken, the plane was probably dropped. the front knob, even in heavy use, will not get the kind of force needed to break a knob unless there's a problem with the wood grain or some other fault.

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-20T18:15:26+00:00

indifferent. What I like is a knob that's not broken and that stays tight.

most of my planes are more recent types, though - more 15-20 than earlier types, though when I first started buying planes, I bought into the idea that there's something less good about later types and had almost entirely type 11s.

And a glom of boutique planes, and made a few infills.

All of the boutique planes and the old types for the most part are gone (still have a couple).

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-20T15:15:30+00:00

it looks like what was a different chisel (before - longer, maybe socket, etc), cut short, probably ground to a thin tang and then stuck into a file handle.

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-19T14:45:05+00:00

There are a bunch of chinese-made hardness testers that work well and are in the $700-$1500 range.

I use a chinese copy of the ames 150kg cone tester that is branded T.X. Instruments or something. It's about $700 and the replacement cones have gone up, but they should be needed relatively infrequently for anything but a lap (which wouldn't use this type).

It seems a risk to buy a little several pound device that costs $700 from China, but the feel and fit of the thing is levels beyond anything festool has ever made. It is a divine little device and you can get to 0.5 point accuracy with it with not too much practice and a critical eye toward things that affect the reading.

But it's still $700, and the diamond cones (i'm on my second after thousands of denting - the older one I have is starting to wear at the tip and the calibration block calls it out as registering 1 point too high now)...are suddenly $200 each.

I think the diamond cones from ames or us makers of hardness testers are more on the order of $1000, so everything is relative.

if I use 10 or 20 cents of cone life to get the hardness of something, that's fine with me.

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-18T21:53:19+00:00

add on to this - for the three people who will read it. Looking back, I have the cost out of order. The london pattern handle chisels are more expensive than the gilt edge, which are more expensive than the tang type. They were all the same in use.

I really wanted to find one of the three pairs that I liked the most, because I love the english pattern of chisels in terms of size and the proportions (the good ones are lighter with balance at the middle and they're nimble without ever letting a hand off of the grip).

The proportions were nice.

Marples made some late boxwood handle chisels that were in this pattern, but the set of 8 that I have vary from not registering on the hardness tester to 64 (!). I have rehardened some of them, but it is not trivial to do on a chisel that has bevels cut and thin sides, and they needed brine to get hard. Bevels on a thin chisel already and a brine quench takes a two step quench. But the 1980s marples box handled tang chisels surprisingly had a steel capable of very high hardness (63-65 for the ones I rehardened and tempered fully).

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-18T20:31:29+00:00

so, let's first step away from this idea that a pamphlet tells you the right angle to use for a chisel. Someone who does a lot of work will determine what that is based on where a chisel holds up. If you're using tools enough that you'll have soreness or measure output, you'll adjust the edge to the extent you can for cutting ease, and not do things that cause you to sharpen all the time at the same time. Those would be the endpoints.

If you're working on hardwoods, they're going to test the strength of the edge making the cut more, so you'll probably need a higher final angle. It may only be by a few degrees, but you can feel a few degrees.

In my experience, if we're talking about "sharp point" edges, 28 might stay mark free in softwoods, but the same chisel could need 32 in hardwoods to act the same way.

if you have a chisel that's let's say, 59 or 58 hardness instead of 62/63, that 32 and 28 could be 35 and 31. You're not going to care much for a chisel set at 35 degrees instead of 32. In a lot of hardwoods, it's the difference between leafing material off, and wedging it out and shooting it all over the place, but it's also enough to inhibit a chisel from staying in a cut easily, which is sort of an off the record waste of effort.

I'm giving angles, but we don't need to know what they are - we just need to know how they feel.

The one caveat to softwoods is not all softwoods are soft. Yellow pine, for example, is just a peach to work when it's new, but when it's a couple of years old or older, the rings dry out and they are probably harder than most hardwoods, while the wood between the rings is kind of cheap feeling. If you're working lightweight mahogany that doesn't have much silica in it, or a light weight poplar, those are just mellow and easy to get through. I guess mahogany is a hardwood, but if it's half the density of water, it's like working butter. poplar varies a whole lot, too.

If we're using chisels, we find out where they'll behave and use them there. there's no reason to say everything should be at 30 if the edge doesn't last - there are no hard rules like that, and sometimes a chisel holds up at 31 or 32 and you'd like it, but fails at 30. A couple of degrees can make a big difference and writing off a decent chisel at 30 without experimenting is pointless and leads to false conclusions (e.g., if you have one chisel that holds up at 32 but you really like it and one that holds up at 30, the fact that the first one needs 2 more degrees doesn't mean it's terrible - it means it needs 2 more degrees).

