Chisel

A hand tool with a wedge-shaped cutting edge at the end of a blade, used to carve or cut a hard material such as wood, stone or metal. The edge is driven into the material by hand pressure, by a mallet or hammer blow, or, in industrial use, by a hydraulic ram or trip hammer. In woodworking, chisels range from small detail tools to broad roughing chisels, with specialized forms including the firmer, bevel-edge, mortise, paring and dovetail chisel, each shaped for a particular cut or joint, and the chisel sits alongside the hand plane and the lathe as one of the woodworker's core hand tools. In metalworking, cold chisels of tempered steel, ground flat, cross-cut, round-nosed or diamond-pointed, cut unheated metal, while hot chisels are made for metal already softened at the forge. In stonework, a stone chisel struck with a club hammer carves or cuts stone, brick or concrete. The chisel is one of the oldest worked tool forms: Neolithic stone chisels recovered in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, date to roughly 4100 to 2700 BCE.