OK. Chisels
OK. brand chisels are yet another mystery brand for me. They do not seem very common. I have only seen the set below and a couple of others so far.
I believe that the OK. brand has a period after the “OK” to get around trademark restrictions. “OK” by itself would have likely been difficult to trademark because of it’s common usage. Carl Kammerling did something similar with its “C.K” brand chisel, placing a period after the “C”.
The OK. chisels are nicely made and pleasing to look at, as the set below illustrates.
The chisels have attractive beech handles. The steel hoop at the top of the handle is held in place by two deep dimples punched through the hoop on opposite sides. The brass ferrule has fairly coarse vertical lines spaced tightly together.
The label colors are shown accurately — yellow background with dark teal green oval outlines and lettering.
The label stamp is a “K” inside an “O”, a stylized “OK”. (I hope they didn’t pay their advertising agency too much for that design). There is no sign of a period on the stamp.
The three widest chisels have the stylized “OK” and “MADE IN SWEDEN” stamped on the blade. The next narrowest has “SWEDEN” stamped on it and the most narrow chisel has nothing stamped on the blade.
I have two OK butt chisels, a 1″ and a 1 1/2″.As a apprentice in ’72 I bought them new off an old Swedish shipwright/carpenter. I laugh now, he was 62. He had bought a chisel lot and those were the only two sizes he had left. This was in Vancouver, B.C. The beech handle on the 1″ didn’t do well in construction.
Nice I’ve never seen an OK butt chisel. OK chisels seem fairly scarce in general.
I bet that beech handle saw a lot of pounding during it’s lifetime.
I just got a pair of OK gouges- one has a decent sticker on the handle, the other is barely legible. The first thing that I noticed was, the labels are on the back side of both chisel handles. I have never encountered that before, but since it is the same on both, it must have been intentional. Always something new to discover.
Yes. All of those variations … very interesting. 🙂
I’ve sent a set of Jernbolaget gouges with labels to the back.