I wanted gouges of various sizes for carving signs, relief work and in-the-round. As a novice, I try to be frugal and yet shop for good quality tools. These gouges requires reshaping and once polished to razor sharpness does an excellent job for my needs. So if you are willing to regrind, this is worth 4 stars.

I was wondering why there was no information on this brand but they were cheap so I took a chance and was pleasantly surprised to find they were the same brand as my mallet, Shop Fox, which is apparently made by Woodstock international. They are very cheap chisels that will have to be re-ground to a workable angle before use as the angle is WAY too high for these to do anything but tear up your project. It is fairly cheap metal that is supposed to be chrome vanadium steel but, if it is, it's nothing like the good stuff that Pfeil is made out of. You will probably have to sharpen these more often than good gouges but for the price it's a fair trade off. You get seven gouges for what you would pay for one decent gouge and less than one really good one. The four stars is for value, not quality. Buy them only if you know how to grind them (and have a power grinder, it would take forever to grind this much metal off with an Arkansas stone) to suit you - bad for beginners since they come ground at a 45 degree angle and that is useless for wood carving. They are very thick so you'll have to grind a LOT of metal away to get them down to 15-20 degrees, hopefully the steel is still strong enough after it's thinned out. They could have made two sets of gouges with the amount of steel they used - I hope that doesn't mean the steel is so weak or brittle it will break if thinned enough to give a proper bevel - I don't think it will but if it does, I'll modify this review and give it one star. Seems to have reasonable strength, so my bet is it will do OK.

The media could not be loaded. These are very usable once ground to a proper bevel angle and sanded and stropped properly. Please see attached video. Before final use, the chisel was sanded and stropped accordingly. The wood I'm using is pine, means it's quite soft. I am using the chisel with, and against the grain. One can tell chisel is sharp if it can feather wood when you go against the grain. I'm pretty sure if this was to be used on an oak or maple, with a hammer, it would dull. But, I have not tried it. Still, for such a price, these are marvelous. One of these chisels from a company such as pfeil, would cost like $45. But these, once sharpened, are awesome. But, I am using a few tools to make these usable. If you are serious about wood carving, you will still have to get those. What I mean by that is that you should not get disappointed if you have to purchase more things to make these work. You will need a bench grinder, and, based on how steady your hands are, you will need a custom made add-on, to keep chisel from sliding and keep the bevel consistent. To make that one custom, you will need a few more tools... Anyway, I hope a short vid I made gives you some idea as how to make these into descent tools.

So wasnt going to expect some thing that was sharp, good edges, or much of anything. But after a little while of sanding and stropping i got them to be and stay sharp. Not to bad of metal. If they broke i would buy them again. Or just save up for some better ones.

These gouges are a great value at a remarkably low price! In fact, for price-to-impact, I'd rate these a 5.

If price is excluded, I'd rate them a high 2 or a low 3.

As noted by other reviewers, they arrived with terrible bevel grinds and were completely unusable out of the box. However, I don't hold that against them. Even when purchasing premium tools I fully expect to re-grind, profile, sharpen, and hone a new edge tool to fit my needs.

The steel isn't ultra-hard, but holds a nice edge and is soft enough to quickly and easily touch up with honing. It's not brittle (at least at the angles and profiles I've ground) and the edge doesn't break, even when I'm using them in hard maple with a mallet. The handles and rings are all well made and set properly.

Also as noted by other reviewers, the description incorrectly lists these as Imperial sized chisels. They're actually metric. That's fine by me and, again, I don't hold that against them.

My only real complaint (and what would make them a 2 or 3 star if they were at a higher price) is that the steel is absurdly thick. So thick, in fact, that the heel of the bevel gets in the way of a sweeping plunge cut because the bevel is so long! Believe it or not, the steel is thicker on these than on my 5/8" bowl gouge!

My solution has been to aggressively grind down the heel at a shallow angle, resulting in a bevel that's about half the stock width, transitioning to a 1 inch taper grind at the heel. It was a fair bit of work, but makes the chisels (especially the smaller widths) much more functional in tight places.

For this price, it might even be worth having a machine shop take some steel off the entire underside of the tool. My guess is that they could do it pretty quickly and you'd still end up with a sub-$100 set of gouges.

Overall, I'm happy given the price. If I'd paid much more, I would have returned them due to the thick steel.