My Journey in Writing, Ranting, and Woodworking

I love cutting dovetails.  Ok, maybe it isn’t the dovetails per se, but the moments when I learn something.  There were several comments yesterday encouraging me to keep at my practice, which I very much appreciate.  I love practicing, so one doesn’t need to twist my arm too much.  What was most interesting was the comment that perhaps I was spending too much time obsessing about each set I cut.  I think this ‘hit the nail on the head’.

I was obsessing too much and thus it led to my being a grouchy pants yesterday.  Now I am feeling much better.  So I decided I would try a different approach, one suggested by several people.   I will devote 1 hour a day to dovetails for the next month.  No need stressing about each set anymore, I will just keep cutting them and in 30 days, I am sure I will be better.

So tonight I cut some small pieces of oak and set up the pins to be cut first.  This only took about 7 minutes.  I then made my cuts and started to chisel out the waste.  I have been using a chisel which I found in the garage, which I had sharpened and quite liked.  It is old, looks like it was an inexpensive chisel when purchased sometime in the late 12th century and I consider it to be in the same class as my Irwin.

I have been using the old low quality chisel a lot of late.  I like the little old chisel, partly because it was likely my great uncle’s.  I also figured it might have better steel, being that it is old.  I haven’t questioned these assumptions at all.  So as I was chiseling out the waste for the first set of pins I started to wonder if it was really doing a very good job.  It didn’t seem very good.  So I sharpened it and started again.  It had a razor sharp edge, polished back, and went dull very quickly.  It didn’t hold the edge at all.  So I have likely been using a very dull chisel mostly.

I remember last weekend when Sean was talking about steel losing it’s temper.  I don’t know the history of this chisel, and it may well be complete crap.  So I grabbed my much thinner Irwin, which wasn’t perfectly sharp.  The second set of pins took about 25% of the time of the 1st.  It was night and day.  This was very exciting to me.

I have talked about my love of quality tools, but I assumed that since I had an entry level chisel, that it couldn’t be any better than the one’s I found in the garage.  It is though, by a mile.  So I am going to put the other chisel to the side, and stick with the Irwin.  It is only a 3/8, which isn’t ideal, but until I have better chisels, it is the best one I have now.

I had fun tonight, but as everyone knows, the pins are easy.  I am going to cut some tails tomorrow, and they will likely not fit very well.  That is ok though, as I will just keep at it.  I feel like I got a little bit smarter today.  That makes me smile.

Now I am going to sharpen the Irwin until it is back to scary sharp, even though it is far from dull yet.  I do love sharpening.