Adam Maxwell wrote: 

"There must be a lot of variability for a given maker. My favorite chisel, hands
down, is a Swan 1-1/4" bevel-edge socket chisel. It's easy to sharpen on
oilstones, and holds an edge nicely for paring or chopping. It also has what I
suspect is an original handle with leather washer on it, and is just
comfortable."


I may well be wrong about the hardness of Swan over the whole history of the
firm. I have three; two of them are so similar in shape, color, and state of
preservation that I think they came from the same set, but one is marked "cast
steel" and the other "alloy steel." My third was NOS without a handle but with a
lopsided grind to the side bevels that probably means that it was originally an
unsold reject made late in the firm's history. All three have the pale, fresh
color steel and the pale varnish on the handles that suggest post-WWII to me. I
should keep my eye open for a Swan with an older "presence."


Adam wrote: "I've heard great things about Herring Bros, and have a NOS Herring
that was ground with low bevel (<20˚, I think). Maybe once it's ground back
another 1/8" or so it'll hold an edge, but it remains a disappointment. W.
Butcher, P. Law, and Wm. Ash are also favorites of mine, in the cast steel tang
chisel category."

When I started buying vintage chisels back in the '80s I knew nothing about the
best or even reliable makers, but I soon noticed that all the real duds I bought
were tang chisels. I also bought some really first rate tang chisels, but I
figured that getting only socket chisels would slant the odds toward good buys.
I hypothesized that socket chisels were always more expensive to make, so a
maker pinching pennies would avoid sockets. At this point I don't know if either
the observation or the hypothesis was correct, but I did buy a lot of very fine
makers long before I recognized their names. There was an unintended side
effect, though, that I bought very few English chisels. Its not that the English
didn't make socket chisels, but I think there was a preference for tangs in
England, and probably a preference for sockets in America. Another unintended
side effect is that I have very few chisels with blades longer than 6"; all are
good bench chisels rather than deliberately long, delicate paring chisels of 8"
or more. Buck, at least, seems to have made the really long delicate ones only
with tangs. My lack of true paring chisels was a great disappointment to me for
decades, but now I think back on all the enormous paring chisel backs, all to be
flattened dead flat for their full length, and I cringe at the work that would
be involved. And I have never really needed true paring chisels for what I have
done, any more than I have needed the pigstickers I took so long to gather and
love so much.

Ahem... Reset...I started in on reminiscence because I don't have any Herring,
Law, or Ash tools, all English makers. I do have a few Butcher tools, but I
think they are all gouges or possibly turning tools, and all worn pst or nearly
past the line of hardened steel. These are mostly not laminated blades, but the
quench was only carred to an inch or two from the tang, leaving the butt end of
the blade quite soft. The same is true, by the way, of most of the American cast
steel chisels I have sharpened; the two regions of hardness are different in
color, and at one time I though this was the sign of a laminated blade (it
isn't, not if the color difference is level on both back and belly of the
blade).


Tom Conroy
Berkeley