TESTED: Zen-Wu chisels and plane blade
Above: Y-1 Zen-Wu chisel set – ‘beautifully made’ in white paper steel.
Review: Robert Howard
These chisels are very close to the Blue Spruce, which itself has borrowed from Lie-Nielsen. The quality is also close, and in some respects, has exceeded them. The most obvious example of this is the laminating process used with the more expensive chisels and the plane blade.
Instead of the traditional blacksmith method of forge and hammer to weld the different metals together, Zen-Wu have taken a high tech path, milling complementary slots with which to mate the two parts of the blade. The milled slots are dovetailed in the chisels, but are square shouldered in the plane blades, with the slots running down the length of the blades.
Zen-Wu’s impressive X-1 chisel has a dovetailed construction.
The blades are very sharp out of the box and are ready for work without any further attention. The attention to detail is impressive – the front edge of the plane blade chipbreaker has been ground and polished on both the upper and lower surfaces, for example. A small, flat plate screwdriver, designed to fit the screw that fixes the chipbreaker to the plane blade, is also included.
Test cuts on red cedar endgrain were made with the X-1 chisel and the largest Y-1 chisel.
At the end of each run, the surface was cut off for a new series of test cuts.
The boxed set of bench chisels are beautifully made, and appear to follow the Lie-Nielsen model of being precision machined from metal stock, rather than being drop forged. The edges are ground and polished to 30°. The blades have a slight concave curve along their length which is a pleasant change from the more common hump in so many chisels. The back of the chisels is convex across the width which I find aesthetically pleasing in both look and feel.
The boxed chisels are each made from a single piece of Y-1 ‘white paper’ steel, with a hardness claimed to be 62.7–63.3 HRC. The single Zen-Wu chisel is a much more expensive laminated blade, with the cutting edge made from X-1 steel, laminated to a titanium alloy body.
The Zen-Wu plane blade has MagnaCut steel laminated to a titanium base.
The plane blade is Magnacut steel, laminated to a titanium alloy base, and hardened to between 62.5- 63.3HRC. The blade is designed to fit all the modern planes based on the Stanley design without any modification of the plane bodies. The extra thickness of the Zen-Wu blade can be accommodated by adjusting the position of the frog, but in order to fit the old Stanley planes the mouth will need to be filed wider by up to 3mm.
I sharpened the X-1 and the largest Y-1 chisel, along with a Lie-Nielsen A2 steel, a L-N O1 steel, and an original Veritas, at 30° using a honing guide to ensure uniformity on my waterstones, finishing at 8000 grit. I tested the blades by using a mallet to drive the edges through the endgrain of a block of 300 x 60mm Australian red cedar.
At the end of each run of cuts (each run done with one chisel) I cut off the tested wood to create a new starting surface. I used a cutting gauge to mark a line 1mm from the end of the board, and clamped the square section block used to guide the chisel in the cut on this scribed line.
After cutting through a total of around 2.2m of endgrain with each blade, only the O1 Lie-Nielsen and the Zen-Wu boxed set blades showed any edge damage. All of the edges however, were still good enough to shave my arm.
These are impressive tools, beautifully made, and comparable in quality to the best we have. I recommend looking at the Zen-Wu website for more information about this very interesting company.
Review tools supplied by and available from https://ad-tools.com.au/
Robert Howard @roberthowardwoodworker is a designer maker who also teaches woodcarving from his Brisbane workshop. Learn more at https://roberthoward.com.au