Wooden Edge Covers for Gouges/Chisels

[Dan Kirkland]

This might be a bit silly to some of you guys but I had been fiddling with making some covers for my chisels and I thought it'd be cool to make some out of some scrap cedar I had lying around. I did a little tutorial on it if anyone wanted to do it themselves.

Main reason I did this was because I have no skill whatsoever in working leather, plus the wood just looks kind of neat I think. The goal was to try to make it look like it had been made out of a single piece of wood. It sort of worked on the two in the video but I'm sure with practice it'd get better.

Any thoughts on how to improve the design and such would be appreciated.

And mods feel free to move if this is in the wrong spot.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIW8xD-X16c

[bridger berdel]

I have made a couple of wood tip protectors for carving tools that get carried around in a more general purpose tool box. that is the exception though. I do most of what little carving I do in the shop. there they live in drawers, sans tip covers.

I have pressed a wine cork or two into tip protector service.

[Stew Denton]

Hi Dan,

Your tip protectors look good, and look to be pretty strong.

I make my chisel covers out of the cardboard backs to writing tablets. The first thing is to mark the cardboard so that it will fold over the width of the blade, covering it's entire length plus a bit extra length so that one flap can fold over the tip to make closed end on the sheath. I make the sheath that is a bit over 2 1/2 times as wide as the chisel. The sheath has to fold over both flats of the chisel, and then have enough extra width to overlap the back side so the chisel blade is completely enclosed, but so the chisel can slip in and out easily.

I then score the place where the folds are and I treat the side of the cardboard that folds in with an oil like 3 in 1 oil, WD-40, or a similar oil, whatever is handy. The oil gets rubbed into the sheath so that it is just dark with the oil, but there is no free oil on the surface oil at all.

The sheath then get folded over and covered with wraps of masking tape. I make similar ones for files, and sometimes spray them with spray lacquer which makes them even tougher.

These aren't fancy, but are very serviceable, and help prevent rust on the chisel. One I have has held the same chisel for over 46+ years. It's getting a bit ratty, but is still serviceable. I went over that chisel the other day with a scotch brite pad, and a couple of minutes later it was bright with no observable rust, because there was almost no rust to take off. Not bad for 46+ years of storage in cardboard, oil, and masking tape.

Cheap, easy and quick, and effective. However, yours look a lot better than mine do, look very serviceable, and may last longer than 40 years!

Unfortunately, I can't give any suggestions on how to improve yours, so can't help there.
Stew

[Stanley Covington]

Thanks for the tutorial Dan. Well done!

Of course, this is a technique as old as chisels, I suppose. I know my Grandpa had them, and they are common here in Japan too.

I have experienced problems with these scabbards when gluing the two halves with water-based PVA glue, and not waiting a few weeks (not days) to allow the water to evaporate before inserting chisels. Rust. Pfeil carving chisels, of which I own over 100 pieces, seem to contain some alloy, and are more rust-resistant than plain high-carbon steel, so maybe you will not experience rust.

Epoxies will not cause rust.

I have so many chisels and carving tools that making wood scabbards would be too time consuming. Besides, it takes too long to remove and replace the covers when a job takes more than a few tools, and then there are the little scabbards scattered all over the place to deal with. So I make scabbards just for the large, heavy edged tools like knives, slicks, framing chisels, hatchets, adzes and axes, that get carried to the jobsite loose, and won't fit inside a small partitioned chisel box or canvas tool roll.

Another problem with wooden scabbards is that they make the tools bulkier, and impossible to fit inside a canvas tool roll.

Tools rolls are compact, lightweight, and very handy, indeed almost indispensable, but whether leather or cloth, they have three big problems: (1) Inserting and removing the chisels will eventually result in one cutting the pocket's sides; (2) Sharp chisels will eventually cut through the ends of the pockets, usually resulting in damaged edges and sometimes with painful results; and (3) They wick moisture to the tool causing rust. Leather is especially bad for this, perhaps because of the tanning chemicals. So what most people living/working in humid climates do is to use the tool roll for transport and use during the day, but remove and oil the chisels in the evenings or when the tools are not in use. They are simply not suited for long-term storage in damp climates.

But there is one simple solution to this problem that I stumbled onto. I make small scabbards of plastic that fit tightly into my tool roll's pockets keeping the chisel's blade's from directly contacting the cloth or leather. The best plastic is the harder clear variety that is form fitted to and used for packaging electronics. You know the kind of packaging I mean. Clear and partially flexible, but difficult to open without a knife. Save flat pieces of such packaging material. Make each scabbard a little wider than the chisel's blade, and twice as long as the blade's length. Fold it in half over the cutting edge. Glue the sides with plastic glue, add a couple of staples near the mouth for reinforcement, splay the opening a bit to make it easier to insert the blade, and voila! Made from garbage. Very quick to use. Very protective of the edge, although not as good as Dan's wood scabbards. With use, the oil applied for protecting the blades will accumulate a bit inside the plastic scabbards, helping to prevent rust without the need to apply it everytime.

Not sexy, but effective.

Stan

[Dan Kirkland]

Stanley, thanks so much for all that info! I had had some issues with rust forming on my gouges (I only own the two in the video at the moment) and that was partially the reason for this project. Other reason was that I accidentally dropped one of my chisels and rolled the edge on one corner. It took a while to reshape it and make it functional again and I for sure didn't want that to happen to my two gouges.

I did see a picture a while back of a wood scabbard someone had made for a huge tsuki nomi (think that's what it's called) and I thought it looked cool so thus I pursued this one.

The idea of the recycled covers is an excellent one and I'll have to give it a shot with some of my other tools, thanks for that!

[Nicholas Lawrence]

Good point about the rust Stanley. I built a box to hold a combination plane a while ago, with little slots to hold the blades. I was concerned about rust, because I don't use that every day (and certainly not every blade), so after getting it built squirted some oil down into each slot. I figured it would soak into the wood, and with the oil I put on the blades anyway would prevent rust. I had it out the other day and checked the blades. So far, no rust.