Making a Fishtail Chisel - Bachi Nomi Style.

Well the title may be a little pretentious, as this chisel will not be a beautiful laminated white paper steel work of art, but it will resemble the bachi-nomi in shape,  and function.

Fishtail chisels are extremely useful in getting into tight angles - mortices and dovetails, as well as cleaning out the corners of butterfly inlay. See here:

Butterfly Inlay

For cleaning up the pins in half-blind dovetails, they are essential.

For the butterfly inlay mentioned above, I used a workshop made skew chisel, which worked well enough, but was not ideal.

I wanted a chisel in the Bachi Nomi style, something like this one from Japanese Tools Australia

I dug around in my old chisel drawer and found a couple of fine bladed chisels that would suffice.

One is a much used Alex Mathieson made in Glasgow, the other a Robert Sorby, made in Sheffield.

Both have excellent steel.

The first task was to mark out the edges of the chisels to be removed. I did this on the back where the steel was uniformly flat.

I ground these back on a bench grinder, making sure I did not allow heat build up in the steel that might change its temper. Constant cooling in water is a sensible precaution.

Once the shape had been established, I ground back the edges to re-establish the side bevels - sometimes called the lands.

I was careful to leave the backs flat, but a wire edge developed along each edge on the back side during grinding, and had to be gently taken off to prevent cutting of fingers in use.

The cutting bevel was carefully checked and re-worked a little to get a slightly lower angle, and each chisel sharpened.

Here they are with my dovetail chisels. (Blue Spruce and Shinogi Nomi)

I have the feeling that the larger one is going to be the most useful for its more angled blade, but time will tell.

Until next time - happy shavings to all........................