George Vondriska

Shop Storage Session 3: Chisel Holder

George Vondriska
Video Player is loading.
Current Time 0:00
Duration 14:58
Loaded: 0%
Stream Type LIVE
Remaining Time 14:58
 
1x
  • Chapters
  • descriptions off, selected
  • en (Main), selected
Duration:   14  mins

Description

You know that if a chisel rolls off your bench it’s going to fall with its sharp edge down, hit the floor, and blunt the edge. It’s a Law of the Universe. Protect your chisels by keeping them in a shop-made chisel holder. You’ll learn how to calculate the size block you need for any number of chisels, and then set up a dado head to make perfectly sized stopped dadoes for them.

Share tips, start a discussion or ask other students a question. If you have a question for the instructor, please click here.

Make a comment:
characters remaining

No Responses to “Shop Storage Session 3: Chisel Holder”

No Comments

When you're using bench chisels it's sure nice if they don't have the opportunity to roll off your bench. 'Cause they're always gonna land point down on the floor, you know that's gonna happen. So this little rack, this little stand is perfect for keepin' ya chisels handy when you're working at the bench. You can put it away when you're down, you can bring it to the workbench, take at the chisel that you need. So let me walk you through what it's gonna take to make one of these.

A 2x6 lends itself to what we're doing here. In this case, I just happened to have an oak 2x6. But if you literally wanna get a 2x6 from a big-box store and use that to make your chisel holder you're gonna be fine, 1 1/2" by 5 1/2. Length is gonna vary depending on how many chisel you wanna do this for. In my case four chisels, 1/4, 3/8.

1/2, 3/4, so overall length of 8" works fine. I'm gonna give you some help with the layout here and you can use that information in just a second in order to figure out how long yours has to be, depending on what you need to do in order to hold all your chisels. The way this works, it's kinda a secret sauce here 'cause you might be wondering how the heck are we gonna punch those square holes in here, no square holes on the bottom. So the trick to this is we cut the back off, and then use a dado head on the table saw to make these blind cuts, then put the back back on. So from here, first step what I'm gonna do is head for the bandsaw and I'm gonna resaw cuttin' a 1/2" off of this back.

I've got my board all set from the resaw. There's the part we're gonna cut the dados into, this is gonna get glued back on as the back. After the resaw I took 'em to the planer and sent 'em through it to clean 'em up and get the saw marks off. And I want to keep track of this so that when I put these back together this is how they were cut apart. If I glue 'em back together just like that, it'll be seamless across the edge and that's cool that you can't see that we cut it apart and glued it back together.

But this part we don't need for right now. Now let's look at the finished one and talk about dimensioning. I'm gonna tell you what I did for this one and then from that, I'll help you deduce what you need for overall length for yours. The spacing on this one I think is nice as far as being able to easily get my hand on these and get to the chisels. So the way I made that happen was, 8" long board and I took my four chisels and I looked at what sizes they were, 1/4, 3/8, 1/2, 3/4 and I added all those numbers up.

So 3/4 and 1/4 is one, plus 1/2, 1 1/2, plus 3/8, 1 7/8" is the combined width of all the bodies of the blades of my chisels. This is 8" long so we're back to a little bit of math here. I've got 8", if got 1 7/8" worth of steal goin' into that thing so I'm gonna subtract, minus 1 7/8". If I've got four chisels I've got five spaces, so 6 1/8 divided by 5 is 1 1/4. What does that tell me?

That tells me that I come over 1 1/4" make a mark, that's where my 1/4" chisel is gonna live. Then I come over 1 1/4, make a mark, see where we're goin' here? 3/8, now what does this do for you? Firstly I'm gonna do is mark the waste so I don't screw that up later, there we go. All right, what does this do for you?

1 1/4", 1 1/4", 1 1/4" good spacing. So for you, if you wanna reverse engineer this. Let's say you have 10 chisels and it includes inch and 5/8 and 1 1/4" whatever they are. So what you're gonna do is add up all of the chisel widths that you have. And if you have 10 chisels then you're gonna have 11 1 1/4" spaces.

So step one add up all ya chisels. Step two calculate, deduce, how many spaces you'll have, you'll have one more space than you'll have chisels. Multiply the number of spaces times 1 1/4 and add that to the combined width of all your chisels and that's gonna give you the overall length of your block. This information is also in the PDF to walk ya through this formula so you can calculate this. But if you're starting from scratch with the different chisel set than I have here that's how you'll do it.

How we gonna cut these? Over at the table saw using the dado head's so that our next step. You set the height of the dado head so it's a little bit more than the thickness of your chisels. Give yourself some wiggle room here, this doesn't have to be a perfect fit, it's not a mortise and tenon joint. Take the thickness plus about 1/16, maybe even a little bit more, that's the height of your dado head, the depth of the dado.

The other thing we need to know is on the table saw were to stop as we make the cut. This is established the same way we did on the previous project. Find the point here where the blade is just startin' to contact the front edge of the wood and then from there measure the overall length of your chisel plus a little bit. Again give yourself some wiggle room, we don't need the chisel to bottom out in the bottom of the dado. Now regarding the stop dado idea.

