Reply To: I broke my chisel – why did this happen?
Welcome! / Forums / General Woodworking Discussions / Tools and Tool Maintenance/Restoration / I broke my chisel – why did this happen? / Reply To: I broke my chisel – why did this happen?
I have recently tried a bit of carving and I those brass headed mallets are basically carvers mallets — I am thinking of getting one for carving. A lot of what they are used for is is fairly modest tapping. I have no idea what carvers do to hog off lots of material from white oak or whatever.
I have one veritas chisel with that “caramelized” (really?) maple handle but have not tried to cut a mortise with it. Given your experience I will not. I have used Narex bench chisels and old Marples (pre-Irwin) blue handled chisels for cutting mortises and I hit them pretty hard with one of the two sided hammers Paul advocates. But like some other folk here, I like dedicated mortise chisels. You can hit them pretty hard! I have used the veritas chisel to cut dovetails which, on Paul’s method, does involve a mallet. No problem so far.
Glad to hear Veritas replaced your chisel. That is the sign of a good company. I wonder if the chisel could have had a defect? I also wonder whether their processing of the handle (caramelized maple) might make it brittle. I even wonder why they do that — makes the chisel sound tasty I suppose. They say it helps seal the wood, maybe to keep random cosmic rays from penetrating too deeply. Just a guess.