To Haft or Haft Not?

It’s nearly impossible to walk into a hardware store, grab a tool, and know that you’ve gotten a quality item. China has done us in.

When I was a kid, I did not realize I was living in the golden age of American tools. We made great tools of all types. Machine tools. Hand tools. Power tools. Most of the stuff sold in stores was made here, and the quality was very high. Now we have stores full of great-looking tools that don’t work very well or last long.

I have a stump near my front door. I want it to go away. I got myself some saltpeter, and I opened the stump up and poured it in the holes I had made. The saltpeter will weaken the stump, and then I’ll be able to remove it with hand tools and so on.

It’s very weird how saltpeter will mess up a stump. Hard to believe, but it works.

I want a good mattock to break up the stump. I want one or more axes, too. No problem, right? You go to Home Depot and buy a mattock and an axe or two. Simple.

It doesn’t work that way.

I have a Home Depot cutter mattock. This is a mattock with one vertical blade and one horizontal blade. The vertical blade is very nice. The horizontal blade is so flimsy, you can twist it while pulling it out of a stump. You could grip it in a vise and put a 45-degree twist in it, easily.

Where was the mattock made? I don’t know, but I’ll bet you three fortune cookies I can guess.

Why would anyone put a non-hardened, easily bent blade on a mattock? It defeats the purpose of the tool. A mattock is for tough digging jobs. It’s for hacking up stubborn roots. You can’t do that with a blade that bends.

I looked into axes. It turns out the American axe industry is nearly dead. We used to have a bunch of great axe companies. Collins, Kelly, Plumb, Sager, and others. They made top-notch tools. You could find them anywhere in America. You didn’t have find a special store that sold to professional lumberjacks. You didn’t have to know a password or a secret handshake. The axes people saw every day in every hardware store in America were very good axes.

Now if you want a good axe, you have to search. You may have to buy something made in Sweden, Germany, or Switzerland. The Aryans apparently have a gift for axe-making. You may have to pay $200 or more. How many Deutche Marks is that?

Wait! You know the answer! Buy a used American axe on Ebay! Yes, you can do that. You’ll be surprised, though. People are selling heavily rusted axe heads for $50 each. They are selling axes that have been sharpened so many times they’re practically sledges. A really good used axe head will run you a hundred bucks or more.

I think I found a decent answer. An American company called Council Tool still makes axes. They claim to be hardened to 1-1/4″ back from the ends, so you shouldn’t have to worry about soft cutting edges.

I found an appealing (new!) double-bitted Council Tool axe on Amazon, and I decided to take a chance. It wasn’t expensive at all, and it’s made out of a real, known type of carbon steel (not random melted Chinese scrap). A lot of people who bought it criticized the handle, but I noticed they seemed happy with the head. Hey, I can buy a new handle. The head IS the axe. I think it’s worth a shot. It certainly beats shelling out $250 for something from Sweden.

An axe handle costs a maximum of about $15. If the Council Tool head is good, and I have to get a new handle, the total outlay will be $75 or less. These days, that is a screaming bargain for a lifetime axe.

I also decided to buy a maul. This is a sledge with an axe bit on one end. I think it will work well on stumps. I got the double-bitted axe for more general axe jobs.

I am not buying my maul on the web. Fiskars makes a maul people adore, and I can get it at Lowe’s. It can’t be all that bad, if over 4,000 people rave about it on Amazon. I hope.

I’ve already bought one Fiskars axe since moving here. It’s a Fiskars hatchet. I had used Fiskars products in the past, and they seemed okay. The hatchet does what a hatchet is supposed to do, but the metal seems way soft. It sharpens very, very quickly. Too quickly. It does not inspire confidence; I don’t know if it’s a lifetime tool. I’m hoping the maul will be better.

I don’t know a whole lot about axes, but I have a great tip for people who use them. When I was a kid, I used one a lot. My parents had a cabin in the mountains, and I loved using an axe. If you want to use an axe without making yourself miserable, get yourself a pair of cowhide gloves and soak them in neatsfoot oil. You should never use an axe or mattock or similar tool without a leather glove. If you like blisters and calluses, go your own way. I don’t like them.

The neatsfoot oil will soften the gloves and make the interior seams less abrasive to your skin.

I used to wear Wells-Lamont Trucker’s Special gloves, with adjusting straps that had little red balls on the ends. It looks like they still make a modernized model without the little cartoon trucker on them. I’d love to have a pair for old time’s sake. But Chinese leather gloves from Home Depot work fine, and they have reinforced palms.

I made the mistake of buying deerskin gloves when I moved here. Deerskin is funny. It’s soft and thick, and it sort of gloms onto your hand in a way that feels confining. The inside is very fuzzy, like a caterpillar turned inside-out. Give me cowhide any day.

I will report on the axe and maul eventually. I can’t wait to see the stump disappear.