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• Cold chisels are made of hardened steel and need to be hit very hard to do their job.

• An old corner chisel for squaring off mortise corners.

• Bone chisels for surgical use, like many surgical tools, are most similar to the corresponding woodworking tool. Dried old bones may look and feel like rock, but living bone is softer and more like wood.

• Cold chisel

• Attractive chisels don’t have to be expensive.

• We saw a drill for dirt and this is a chisel for dirt. Digging a hole in the ground with a shovel is remarkably similar to chiseling a mortise into a block of wood. You start in, then as the hole gets deeper you start shaving off the sides, shaping the hole until it’s just right. A shovel is very much a chisel for dirt. (And isn’t this a lovely, bizarre, storied shovel? It’s obviously been patched, mended, and cobbled for many years by someone who probably didn’t have the resources to just go get a new one. Or perhaps they were rich because they were stubbornly cheap and refused to get anything new when all that was needed was a bit of mending.)

• Mystery shovel! It took me a long time for find out what this is. Jess eventually found a reference that explained it. This is a fancy shovel meant to be mounted inside the spare tire mounted on the back of your Jeep.

• Very wide brick chisel

• I haven’t done any wood carving since I was a kid, but my mom kept it up, a legacy of her upbringing in the Steiner School philosophy, which, along with some nonsense, emphasized the dignity and tradition of hand crafts. These are her chisels, what survived of them. They are not meant to be hammered: you push them through the wood by hand. Hence the emphasis on sharp edges.

• I don’t know for sure that my mom carved this box, but I think she did, probably in high school as a school project.

• This modern corner chisel has a guide that you push into the corner. One good hit with a hammer drives the square chisel down and cuts the corner perfectly.

• If a shovel is a chisel for dirt, then this is something more like a dado plane. It’s a horse-drawn moldboard plow, the tool that opened the prairie to cultivation by breaking up the tough roots of the prairie plants and turning the soil over

• Chisels meant to be hammered can have solid metal, wood, or plastic handles.

• Brick chisels come in a range of widths.

• This is a scoop chisel for ice cream.

• Wide Chisel

• This is a chisel for some kind of food.

• Wide chisel

• My mom’s woodcarving tool chest with old Swiss chisels.

Do you have a better example of this kind of tool? Let me know by leaving a comment, and include a picture of it if you can so everyone can see!