Woodcraft Wood River socket chisels review

[John C Cox]

Hey guys,

I got a set of 4 of the new Woodcraft Wood River socket chisels. I really like them.

TLDR: A good plain high carbon steel, properly heat treated socket chisel set. They hardly required any work to get them going. Definately keepers. If you are looking for a good set of regular High Carbon steel socket chisels - these are a fine choice.

I saw these in the local Woodcraft and was very curious about them. I wanted a good set of regular, plain fine grained carbon steel chisels for shop/guitar use. I have seen too many reports of the new Stanley's being warped or having backs out of whack... The new Stanley's are also a high chrome alloy steel - good stuff, but not easy sharpening regular plain high carbon steel. LN and Veritas cost about 2x as much.

Most of the other plain carbon steel chisels on the market are budget oriented - like the Ace Hardware Premium chisel, Marples, and Buck Brothers. Most of these require considerable prep time - and some are tempered be pretty soft... The rest are a lot more expensive - Veritas O1 and Japanese white paper steel chisels..

Edge retention wise - they hold up as well as any quality Carbon steel with 1% carbon... That puts them into the same range as O1.

Hardness wise - from sharpening and an hour or so of use - hardness is about right... No mushy problems, minimal chippy problems which were resolved with a 30 degree microbevel... These could easily be ground down to a low angle for sneaking in and massagin a joint.

Guys - these chisels are definately good ones. And they currently fill a gap in the market at a good price.

Here are a few pix.
https://s13.postimg.org/nmn61vojb/image.jpg
https://s13.postimg.org/zbr5puuxj/image.jpg
https://s13.postimg.org/h8y2yn6sn/image.jpg

[brian zawatsky]

Thanks for the review John. I have a 4 chisel set of the new Stanley 750’s, and I guess I got a good one. Setup time was minimal, and they sharpen quickly & easily. Edge retention is not the greatest though.

I only question whether these chisels are worth double the cost of the Stanleys...

[Patrick Chase]

TLDR: A good plain high carbon steel, properly heat treated socket chisel set.

Edge retention wise - they hold up as well as any quality Carbon steel with 1% carbon... That puts them into the same range as O1.

They're advertised as "Cr-V" steel. While that's a very broad description that encompasses a lot of tool steels, one thing we can state with confidence is that it's mutually exclusive with "plain high carbon steel" (i.e. a true plain HCS could never be honestly branded as Cr-V and vice versa).

[John C Cox]

Patrick.
I am making my claims based on how they work on the stones, how they behave on wood, and how they take fingerprints ;)... I don't have a mill cert. ;). But it's pretty obvious.

Regular old low alloy high Carbon steel tends to feel very "dry" on the stones - and these chisels sharpen like good old carbon steel chisels.. They sharpen readily on India and Arkansas stones... I think if you tried them - you would lump them with your "carbon steel" tools - not your "alloy steel" tools.. I have tried new Stanley chisels - and they are definately alloy steel (That's not a bad thing.. Stanley steel is very good... It just is what it is...)..

From what I have read of commercial chisel production - the steels require a bit of Cr and V for grain refinement and so they cooperate with the industrial heat treatment process without severe warping and cracking... But they don't take much... I have heard a rumor that if you saw the mill cert for Narex's Cr-Mn steel - you would just consider it a regular 10xx steel...

The other reality is simply that all steel commercially produced today (even the fabulous Hitachi White paper #1) has some alloy in it... Even the old "Carbon steel" from the 1800's generally had a bit of Mg and Cr in it - if only as impurity....

[Patrick Chase]

Addressing part of your reply that I've clipped, the fact that it's Cr-V isn't a negative. It just means that it can't be "plain HCS" as you stated. As I said there are a huge range of Cr-V alloys with different properties and "stone feel", so while I don't doubt what you wrote it also doesn't prove anything about whether the steel is plain HCS. Either their specs are wrong, or it's not plain HCS. It's that simple.



From what I have read of commercial chisel production - the steels require a bit of Cr and V for grain refinement and so they cooperate with the industrial heat treatment process without severe warping and cracking... But they don't take much... I have heard a rumor that if you saw the mill cert for Narex's Cr-Mn steel - you would just consider it a regular 10xx steel...

That rumor is wrong. Narex austempers their tools, using an interrupted molten-salt-bath quench to convert to lower Bainite instead of Maretnsite. Molten salt is much slower than water, so as a rule you can only do it to thicker parts (like chisels) if they're made of oil- or air-hardening steels. 10xx is water-hardening, such that any but the very thinnest parts would end up as pearlite. A simple look at the I-T diagrams or Jominy results will prove this beyond doubt.

What you say about the benefits of adding Cr and V is vaguely true, but only once you add so much that you no longer have a "plain HCS". Plain HC steels like 10xx and W1/T10 are water-hardened, and that does indeed lead to a tendency to "warp and crack". Alloying as you describe is basically how you go about creating a more stable oil- or air-hardening steel, which will indeed "cooperate with the industrial heat treatment process without severe warping and cracking". It just won't be plain HCS.



The other reality is simply that all steel commercially produced today (even the fabulous Hitachi White paper #1) has some alloy in it... Even the old "Carbon steel" from the 1800's generally had a bit of Mg and Cr in it - if only as impurity....

Err, this is garbled beyond recognition.

The main impurities in mass-produced steels are and have always been Sulfur (S) and Phosphorus (P). S tends to wet out along and weaken grain boundaries, which can be prevented by adding Manganese (Mn) to bind the Sulfur into less harmful MnS particles. The gory details are spelled out on p.52 here (http://www.hybridburners.com/documents/verhoeven.pdf). You can tell how much S the maker expects to "leak" into their steel by how much Mn they add to counteract it. 1095 (a prototypical Western HCS) has 0.3-0.5% Mn, while White has 0.2-0.3% Mn. There is a difference in purity, but it's not as drastic as people sometimes make it out to be.

