I made two dovetailed drawers today. Both have four tails/pins at each corner. The wood was straight grain (quarter sawn) fir. A softwood. I was trying out two new sets of chisels. Actually one chisel from each set. One is the Veritas PM-V11 at 1/2" the other is LN A-2 also at 1/2". Both sets are fairly new. The LNs I have had for about one year and have used frequently to cut dovetails in Walnut, Ash, and Cherry. No problems with the LNs. Normal dulling and touch-up sharpening. The Veritas PM-V11 is new and this is the first actual use, other than doodling around just to see how they behaved. Both chisels have a 30 deg bevel with an additional 2 deg micro-bevel. In other words the cutting edge is 32 deg. Both are sharpened to 8000 grit with a waterstone and then polished with Veritas green compound on a piece of MDF.

When marking for the dovetail baselines (using a wheel gauge) I noted that the Summer wood rings (dark) were noticeably harder than the Spring wood rings (light). Hard enough that my wheel gauge did not want to score them. Basically the wheel edge rode over the dark rings and left little, if any, scoring. I did not pay much attention to this. Just noticed it.

Cutting the dovetails to the marked lines was no problem. Then came the chopping out of the waste. This is when things became surprising. I did the first drawer with the LN A-2 chisel and the second drawer with the Veritas PM-V11 chisel. I just wanted to compare the edge retention of both. What a surprise. Half way through the first drawer the LN A-2 was looking very bad. The edge had failed badly. I could see and fingernail feel the ragged edge. It had notches in the edge, rounded over. Serious enough that I needed to go down to 1000 grit waterstone to clean it up, and thence to the 8000 grit and green rouge polish. When I finished the first drawer I again had the some ragged edge and had to redo the edge with 1000 grit followed by 8000 grit, then the green rouge polish. To say the least I was rather unhappy and puzzled about the poor performance of the LN A-2 chisel.

I then started the second drawer using the Veritas PM-V11 chisel. Lo and behold, I had exactly the same results with the Veritas PM-V11 chisel. Halfway through the drawer and the edge was ragged, in the same way as the LN chisel, and I had to redo the edge. At the end of the second drawer the edge was equally bad as at the halfway point. In other words the edge retention seemed to be the same with both the LN A-2 and the Veritas PM-V11 with this wood.

This was all a great surprise to me. Is the Summer wood (dark/hard) in qtr sawn fir really hard enough to cause this edge failure? Is something else at work here? I really don't know. Has anybody else experienced similar edge failures under similar conditions? Any ideas?