Of Chisels and Men

 Of Chisels and Men

By Bobby Neal Winters

They say that iron sharpens iron. If you get nothing else from this, stick that in your pocket and keep it.

I sharpened my chisels last night.  

This is not a sentence that I ever thought I’d write, not even in a work of fiction.  I could have imagined writing, “We planted gooseberries on Ganymede,” in a work of science fiction, but not the sentence about the chisels. 

This is nuts.

I’ve been tracing back my entry into woodworking to having found my father-in-law’s table saw.  That was an import point of transition on the route, but there were multiple other such points on the way.

Summer 2020, we were in the lockdown, working from home. No movies; no vacation; no restaurants. Stuck.At.Home.

I went into the back yard, and I saw my youngest daughter’s boyfriend working on his car.  I went into the front yard, and I saw my neighbor across the street working on his house.  

With their inspiration, I decided to become more active.  I began putting in a paver sidewalk in the backyard.

I looked at what I’d done; I saw that it was good; and I started doing more things out of the stinking house.

These are both young men: the first under 30 and the second under 40.  Young men, healthy men, working men.  Neither men of many words.  I looked at their actions, and they inspired me.

So here I am, sharpening chisels.

There is a right way to do this.  Or maybe I should say, a good way.  I would hate to rule out all other methods, because even among the pros there are a variety of ways.

This particular method involves taping different grades of sandpaper to glass, spraying the glass with Windex, and sharpening the chisels on the coarser sandpaper first and then working your way up to the finer.  After that, you polish your edge on a leather strop.

It doesn’t take as long as it might sound, and when you are done--if you do it correctly--you have a sharp chisel.

I fell in love with chisels by watching Paul Sellers on YouTube.  He is a master.  He makes it look so easy.  He comes off as a model teacher; he seems kind; he’s not dogmatic; he teaches by showing.

He doesn’t say, I am going to tell you the right way to do things. Rather, he does something well, and you want to do the same.

Doing that requires a sharp chisel.

As a part of our rite of passage into manhood, Dad gave my brother and me pocket knives.  Sharp pieces of steel.  We were told never to hammer on them.

A chisel is a sharp piece of steel that you can hammer on.  

I think I’ve just glimpsed a great truth of the universe so indulge me for a moment.  The steel is necessary for neither the knife nor the chisel. A sharp piece of flint would do in either case.  Sharp pieces of flint were lying around long before Man ever came along, but there were neither knives nor chisels then.  It was Man who created knives and chisels; it was his use of each of these that made them what they are.

Until a few months back, I’d only owned one chisel.  In light the the previous paragraph, I should say that I owned a piece of steel that was kind of sharp on one end and had a bakelite handle on the other. 

Only after having watched Paul Sellers at work and put in some practice myself did that piece of steel turn into a chisel. This is beginning to sound a little mystical even to me, but “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.”

I got myself set up to sharpen my now multiple chisels first by setting out all of my sharpening paraphernalia: sandpaper, strop, Windex; the whole shebang.

Then I began to gather my chisels.  I had the one I had owned for years; I had three that my brother had given me; I had six that I had gotten from Amazon.

Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw three more.  They were in an ancient plastic bag.  They had obviously belonged to my father-in-law.  I removed them from the bag, and it was as if I’d never seen them before.  I looked at them, and I could tell these were good chisels.  While my father-in-law never wasted money, and there was quite a bit of er....crap...among the tools that he left, there were also some quite fine pieces.

These were quite fine.

I tested them on some wood I had there.  

They were already sharp.

What had been just pieces of steel that were sharp on one end and had plastic on the other, became chisels and appeared before my eyes.

They were a gift from Jim, my father-in-law, who passed away 16 years ago.

I did feel a bit of chill.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.