Thread: Walnut Stock Build

Looking great, wish I had the patience for traditional inletting. I tend to just mill out a pocket and bed the whole inlet area. All of the stocks I have made so far have been painted though. What sort of chisels and scrapers are you using for the inletting? Anything special or specific? I have a large assortment of chisels, but a limited number of scrapers.

Originally Posted by SixtyTen

Looking great, wish I had the patience for traditional inletting. I tend to just mill out a pocket and bed the whole inlet area. All of the stocks I have made so far have been painted though. What sort of chisels and scrapers are you using for the inletting? Anything special or specific? I have a large assortment of chisels, but a limited number of scrapers.

For proper traditional inletting I'd defer to Hunter_Nick; like you I would prefer to use the mill where possible. Your approach makes perfect sense if the stock is going to be painted - I'd do the same. As far as inletting tools, probably the only special/specific ones I have are the 3 homemade ones in the picture below:



The top one is a small chisel I made to work specifically on the tang area. It's a piece of 4mm drill rod which I centre-drilled, hardened, and then ground at an angle to make a little in-cannel gouge.

The centre one is very basic - just a length of broken bi-metal hacksaw blade onto which I ground a couple of scraper profiles. With the HSS teeth ground off, the body of the blade seems to be just the right hardness to turn and hold a good scraping burr. I 'turn' the burr with the shank of a carbide drill bit held in a pin vise. The piece of all-hard hacksaw blade I tried this with didn't work as well - the burr tended to chip instead of roll.

Bottom one is a cranked-neck incannel gouge. Source material was a woodturning gouge from a secondhand shop which had the standard external bevel. I cut off the tang, welded it to a bent piece of all-thread (through rod with a smooth finish would have been better!) and ground the internal bevel. Worked really well for the barrel channel.

Other than those I have a set of cheap 'Mastercarver' detail chisels like these https://www.timberlywoodturning.co.n...isels--601001- and some standard straight chisels - nothing special.