Originally Posted by
Wilbur Pan
...Could you expand on what you mean by "I want an edge to wear as if it were being polished"? Do you see a progressive decline in edge performance? From your descriptions it sounds like your experience is when the edge of a chisel folds/chips the performance suddenly drops off -- going from 60 to 0 in no time flat, as it were.
The reason that I ask is that I don't think I've ever had a chisel that wears as if it were "being polished", so I'm not sure how that feels. Nor have I ever experienced a sudden change in performance with my Japanese chisels. Instead, performance slowly degrades as the chisels are used.
This is what happened with the Imai chisel in this demo as well. As I was chopping and paring, nothing happened that would have made me stop and think, "Hey -- I think there's a chip in the corner of my chisel!" Instead, as I was chopping the last notch in the white oak, I was thinking, "This chisel is slowing down some. I'll be happy to get this chisel sharpened again." It actually was a surprise to me that I was able to get clean endgrain shavings in that scrap of pine the second time around -- and that is with that chip in the corner of the chisel.
Certainly, I did not encounter any catastrophic change in chisel performance in this demo. It may be that edge chipping, as you are defining it, does something different to my chisels.