Make a carving set to use on your wood turnings
or just to carve a lovely piece.

"A cut above the rest."

My daughter likes to travel and she likes to carve, so I decided to make her a traveling carver's set. The idea was to have a handle with replaceable blades covering things from knives to chisels. To begin with I chose to have a 1/2” insert to hold the tools in place so I measured the diameter of a 4” concrete nail and found it to be a bit less than 3/16”.

Then I drilled a 3/16” diameter hole 1” deep into the end of a 1/2” diameter, cold rolled steel rod
and cut the rod to 1” long.
I cut another piece of the rod to 1 1/2” long. If you use an angle grinder to cut the pieces as I did, they will be hot! Handle with care!
Choosing a piece of hardwood for the handle, in this case bird's eye maple, I drilled a 1/2” diameter hole in the end to a depth of 1 1/8".
The 1 1/2” piece of steel was inserted in the hole in the handle and mounted in a Jacob's chuck on the lathe. If you do not have a Jacob's chuck a hole could be drilled in a wood block in a face plate and the steel pressed into place. It serves as a mandrel to keep the hole centered in the turning.
Bring up the tail stock for support
and turn the handle to a comfortable fit. Normally I like unfinished tool handles but this being a present, I used some turner's polish to finish it.
The handle is removed from the lathe and mandrel
and the insert pressed and glued into place.
Using a v-block, drill for a set screw through the wood and the insert.Tap for the set screw.
The handle is done and now for the blades. I annealed several concrete nails with a torch. Just heat them to red hot and allow them to cool slowly.
Again using the torch the ends were heated to red hot and hammered flat.
The cutting edges are then hardened by heating each tool to red hot and immediately quenching in water. After each edge is polished so as to be able to see color changes, they are tempered by heating with the torch to straw color and immediately quenched in water to stop the color change.
Each was then cut, ground to various carving shapes and sharpened. Here from left to right are a couple of knives, the handle with allen wrench for the insert and a chisel blade inserted, a carver's skew, a coupe of straight chisels which may be reground at the carver's convenience, a round chisel and a bent round chisel. If you are making individual tools, the insert can be omitted of course and the tools inserted into individual handles.