3 Attachment(s)
Broken Tip R Iles Mortise Chisel
I was chopping 1/4" wide x 3/4" deep mortises in some pecan (hard) and broke the tip off on my 1/4" Ray Iles chisel on the beginning of the 2nd pass through the 8th mortise I worked on for this project. The tip broke off when I levered back to eject the debris after the mallet strikes and looks like I broke the last 3/16" - 1/4" off of the length. My first pass yielded an approx. 1/4" deep mortise as I don't normally try to drive a chisel as deep as it can go, just tend to strike the chisel with two solid blows (using a 20 oz Wood Is Good mallet) per movement every time. This pass was probably going to yield another 1/4" of depth (see the "hole in photo 2 where I was able to extract the tip from). This pecan is hard, maybe I struck the chisel a little harder than I normally do? Maybe there was a hard(er) spot in the timber?, maybe I powered up on the lever jerk more than usual? (pretty sure this was not the case this time and the "pop" of the break occurred immediately after just starting my first lever pull). Maybe there was some type of minor flaw in the metal? Who knows, I don't have any magnification equipment to take a close look at it and most likely would not know what I was looking at any way. The end of the remaining chisel is approx. 1/8" thick (doesn't sound like a lot, does it) but this will require an amount of grinding to bring it back down to a useful thickness for final hand sharpening. This chisel is only a couple of years old, not much use to date, but used enough to have honed the working tip at my version of a 35 deg angle many times on a couple-three projects. Attachment 372220Attachment 372219Attachment 372218