If you don't wanna do that, if you just wanna cut all the way through. Worst-case scenario is you just got square holes showing on the bottom of ya work. It's not a huge deal. If you wanna do the stop dada, do what I did here. Where it meets, overall length that's where we gonna stop on the cut.

Now we've got layout lines on here already, so we're gonna use those layout lines to locate the fence, just like that, edge of the cutter right on the pencil line. Now I can plug in the dado or plug in my table saw, make a cut until I get to that secondary line, stop the feed, stop the saw, remove the work. Now here's my advice. Before you leave make sure the chisel in fact fits in there 'cause it's really easy right now to move the fence a gazillionth of an inch and make that slot just a little bit wider. It's gonna be pain if you gotta come back and do it later.

So do a little double check there, make sure that's gonna fit. Now when I made mine I thought about this a lot, thought about being, do I disassemble this, add a chipper, make it 3/8" and in the end, I chose not to do that. I'm just gonna do multiple passes on every cut in order to get the width that we need as the chisels get wider than 1/4". So, same deal here, let me unplug, relocate then we'll come back and make another cut. Now before we make this cut, gotta do things a little different.

I just did this on the 1/2" cut over here as well. This being, we need to add a support board behind our target board. Here's what's goin' on. We're so far from the fence here, from the dado head to the face of the fence that there's a chance that this could start to spin and if it does it's climb out on the dado head and it's gonna kick back, it's gonna be really bad. So we wanna bring this board in behind it, feed the two of them together.

And that board, that secondary board is gonna support the first one so it can't roll out on you like that. The rest is still gonna be the same as we move forward, we're gonna stop when we get to the pencil line, back off the cut, with the blade stopped, move the fence, do everything again. That takes care of our dado work. Each one sized individually for its chisel. Now we can go back and do some assembly on this.

As you're puttin' things back together keep in mind that we did a resaw here and if you put them back correctly you gonna have a really nice grain match across the top here and that's what we want. Here's what I'm gonna do. Apply glue and the thing we're up against with this glue-up is that these two parts are already identical in size 'cause we did that before we did the resaw. So we're gonna do a little bit different step we're not just gonna clamp. We're gonna do something in between.

Now I'm bein' conservative alongside the chisel gaps with glue 'cause I'd rather not have a bunch of squeeze out go into there. And the thing we're gonna do different here, is just before the clamp goes on, we're gonna use a brad nailer, a pin nailer, and pin everything to hold position. I'm flushing up here on the top edge there and left to right. Pin it. Check this, pin it.

That just keeps everything from slip slidin' around. When ya put clamp pressure on it, you know how glue makes everything a little bit slimy and it starts to move on ya. From here, it's just standard clamping stuff. Make sure you get enough good clamps on here to close everything. And then we'll let this sit.

Come back for the kickstand. If your chisel block is just gonna sit on a bench like that or you're gonna screw this to a wall, at this point, you can be done. However, if you want it to sit on a bench with a little kickstand behind it, it's gonna help to cut a 10-degree bevel on the bottom. What I've done is, I set the blade at 10 degrees, I set the fence so that that cut is gonna go from this corner down. We gonna cut right to that outside corner, take the rest away.

That bevel on the bottom edge is gonna make it much easier for this to sit against that kickstand then had we left that square. That takes care of that, but while we're here, let's go ahead and make the kickstand too. In order to make the kickstand, I've got one more block, same material that we made the chisel rack itself from, set my miter gauge to 10 degrees, and what I'm gonna do here at the top of the block is I'm leaving this an inch long. And then from that 1" point, gonna cut the 10-degree angle, pretty easy stuff here. Now all right, when it all comes together.

We're gonna look something like that, there's that 1" measurement at the top I talked about. Let's head back to the bench and glue that baby up. Before you glue the kickstand on, do a little sanding, ease the corners, make that thing nice and comfortable to touch and feel. If you're doin' a block that is four chisels, six chisels long, a single kickstand is gonna be fine. If you're goin' eight, ten chisels long, I would put two on the back.

I got some layout on here, such that the kickstand is gonna end up centered across the length of the back. Now, this really lends itself to a rub joint which is just what it sounds like. Gonna get some glue on here, and not even use any clamps, I'm gonna just simply rub this in place. When I taught overseas in Africa, the kids glued stuff like this all the time, 'cause we did not have clamps. So rub joint means, get it in position, watchin' my pencil line, rub it, and I can already feel it kinda binding itself up.

Register on that pencil line. Now the last thing I wanna double-check is are the bottoms lined up? So I'm doing a good finger test across there and that feels good and then just don't touch that. In about 20 minutes that's gonna be pretty much immovable, in 30 minutes you're gonna be good to go. The kickstand takes care of our final assembly.

Little bit of finish on there, little Danish oil will be perfect, and that is ready to receive your chisels.

Get exclusive premium content! Sign up for a membership now!