Making wood lathe chisels ????

[Dave Paine]

Hi Finster,
for woodworking tools you could get away with any medium to high carbon tool steel, or even braze or silver solder a hunk of carbide to a mild steel backing and sharpen as necessary
good luck!

A wood turner Reed Gray who posts under the name Robo Hippy has a video of another turner making what he calls the "Big Ugly" scraping tool which has a piece of TantungG brased onto a steel bar. He shows how well this works to remove wood in his videos. I think this material was popular before carbide inserts. It does not seem popular these days.

 

[wawoodman]

I would certainly want to stay with HSS, rather than carbon steel. Remember, you don't want to be constantly sharpening. The old Craftsman tools (carbon steel) were very quickly relegated to the junk box. The good Sorby HSS are a pleasure to work with, especially with plastics and impregnated woods for pens and pencils.

 

[DaveInMi]

I made a couple that hold a regular 1/4" square HSS tool bit in a socket in the shaft, held in place with a hex set screw. I use them for hollowing bowls.

 

[benmychree]

I haven't bought any stock yet. I'm just kicking the idea around at the moment. I was thinking of annealing it, shaping it and hardening it with an oil dip. Figure I can polish them after with a wire wheel. I also saw a few that had carbide tips, just everyday triangle inserts. I may make a few different ones with softer steel using inserts just for kicks.

I think that M2 tool steel would not be much better than o-1 unless it was heat treated with the Taylor White process for HSS tool steels. It is impossible to anneal HSS tool steels with ordinary means, heating to red will not soften it more than a couple of points Rockwell C; it takes many hours of heat, the heat being reduced a few degrees per hour to satisfactorally anneal any HSS alloy.
I made a set of scrapers for wood turning, just rounded up all the 10" mill files from my shop and surface ground them on all sides, then carefully ground the form that I wanted so as to not draw the temper. I use them on my Oliver 12" patternmakers lathe when I need to form irregular profiles, normally pattern work is pretty much straight and tapered turning and boring.