Craftsmanship in Wood

Oh cool, thanks for putting together this wiki.

Are you showing these chisels to make me realize how crappy is my chisel collection? Well it worked.

Paul Atzenweiler wrote:Are you showing these chisels to make me realize how crappy is my chisel collection? Well it worked.

Nothing that an application of your life savings, or a second mortgage, couldn't fix. Have you considered selling off an internal organ? Surely you could do without a kidney for the sake of some shiny metal?

I have noticed these to be addictive...

It is a hard question to answer: when do I have 'enough' chisels?

That's like chasing the horizon.....just a little further.

Thanks for putting the nomi wiki together Chris, this is really helpful.

One of the things that anyone who comes from a background in a language like English, when tackling Japanese, is that in Japanese there are no spaces between the words. So, knowing where one word starts and ends can be tricky at times. Even when you are a bit further along in your study, it is still possible to make mistakes in this manner, and I fell into that pit the other week.

In delving into research for a chisel wiki entry, I saw a cluster of kanji and in looking up the meaning I chose to clump them together the wrong way. While I knew the meaning of the characters in isolation, sometimes when characters are clumped together there is an unexpected shift in meaning.

There was the phrase '総角打ち'

I separated (clumped) the characters in that term as '総角' and '打ち' instead of '総' and '角打ち'. And that lead to a mistake in translation.

You see, '総角', read age-maki, happens to have a meaning as a term for a old samurai hairstyle, where the long sides are coiled up. It's an odd reading where the actual characters are read in a completely non-standard way. That sort of thing happens in Japanese - they call such readings ateji. It's a confusing language at times.

In the Meiji period the term age-maki was applied to men with longer hair on the sides, kinda like what you saw sported by members of the Beatles in the mid 1960's. I took that to mean that the chisel head was thought to resemble that hairstyle. Not a crazy supposition, but, uh, wrong!

When someone later asked me if the correct name for the chisels shouldn't be kaku-uchi, I inferred, as I had done for men-tori shaped chisel head, that the term kaku-uchi was simply an abbreviation for 総角打ち. That guess was perfectly logical in term of Japanese, as such abbreviations are rather common, but I was off the mark.

As it turns out, clumping the term '総角打ち' as '総' and '角打ち' was correct. The reading for that compound would be sōkaku-uchi, meaning 'complete' kaku-chi, i.e., all chisels in a set having the same kaku-uchi chisel head style.

That reading would have lead to different conclusions on my part. I'm sorry to have mislead anyone as a result. I'm hardly the world's leading scholar of Japanese and I am going to make mistakes from time to time, however you can count on me to get to the truth eventually!