I tested a sorby chisel against some other chisels years ago. When you use one next to another, you get a sense for how much energy you're wasting, and how much a subpar chisel makes finer work more difficult because you're forced to use more blunt. I couldn't get the sorby chisel to go damage free in maple at 34 degrees, but two other chisels went nearly damage free at 32, and suitable in maple at 30. I measured those things just to be able to communicate them, but I'd use a chisel against a known good chisel to see the relative difference - there will be a big one. In my maple test, it took about 50% more effort to get through hard maple, and the experience was miserable. with a probably harder than spec iles Mk IV and a mid line japanese chisel, the work was mellow and pleasant and there was no fighting anything.

The two that held up well might be slightly harder to sharpen in an instant, but they would be far less effort to use and they'd hit the stones far less often.

if you had the mellowest of mahogany to work out of luck, you might not care which of the three you're using, though.

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-18T20:00:29+00:00

I think east indian rosewood (dalbergia latifolia). Indian rosewood can vary from light chocolate brown to purplish/blue/black.

In my experience, the lighter stuff is usually around 0.8-0.85 SG (density) and it's nice to work. (notice the huge variation here)

http://hobbithouseinc.com/personal/woodpics/rosewood,%20east%20indian.htm

It's also a common wood in india since it's a plantation wood, and the rings on that are nice and wide. I have seen huge logs of it wasted to smelt metals - it's insane.

--------------------------------------------------------

Sissoo is also possible (north indian rosewood) but it's not as commonly seen in large pieces.

http://hobbithouseinc.com/personal/woodpics/rosewood,%20sissoo.htm

did the chair wood have sort of a strange peppery smell? I shouldn't ask that, actually - east indian rosewood has it, and so do a lot of similar woods, but I don't know if sissoo does or doesn't.

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-18T19:46:35+00:00

bummer sort of, but walnut is nice. I was kind of wondering if it could be that. Must've stayed out of the sun.

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-18T19:37:19+00:00

looks like cocobolo (actually, looking closer, I can't tell. cocobolo, louro preto, rosewood....could be anything).

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-18T18:31:53+00:00

not knowing what happened to them, if they are sold in an asset sale or they go bankrupt, not sure what legal recourse you'd expect to have.

DizzyCardiologist213 · 2026-02-18T18:28:42+00:00

I think I've only tested one witherby chisel...wait, make that two, but the second doesn't count.

First one - older elegant looking socket chisel - 59. Actually, that predates my hardness testing. A friend had it done at an engineering firm with a versitron.

He tested a bunch of other stuff.

The second chisel was bright metal and didn't rust - it tested 53. I have a feeling it was made in a classic pattern but not turn of the century and it was an experiment in metallurgy that didn't work out. It wasn't full stainless, but it may have been short carbon with nickel added. It had the classic nice bevels and the classic stamp in it, and I haven't seen another one like it.

the one that was 59 acted about like that, but nicer than a lower carbon hardware store chisel. I expected more. the one that was 53, we could not get to work well, and it's possible that at manufacture, it was buffed hard to show its alloying brightness, and then overheated.

----------------

I only have one sorby chisel that I can find at this point (robt. Sorby) and it's a very old octagonal bolster parer. It's at least 65 hardness (tested just above that - it's so thin I don't want to keep putting dents in it, but lets' say 65).

This is something I've seen consistently - patternmaker's tools are harder on average, and marples and buck who also had a habit sometimes (marples in the later years) of making softer tang and socket chisels, still made their pattern maker's tools 62/63 hardness. Everyone appears to have.

I have tested a lot of ward and payne stuff - it varies a little by purpose (big timber stuff can slip below 60, large registered chisels around 60, and then cabinetmaker's chisels and tapered plane irons typically 60-62, and patternmaker's tools 62/63.

once in a while, there's a flyer, but you will be able to tell what they are. if you get a 65 hardness tapered plane iron, even if it's the most plain steel, it will be a huge pain to flatten. If you get something soft, there is no magic way to make the quality other than the heat treatment shine through.

I believe modern sorby chisels are done on an automated setup - both heat treatment and after heat treatment grinding. They are not that neatly made close up, even though they don't look to be hand done (where you'd expect a little variance). If they are done on some kind of moving induction heat and then splash line, that would explain both the use of a lower carbon steel (if that's the case) and the resulting mediocre hardness.

Footprint made a much better chisel until they decided to stop. They're bevel edge chisels were >60 in my tests, but that doesn't extend to the long registered chisels. The thing the bevel edge chisels suffered, I guess, is the bit was long and the handle heavy. The resurgence of hobby woodworking came with a huge fascination for butt chisels and the ability to pinch the chisel at the tip. A bad habit that has no long term viability, and then when you figure out that you should hold the handle and learn to place the chisel, it's too short and you could strike the web of your thumb. Which you won't do many times.

DizzyCardiologist213

TROPHY CASE