Another chisel restoration....Merrill

   Another interesting looking old chisel with a truly sorry excuse for a handle.  A thin coat of rust came off fairly easily, but most of the neglect is around the socket.  The improvised handle has peened badly with use.  Worse, the socket has been forced in out of round on one side where the handle appears to have been hammered over the socket, or perhaps someone thought the handle would stay in longer that way.  In any case, it will make fitting a new handle fussy.

A maker's mark was thinly visible as I cleared the surface rust, so I focused in and gently cleaned that area to be able to read it - P. Merrill and Co., not a name I knew but from the style I guessed it was old.   I wanted to see what the steel was like before I get too deep into cleaning it up, so I sanded the end clean of rust and restored the bevel to a clean 20 degrees on a grinder.  

The exposed steel held a remarkably fine but firm burr, that has to be a good sign.   But who was P. Merrill?   As it turns out, this is a remarkably old tool.   Pliny Merrill set up his edge tools business in Hinsdale, New Hampshire in 1840.  His earliest marks have Hinsdale, N.H., but probably started using the P. Merrill and Co. mark in 1848, when he brought his nephew George Wilder into the business.   So this chisel dates to somewhere between 1848 and 1858.  In 1858, when George became a partner, the mark became Merrill and Wilder.  In 1866, Pliny Merrill sold the business to George, who would go through a succession of partners before selling to Jennings, who would continue to use the recognized Merrill and Wilder name for their Hinsdale-made tools.

So now to find out what the handle looked like.  A gouge with the Merrill and Co. stamp was made with applewood, while at least some of the firmer chisels of the 1858-1866 period were made with hickory.  The 1895 Montgomery Ward catalogue has 'firmer chisels' with applewood handles.  Could this be one of those?  At a guess, I would have called this a paring chisel, but the sides are not beveled.  I can't find anything to suggest that Merrill made a paring chisel, so this is most likely a smaller firmer chisel.  The 20 degrees was close to what was there, but who knows how many times it has been sharpened and reground?

The handle shape seems fairly consistent,  the 1895 handles in the catalogue look very similar to the 1884 advertisement on top, with really only a groove cut into the widest part of the bulb.  The 1" gouge on the bottom is from the 1848-1858 period, so I will use it as the pattern.  The bulb is less pronounced, but otherwise it doesn't seem to have changed much.   Following the original, I will use applewood.

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