Chisel

A chisel is a flat, beveled steel blade for carving, paring, or chopping wood away — most often for joinery like mortises, dovetails, and hinge recesses, but just as happily put to general shaping and cleanup.

Common Types

• Bench chisel — the general-purpose chisel in every tool kit, handling most paring and light chopping work without complaint.
• Mortise chisel — thicker and stouter, built to take repeated mallet blows chopping deep, narrow mortises without flexing or snapping.
• Paring chisel — longer, thinner, hand-pressure only — no mallet — for work where control matters more than speed.
• Dovetail chisel — a thin, often triangular blade shaped specifically to get into a dovetail joint's tight corners.

Technique

A chisel gets driven either by hand pressure (paring) or by striking the handle with a mallet (chopping). Sharp, and guided with the grain, it shears fibers cleanly; pushed against the grain, it's far more likely to dig in or split the wood in a direction you didn't choose — see Grain and Tearout for why that direction matters so much.

Sharpness and Safety

Like a bench plane iron, a chisel is only as good as its edge — a dull one needs more force to push through wood, and more force is exactly what makes a slip land somewhere you didn't intend. Keep both hands behind the cutting edge, always, and never chisel toward the hand holding the workpiece.