One of the chisels I got when I became the new caretaker of
Orvil Heft's tools was this 1" chisel by Jaxon. I haven't been able to find much information about Jaxon. Perhaps they were a hardware store that had someone else make chisels for them. I did see somewhere on the 'net a drawknife that the seller said was made by Greenlee for Jaxon in the 1950's. Maybe this chisel is similar.
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| Fairly mangled handle |
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| Maker's mark? |
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| Handle in tough shape - you can see a hole where someone put a screw to hold it together |
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| Some serious pounding went on in this chisel's lifetime |
Now that I have
lathe capability, I've been re-handling some chisels that have needed it for a while. I thought I'd try to duplicate the original handle.
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| As before, first up was to fit the socket - black marks show where it's too tight |
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| The rest was pretty easy and I'm happy how it turned out |
The part of the handle that fits into the socket is fairly short on the original and I made mine the same way. The inside of the socket showed the reason why - it was nicely conical for about an inch, but was quite uneven deeper than that.
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| Glamour shot |
I got a comment from Bob (
The Valley Woodworker) regarding the space between the handle's shoulder and the back end of the chisel's socket. I used the original as a model for this, too.
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| Mind the gap! |
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| On the new handle I left about 1/16" gap |
I still have to re-handle the rest of Orvil's chisels and hopefully I'll get to them reasonably soon.
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| These have seen some rough use - most handles are broken or in tough shape |
Orvil did a lot of fine, small carving (birds), so it's hard to imagine he was so tough on these chisels. Maybe when he got them they were already in this shape from a prior owner who was very rough on them.
