Shooting End Grain with a Chisel

[Jim Koepke]

My son is in Korea and sent me this > Shooting End Grain with a Chisel <

jtk

[David Carroll]

It sorta looks like he wet the end grain and then let it dry a little. I wonder if that helps. When freshly sharpened, I can pare end grain like that with a slicing cut, but the part I remove doesn't hold together in a "sheet" like is shown in this video.

Very cool!

DC

[Rob Luter]

Probably not white oak.

[Cameron Wood]

Couldn't get it to play.

[Frederick Skelly]

He sure nailed the sharpening on that edge, didnt he? Worked like a hot knife through butter.
I never tried wetting the end grain - wonder what that does for him, maybe keeps the shaving intact?

[Michael Bulatowicz]

Maybe I’m misinterpreting what I’m seeing, but to me it looks like the end grain has been soaked in some kind of flexible transparent adhesive to keep everything together. The shaving seems too coherent and too transparent for its cohesion if it’s just wood.

[Frederick Skelly]

Maybe I’m misinterpreting what I’m seeing, but to me it looks like the end grain has been soaked in some kind of flexible transparent adhesive to keep everything together. The shaving seems too coherent and too transparent for its cohesion if it’s just wood.

You may be right.

[Jack Dover]

Nah, it's just cedar, you can do that to cedar or white pine no problems. There's enough pitch in these woods to hold a shaving together. You could do that to oak too, the shaving will just fall apart once you try touching it, but it will fall down as one piece. The endgrain was just sprinkled with water.

The downside of wetting endgrain is that it will swell it. Especially when area is large. It will soak copious amounts of water and it will pare like soap. But then it will dry and pared area won't be flat, it will shrink opening a gap, and often there's a white residue after water is dry. Or black stains on oak. This works in carpentry where a 1/16" is well within tolerances and the where staining doesn't matter. Chris Schwarz suggested this for furniture making a quite a while ago too, but he suggested using something like white spirits, turpentine or denatured alcohol. And Chris also reserved that for trimming endgrain on something like a dovetailed drawer, so maybe he's still redeemable.

Wetting endgrain was shown by this one guy - Takami Kawai, who runs the Suikoushya YT channel and who is a carpenter. Now it's everywhere, and people claim as much as "this is a TRADITIONAL Japanese technique", something I find very hard to believe. This is a crutch type of a trick that is dictated by plantation grown kiln dried wood to people that can't sharpen - because heavy framing carpentry uses timbers with quite a bit higher moisture content, and it pares fine without any tricks. And even kiln dried DF from a borg store pares just fine if one bothers to learn sharpening properly.

[Ray Newman]

Now that was impressive! Wonder what the sharpening technique was?

[Stew Denton]

I had exactly the same thought as Michael.

[Rafael Herrera]

Water, alcohol, or mineral spirits can soften end grain. The species of wood is also a factor, it's probably a soft type. Sharp chisel also a big factor.

Has anyone tried to repeat this?

[Jim Koepke]

Has anyone tried to repeat this?

Not this in particular, but many years ago an old story about "blocking in" a piece of wood was read that got me to try squaring the end of a piece with a chisel.

The article suggested that this method, supposedly common at one time, was what gave block planes their name.

It described a method of using a square to knife a line around the end of a piece of wood. Then the end was chamfered all around with a chisel and then paird down to the line to produce a squared end.

It worked, but a shooting board or holding the piece in vise and going at it with a plane is much faster and easier.

Also Derek's method of trimming miters inspired me to make a small guide:

Mitere Guide Allmost Finished.jpg

It is great for taking off thin shavings with a chisel, but I have not made an attempt to sheer off a specimen as in the video.

BTW, when my son sent me the link he commented that he thought this is how the toilet paper on his base was made.

jtk

[mike stenson]

I've been able to do that, although the shaving wasn't as consistently in tact, with sugar maple. Mostly because when paring the bench dogs flush on my old bench. I suspect the species has as much to do with it as the tool.

[Jack Dover]

Pretty sure a bunch of people do exactly this as we speak, it's not a big deal. Can't really get the fascination with stuff like this. It's as if an ability to take a continuous end grain shaving enables building better furniture or something?

[Rob Luter]

I’ve seen a number of these type of vids on YouTube. It’s usually framed as an ancient Asian technique or Zen woodworking. The wood is typically a light, hard, fine grained tropical hardwood that cuts like soap. The chisel is normally used with a slicing action as opposed to traditional paring. It looks cool anyway. It reminds me of my days tying flies and making poppers. A single edge razor blade works balsa much the same way.