New Members in the Chisel Family

So it has been a little while since I posted anything.  After the timber framing course things were pretty hectic through Christmas and afterwards.  A bunch of my family chipped in and gave me a pair of timber framing chisels for Christmas which is really exciting. 

I've been anxiously waiting their arrival, each day checking the status of their delivery on the USPS website.  My friend Jamie said it reminded of him of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip where Calvin orders a propeller beanie in the mail and it takes 6 weeks to arrive.  It's worth checking because it is actually quite accurate.  

Today they finally arrived!!!  Thanks to my generous family I now have 1.5" and 2" Barr Quarton timber framing chisels in my arsenal.

The New Chisels, 1.5" on the left, 2" on the right

The Quartons measure 17.5" long but are no match for the Smith original that my brother made for me for Christmas.  The Smith original is 6" in width and has a new home on the wall in the shop where I will see it every day.  Thanks bro for one of the coolest Christmas presents ever!!! 

The Smith Original in its New Home

A small addendum on setting up the new chisels; To truly make a chisel sharp both the back and bevel need to be sharpened to a high degree.  The edge can only be as good as the worse of the two planes which intersect.  As a result when I get a new chisel I try to take the time to flatten the back, which, luckily only needs to be done once.  Often this means putting on a movie and lapping the back of a set of small chisels in an evening.  However, these chisels are much larger than my others and thus I knew it would take longer.  How much longer was a mystery I was going to have to find out the long way.  Over the past week I have had a couple of late nights and watched more movies than I normally care to.  It turns out I could have almost watched the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy (extended edition) in the time it took to fully lap the backs of these beauties.  I wound up putting a little more that five hours into each one. 
 

Before lapping the back.

The slurry produced in a few hours of lapping.

After lapping the back.