Chisel holders

I started by giving the piece of teak a tart-up with my smoothing plane. The piece had some nasty tearout from machining (not my doing), but a couple of swipes took care of that. I shot one end dead square and planed the board 4S (four square, each face is square to the adjoining faces).

I then marked the board using a compass, “walking” the board while pressing the points into the wood to create a starting point for the Forstner bit.

A piece of OSB acts as a backing board, and I clamped a piece of scrap as a fence. This ensured dead on accurate spacing so that the “bottom” of the curved spaces for the chisels would be equal.

Here’s my jerry-rigging for a support while drilling. The plan is to get a big, floor-standing drill press at some point, but for the time being this unit will have to do.

I then marked the end of the board, made a knife wall and cut the excess off with a saw. I also shot the end dead square.

Using my band saw, I ripped the board down so that I had an equal distance from each hole to either side. I then ripped the board in two, creating the chisel racks.

I planed the small tops to remove the saw marks, and planed the offcut 4S – I plan to use it to hold the blade of the chisels, like so:

I tested the setup; I am going to make two versions. One for my butt chisels (left) and one for my bench chisels (right). These are my Ashley Iles chisels.

Here’s a few pictures of my chisels. Note the large “pizza spade” – my heeuuuuge 50mm / 2” chisel! That one will have to reside in its own holder!

I am especially pleased with the butt chisels. Funny story: I was going to order a set of bench chisels MKII originally, directly from Ashley Iles. I was looking at the butt chisels at the same time, thinking that I might order two or three of them for fine detail work – but I ended up ordering a set of six butt chisels by mistake. Realizing my mistake the next day, I decided to just roll with it and order the bench chisels at a later stage.

This turned out to be a good choice, as I have reached for the butt chisels on many occasions. Especially for dovetailing – the short chisels mean that I have the end of the chisel in my sight while I am focusing on the business end of it. This makes it easier to hit the chisel with my hammer. The chisels are also very easy to “balance plumb” – you can just feel that you are plumb by grabbing the chisels using three fingers, near the bevel.

On the next page I’ll start prepping stock for the trays.