Make A Chisel Handle from Firewood

I bought an old socket chisel off ebay.  This is a 2 inch wide chisel with no bevels on the edges, sometimes called a slick, historically used for timber framing or other large workpieces.  The chisel had the usual rust and pitting, and lacked a handle.  You can see it below on the bottom left.

I cleaned the rust off with a brass wire wheel in a bench grinder.

Here you can see the left edge of the chisel has some pitting, so I have to grind away some metal to reach a non pitted area there.

I do this rough grinding on my belt sander.

Then I sharpened the chisel with my usual bench stones

 
 Then I turned my attention to the handle.  I'm making this out of a piece of red oak firewood out of my parents' firewood pile.  This piece is well dried, and this is a great way to get some good usable wood for free or very low cost.

I start by splitting a piece off with wedges.

 

Then I hew it round-ish with a hatchet.

 I whittle the end to rough size with a knife.

Then continue to shape it to fit the socket with a knife and rasp.

It fits!

A shot of the carnage left over from all this shaping.

The handle is still just round and I want to profile it a bit to fit better in the hand.

I shape it down with spokeshaves and rasps and smooth it with a card scraper.

Here's the finished profile.

To finish it, I drive in finish nails into both ends of the handle just a little ways so I can balance it on 2 blocks with v shaped notches in them and turn it to finish all sides at once.  I apply 3 coats of walnut colored danish oil.

Here's the finished product.  The handle is left long so that the chisel can be used 2 handed on large pieces for extra leverage for carving and shaping.

If I had this to do over again, I would have left the handle the same diameter as the outside of the chisel socket so that it formed a shoulder.  This would have looked nicer instead of having the top of the socket exposed.  But I expect this one will work fine for a long time.