Biggest issues, the 1/4 inch chisel was ground off center of the socket!? The beveled edges aren’t even (I ground the shoulders down to almost nothing so this didn’t matter) and the blade edge isn’t square to the shoulder on any of them.

Oh and the wood box as advertised was a cardboard box with wood print.

But after 3 hours work, there great.

It’s unwise to pay too much, but worse to pay too little. When you pay too much you lose a little money, that is all. When you pay too little, sometimes you lose everything because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was supposed to do.

The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot. It can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better.

The point I meant to make was that if this is the product, the only place I’d send it is back to the production team.

The Sweethearts however are 2x the price of the Baileys and Stanley says they are competing with Lee Valley and Lie-Nielsen so I would have expected them to be better then you’ve shown so far. Maybe I expect too much but flat backs on a want to be premium chisel doesn’t seem to be a lot to ask…

Just a quick gripe about Stanley in general, their website is pretty horrible. You can’t even find either of the new chisels if you just go through the menus, you have to search for them by keyword to find them on the site. You’d think spinning up a premium line would mean they would spend a couple of hundred and make a dedicated site for the Sweetheart line so they can effectively advertise them to people looking for more info. (anyone from Stanley reading this????)

In 15 years, I can think of only one item that was, ahem, tampered with before shipping to us.

I’d be mega POd if I purchased crap based on a glowing review. I would doubt the manufacturer AND the press source.

Great timing on this post. I was looking at Highland woodworking’s site yesterday and noticed they had the stanleys for sale. I almost bought the big set.

I very recently picked up two Narex chisels based on the recommendation of a poster in your blog. Sure, they are cheap enough but the backs are atrocious; one still has circular grinding marks on it. They are in the tool box with the Harbor Freight chisel-like hunks of pig iron.

I use Irwin Marples that I picked up at a home center store a while ago. They only took a few minutes of work (bout half hour per) and they were certainly cheap enough.

I just found out the Lie Nielsen offers longer handles for their chisels. Based on your post and my past experience with LN, I’m going to save up and take the plunge and get the LN chisels with the long handles.

This makes me wonder if the people in charge of sending samples to well-known tool reviewers know anything at all about the tools they sell. I had high hopes for these chisels after seeing samples at a woodworking show.

I guess this is just another example of LN’s fair pricing. Apparently, what LN charges is what it costs to provide a quality inch-sized socket chisel.