> > OK, you have the proto chisel handle in the lathe between centers. 
> > How do you fit the chisel on the taper to smoke 'er on?

I very successfully handled an old roughing gouge forged from a piece of 
something that looks like hex bar by turning the handle on the lathe, 
removing it and then drilling a succession of holes into the end where 
the chisel tang goes.

I started with an auger bit sized a bit smaller than the widest diameter 
of the chisel and guesstimated my way down to a small bit, ending at the 
approximate depth I wanted the tang to go.  Then I stacked up some fire 
brick and pointed a torch into the opening and heated the tang until it 
was as red as it would get (not very red, in this case), and quickly 
thrust it into the hole.  I repeated this a few times until it was very 
tight.

The wood was fairly wet when I did this, and I think the hot iron dried 
the hole some (so that it didn't split), and as it dried the rest of the 
way it tightened onto the tang.  I think that you're supposed to put a 
collar around this area of the handle before the final fitting / 
pounding in of the chisel, but I didn't and things worked out.

It worked remarkably well, and didn't require any complex tapering or 
anything other than a set of auger bits and a little torch.

I'd be pretty nervous jamming the business end of a stationary chisel 
into a spinning piece of wood, especially since I suspect we're talking 
about multiple horses driving the operation.

Chris, really enjoying my $40 pole lathe.
-- 
Christopher S. Swingley      University of Alaska Fairbanks
cswingle@i...        http://www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu/~cswingle

OldTools Searchable Archive: 
    http://nika.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu/~cswingle/archive/
    http://www.frontier.iarc.uaf.edu/~cswingle/archive/
    http://archive.oldtools.org/