How to Use a Wood Chisel

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Drew Finn here for Expert Village. We are going to talk about standard hand tools and how to use them. Here is a wood chisel. I am going to explain how to use it. As you notice one side is tapered and one side is flat. Okay so we have the tapered side which is the side that you sharpen and then the flat side that you don' sharpen. We want a a nice flat side here. Remember when we are using this, this is not a pry bar. You don't pry with it. It is a chisel. You want to actually chisel. If you pry, you could break the edge off and dull it. So what we are going to do today is chip out an area like this. This is often like on an end of a door. If you are putting in a latch for the door, sometimes you cut out an opening like this. So what we need to do if you are working flat work like this, we need to clamp it down. Now what we are going to do on the area that we want to cut out, is we are going to tap it in areas where we want the edges to end so it is cut all along th edges. Now we can go down the side and actually go with the grain and chisel out the wood. Stopping very short of the edge. So when we are done, see the edge of the chip, we haven't overshot it all. So we cut just work it back and forth and get it down to whatever depth we need on it and so that is basically how we use a wood chisel. "