Cleaning out my late uncle's garage bench and hit the jackpot

I picked up a similar bundle of old chisels at an estate auction a couple summers back, six Stanley and one W. Marples, all gummed up with years of grime. Half of them looked beyond saving. I almost left them on the table. Glad I didn't, because after an hour with some mineral spirits and steel wool they cleaned up better than anything I could buy new at that price.

The one thing I'd say before your cabinet job is check the backs. Old chisels usually need the flat side polished out a bit before they'll take a proper edge. I used a cheap diamond plate and someWD40 for mine, worked the back flat, then did the bevel on the same plate and finished on a leather strop with green compound. Two of them will shave arm hair now, which honestly surprised me. My grandad had the same habit of buying the good stuff and then barely using it. His block plane still had most of the factory finish on the sole when I got it, and it planes as sweet as anything. Tools like that were built to outlast the guy who bought them. Let us know how they cut on the cabinet. If the steel's decent you'll feel it right away, that smooth way old carbon steel goes through pine compared to the new stuff.

My take is a bit less rosy about looks meaning anything. I inherited a set of chisels from my father-in-law a few years back, handles polished like furniture and blades with hardly a scratch. They sat pretty in a roll for two years before I actualy used one, and the edge was useless. Looked fantastic, would barely cut pine. Spent a whole evening on the coarse stone getting the backs flat and regrinding a proper bevel, and only then did they come alive.

So before the cabinet job, check the edges honestly. Even if the previous owner kept them sharp, a blade that old has probaly been honed at all sorts of odd angles over the decades. I found one of mine with a bevel closer to forty degrees than twenty five, probably from someone who just touched it up by eye every time. It worked fine for rough stuff but chattered when I tried fine end grain on a shelf.

If the flats are pitted from sitting somewhere damp, you may spend more time at the stones than on the cabinet itself. That said, once they are dialed in, old steel holds an edge as well as anything I have bought since. Just do not judge by the handles and the shine like I did.

One thing to watch on old chisels is a cracked handle. I picked up a few at a yard sale last year and two of the handles had hairline splits I didn't spot til I gave one a whack with a mallet and felt it flex. A drop of thin cyanoacrylic glue wicked into the crack fixed mine up fine. How big is the cabinet job? I've got a similar backlog of small projects I keep finding excuses to postpone.