In any reasonably well-controlled process, now or historically, Cr (Chromium) will only be present on purpose. It is not a common contaminant as you state.

Mg (Magnesium) makes no sense whatsoever as an alloyant in steel for reasons I won't get into (short version: Wrong periodic table group), and also isn't a contaminant. There are no commonly used tool steels containing Mg AFAIK. Mg is used as an alloyant to create ductile cast iron as used in modern higher-end hand planes, but not steel.

[Frederick Skelly]

Thanks for the review John!
Hope you get many enjoyable hours from them!
Fred

[Nicholas Lawrence]

I really like the Ashley Iles I have. They are 01, and actually a little than what I am seeing these Woodriver for.

Of course, the AI are not sockets. Thanks for doing the review.

[Patrick Chase]

I really like the Ashley Iles I have. They are 01, and actually a little than what I am seeing these Woodriver for.

Of course, the AI are not sockets. Thanks for doing the review.

AI makes good traditional chisels. I know that the long-departed-from-SMC David Weaver has a set and thinks highly of them, and that says a lot IMO. Their catalogue (http://www.ashleyiles.co.uk/Catalogue.pdf) has a lot of information BTW.

I'm not sold on the importance of socket construction for chisels that will be used for fine work. The fact that you can make a handle by turning alone is a definite plus, but it realistically isn't *that* much harder to make one for a tanged chisel. Tanged chisels with proper bolsters (which quality examples like the AIs do have) are plenty tough, so I don't see much advantage there either.

[John C Cox]

Patrick,

Perhaps you can forgive me for Mg vs Mn... From the tone of your post - probably not... I suppose I will have to remain in the camp of the unwashed...

It's clear that you seem to understand a lot about metallurgy. While what you say may be true about what you assume is the alloy in the Narex and Asian chisels... It's pretty clear you have never tried hardening a Narex or one of these miscellaneous Chinese chisels.

If you did - you would already know they won't oil harden to any useful degree (Perhaps they will using a super fast oil like Parks 50... But 200F canola gives you a half-hard chisel..). Brine was the only thing I could use to consistently get them full hard in my own trials....

Given that.. What is their actual alloy? No idea... But - treating them as if they are 10xx steels works and in use they behave like a fine grained low alloy carbon steel... If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.....

[Patrick Chase]

Perhaps you can forgive me for Mg vs Mn... From the tone of your post - probably not... I suppose I will have to remain in the camp of the unwashed...

Ah crud, it didn't occur to me that you'd made that mistake. My error, sorry for wasting so much space on that.



It's clear that you seem to understand a lot about metallurgy. While what you say may be true about what you assume is the alloy in the Narex and Asian chisels... It's pretty clear you have never tried hardening a Narex or one of these miscellaneous Chinese chisels.

If you did - you would already know they won't oil harden to any useful degree (Perhaps they will using a super fast oil like Parks 50... But 200F canola gives you a half-hard chisel..). Brine was the only thing I could use to consistently get them full hard in my own trials....

You didn't try the one thing that they actually use and that their steel is designed for.

As I said above, Narex uses austempering, which is a very unique process that uses an interrupted quench in a molten salt bath. Salt is typically in between water/brine and oil in terms of quench speed (see the graph on p. 124 of Verhoeven (http://www.hybridburners.com/documents/verhoeven.pdf)), which is why it isn't fast enough to harden thick 10xx/plain HCS parts. Narex probably selected/designed their alloy with salt-bath quenching in mind, and they would have incentive to make it "faster" than oil-hardening steels to minimize the dwell time at the Bainite transition temperature. In other words, while their steel must have slower kinetics than 10xx/plain HCS to work in the salt bath (and that's why the rumor you cited has to be false), I'm not at all surprised that the kinetics are too fast for oil. The bottom line is that that steel is designed to be used with a specific and somewhat exotic HT process, that is very different from anything you tried to do with it.

EDIT: Austempering requires that the initial temperature of the quenchant salt bath must be higher than the Martensite start temperature of the steel. For a HCS with 1% C that would be about 210C, so the curve on p.124 of Verhoeven (which assumes a 220C salt bath) is probably fairly representative of Narex' conditions. That high initial bath temperature is why the salt bath appears to be initially very fast but then slows down dramatically as the part temperature gets closer to the bath temperature. Did I mention that austempering is a somewhat exotic process?

A lot of Chinese makers, including Quangsheng, use W1/T10 presumably because it's extremely cheap. That's probably what you're seeing in your heat-treating experiments. That is also not a "Cr-V" steel, though, so WR's marketing for these specific chisels rules it out. Also, when they used it in their plane blades they explicitly branded it as such.



Given that.. What is their actual alloy? No idea... But - treating them as if they are 10xx steels works and in use they behave like a fine grained low alloy carbon steel... If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck.....

... then you need to learn to recognize some "saltier" kinds of poultry :-).

EDIT: Seriously, your latest revised wording ("low alloy carbon steel") has a good likelihood of encompassing what both Narex and WoodRiver are doing. Neither are "plain HCS", but they're probably both on the low end of the alloy spectrum. I would be surprised if the "Cr-V" steel in those WR chisels contains anything like the Chromium and Vanadium levels found in, say, ECE's identically marketed "Cr-V" (which is fairly chippy stuff and doesn't behave at all like plain HCS).