Trevanion wrote:So one month on, what do I think?
They're great.
...
Oh, you want more detail? Alright then.
Thus far, I have been really impressed with the Richters! I haven't been babying them much at all and they've had a couple of fair wallopings with a mallet (or even a claw hammer lightly on occasion when the mallet was too far) now and stood up very well. One thing I will note is that I feel that the tops of the handles are maybe a little too round initially, as I had a couple of deflections of the mallet when I first started using them as the top is almost a perfect dome rather than a gentle round-over, but this is really a non-issue as the tops began to flatten out a bit as it was being used.
I haven't even felt the need to sharpen them yet after a whole month. I've been using them quite a fair amount and the edge still feels good, not the same as the initial sharpen I did on them, granted, but good enough for my work and they just seem to keep going and going. I'm mostly doing fairly light chopping and paring working in Accoya (Radiata Pine) which is fairly easy on the tools anyway, but the latewood can be very hard on hand tools in particular.
We'll see how they keep going.
I intend to get hold of a set of those bad boys as and when WH get their next shipment delivered. As soon as I've run them in, my Jap chisels will be up for grabs - Rob