Am I the jerk here?

[Patrick Baney]

I don’t have any reason to believe anyone there is knowingly selling chisels outside of their advertised tolerances. For all I know these two chisels I received are uh, 2-offs? Though, since the imperfections are identical between the two, I can speculate that the entire batch was affected.

And now that you mention it, I did actually give Robs personal number a couple calls. I happen to know someone who attended a class some years ago and they provided his number. No answer, which I of course don’t fault him for. My voicemail got disconnected about 10 seconds in so I doubt he actually got it. I didn’t try again after that.

[Richard Coers]

Here's that "your specs" language that their customer service used. You don't know my specs, but I'll tell you, to be clear. My specs are exactly what he has advertised, and those should be upheld. To be clear, the chisels I received were double the advertised tolerance. If they don't have a supplier that meets these specs, then they shouldn't be listed on their site.



Have I? Pretty sure they did that when they sent me two out of spec chisels, and one completely different type of chisel, prefaced with "special care" about "my" specs.



I do respect him, and it's fine if you think one gripe about what's likely not his direct doing disqualifies me from respecting him.

My post may have some snark, but I've clearly left the door open to this being a me issue. Many who read this will absolutely roll their eyes over me fretting over .6 degrees on a chisel that's often intentionally trapezoidal.

Not as much snark as this post. I'll guarantee there are people using that exact chisel and it's fine for them. What would you call complaining about a .005 tolerance other than your specs? In 50 years of woodworking I have never put a staight edge and feeler gage to a chisel.

[Edward Weber]

I think the point is getting lost a bit.

It's not that .005" matters or not, or if it's close enough for most people, or don't worry about it, it'll be fine.
The point is this, if someone advertises their chisel at .00X" tolerance, then you shooed get .00X". Not close to it, not a few thousandths off, not close enough, but what was advertised. If the company can't or won't provide what was advertised, take your money elsewhere.
If you pay for a service or product, you are entitled to receive that service or product, no equivocation.

[Tom M King]

Here's the ad with the listed specs:

https://robcosman.com/products/ibc-m...hisel-3-8-inch

[Jim Koepke]

I've been trying to use Google to find information on where IBC tools are made, no luck.

Does anyone know if these are made in North America or overseas?

The price on these seems to be on the premium end.

For a premium price one should get a premium tool.

There are four mortise chisels in my set. All four of them didn't come too much more than $100 with shipping. Two of them are late 18th century or early 19th. One of them is a Narex and my 1/2" is marked Thoe Ibbotson, whoever that is. They all arrived and work as expected.

If someone is selling a chisel, one of the simplest woodworking tools, at stratospheric prices the tool should arrive in a condition that is warrants such a price.

Rant mode off…

Patrick, imo, the jerk is on the other end of this deal.

jtk

[Edward Weber]

https://www.ibctools.ca/about/

[Jim Koepke]

https://www.ibctools.ca/about/

Thanks Edward.

My Google Fu wasn't working today.

jtk

[Kent A Bathurst]

......... Not close to it, not a few thousandths off, not close enough, but what was advertised...

I dunno about the rest of you fellers, but I'm sitting here thinking that if this was about L-V, Rob Lee would have already been in this discussion. Except with L-V or L-N, the thread would not have existed because duh!!

This is painfully simple - cull your vendor list.

[Mark Gibney]

Richard I take the opposite view to you. The OP carefully explained his experience with us, other forum users. I don't think for a second his post did any "damage to" Rob Cosman's brand. And if it potentially could, that's not a reason not to post, either by principle or in actuality. This forum has it's frequent visitors, but we're probably a tiny % of 1% of the woodworkers of north America. There will be no contagion outside of us!

[Tony Zaffuto]

IBC stands for “Industrial Blade Company”. They have made blades, etc., for a number of tool vendors, including Woodcraft, formerly LV (years ago) and Cosman.

For the tool’s cost, said tool should be within stated tolerances, but the big question is, what tolerances does IBC warrant to its vendors?

[Cameron Wood]

Looking at the specs, it says the back is flat to a certain degree, but says nothing about bow to the side.

I set a digital angle finder to 90.6˚, with a small engineer square to it, and a .002 feeler gauge went down to almost 1/2", so that seems to be within their stated spec.

[Jack Dover]

This is funny. Because Rob spend like 30 mins bashing on Narex mortise chisels and one of the points was that a Narex chisel he used for a review was bent about 0.005" just like you describe. He was correct though, Narex often comes bent.

I think you're right demanding what you've paid for. I also don't think Rob has anything to do with it, it's a responsibility of a QA department and training order pickers to check items before shipping. Rob is just a brand's face, so he gets all the blame.

[Jim Koepke]

This is funny. Because Rob spend like 30 mins bashing on Narex mortise chisels and one of the points was that a Narex chisel he used for a review was bent about 0.005" just like you describe. He was correct though, Narex often comes bent.

I think you're right demanding what you've paid for. I also don't think Rob has anything to do with it, it's a responsibility of a QA department and training order pickers to check items before shipping. Rob is just a brand's face, so he gets all the blame.

Most of the time my chisel acquisitions are merely eye ball inspected.

My recollection is most of them looked straight enough for me.

A few chisels of one type tend to have a belly. They may have been made that way or they may have been whacked a lot.

Though the majority of my chisels were found preowned.

Maybe check the mortise chisels next time in the shop.

jtk

[Dave Zellers]

Rob is just a brand's face, so he gets all the blame.

And the profits?

[Jack Dover]

If I remember it correctly, Rob's point in that video was that you could fix it on a diamond plate, but it would take days (this is true). And for him this is essentially lost revenue or something. Which might be a case for Rob since he probably has some paying customers. For people that don't do paid work this is not a very compelling argument.

My mortising chisels are from various brands too, most of the brands are well-known and assumed to be "good" tools - Sorby, Marples Shamrock, Witherby etc. Yet most of the chisels have some deviations from a perfect form: a skewed trapezoidal shape is the most common, but also many of them are bend sideways exactly like the OP described. Most of them have some sort of a belly. But once I figured chopping in general, my "worst" chisel didn't prevent making a clean square mortise with minimal paring. I find an out-of-square cutting edge to be a bigger issue than this. And getting something similar to Narex into a working order isn't much longer, at least I don't remember a single Narex chisel that would had a belly out of a box, so it was same 10-15 mins to set up. Not that I advocate for Narex, quite the opposite.

I also had a chance to try LN, Veritas and IBC mortising chisels. While being obviously better manufactured they didn't really made me to chop better. Probably there's a certain limit after which improvements in quality don't bring any extra benefits. Neither they stayed sharp longer, but that's another story. So I'm yet to figure what could be worth 150$ in a mortising chisel.