I Sleep all Night and I Blog all Day

I’m kind of drained after visiting assisted living operations today, so I will write some more.

I conquered two of my tool-acquisition problems this week. I think. I won’t know until the tools arrive. I ordered a Pexto brace with a Samson chuck, and I got a good deal on a used Collins axe head.

If you don’t know what a brace is, it’s because you’re a little green sprout who hasn’t been on Earth long enough to know anything. A brace is a drill you operate by hand, without batteries or any other helpful technology. Usually, you don’t hear “brace” by itself. You hear “brace and bit,” but since I didn’t buy a drill bit, what I have on the way is a brace.

It turns out braces are useful for certain things. When you want a lot of control and you don’t want to worry about electricity, a brace can be convenient. They are very handy for countersinking and deburring in metal.

Braces have chucks, and some chucks are better than others. Two types people like a lot are Lion and Samson chucks. These are versatile ball bearing chucks. Lions were made by the Millers Falls company, and Samson chucks were made by Pexto (a contraction of “Peck, Stow & Wilcox”).

Ordinarily, braces take drill bits with weird, 4-sided shanks. I have not tried a Samson chuck, but supposedly, they will work with round drills. I hope so, because otherwise I will have to buy adaptors. Which do exist. You can find adaptors for sockets, hex-shanked tools, and…other stuff I don’t remember.

Braces come with reversible ratchets, so they turn in two directions.

I look forward to checking my brace out. I found one that looked reasonably pretty and didn’t seem too beat-up.

The axe head was an unexpected find. As I said in an earlier entry, modern axes are very badly made, and people are selling rusty old American axe heads on Ebay for high prices. A lot of Ebay axe heads have been sharpened so many times there isn’t much of them left, and many, for reasons I can’t fathom, appear to have been stored with one side underwater. There are a lot of Ebay axe heads that look fine on one side and have a second side which is a vast expanse of craters.

Some sellers wire-brush axe heads until they look nice, but they’re still junky. Also, many axe heads have sledge marks on them. Apparently, old timers used sledges to knock them out of logs. I hate tool abuse. I’m not going to trust an axe which has substantial deformations on it.

There is another problem with Ebay axe heads. Some are burned up. Ignorant sellers will sometimes burn an axe head to get handle fragments out of it. Hardened and tempered steel loses its conditioning when it’s heated too much. A roasted axe head which looks nice due to wire-brushing may be too soft to use.

The axe head I found is a Collins. This is a company that made highly regarded axes. I sent the seller a message and asked how the wood was removed, and she said it was removed with wedges. I think she means drifts. You use a drift to knock the wood out of an axe head. Anyway, it’s not fire. The axe head appears to have very little wear, and no one has beaten on it with a sledge, so I think I’m finally getting a decent tool.

I have to buy a handle now. I plan to try the local stores, but I may end up buying an American handle online.

Axe handles are commonly made from hickory, which is a hard and very springy wood. You can’t just take a hickory four-by-four and cut a handle out of it without further examination. You have to make sure the striations in the wood run more or less parallel to the axe head’s length. You also have to look for cracks or whatever. I have read that there are some pretty crappy axe handles out there. I hope local stores will fix me up, but if not, I can get an American-made handle for $15 or less online.

Once I have the head and handle, I have to “hang” the axe head. This is tool talk for attaching it to the handle. Supposedly, hanging a head incorrectly causes problems when you use the axe, and this is where the expression “getting the hang of it” comes from. This may be Internet BS, so caveat emptor, or if not “emptor”, whatever the Latin word for reader is.

I found a neat resource for axe scholars. Some dude who probably doesn’t date much works as an axe expert up in Montana, and he wrote a long treatise on axes. He tells people how to hang them and so on. I will provide a link to his PDF, in case you want it. And I know you do.

https://www.pcta.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/an_ax_to_grind.pdf

Tools are never simple. I guarantee you, even a putty knife has complexities you would not suspect. I don’t even have to check. I’m sure of it. You can spend a whole day reading about hammers and be amazed when you’re finished. It doesn’t surprise me that axes have substantial lore.

I bought a double-bitted axe head. Some people say they swing better. We will find out, I guess. I learned that double-bitted axes aren’t symmetrical. Not always, anyway. One bit is thicker than the other. The thick one is for splitting, and the thin one is for chopping. How about that? I told you tools aren’t simple.

I’ll have to sharpen the axe. Some people get their axes shaving sharp. I think that’s stupid, because after three whacks, an axe will lose the fineness of its edge. That is my guess, anyway. That will mean that you wasted maybe 2/3 of the time you spent sharpening it. It’s easy to get a blade fairly sharp. Making it super-sharp takes a lot more time.

I suspect that once you get your axe sharp enough to slice bologna, it’s more than sharp enough to cut wood well. Maybe I’m wrong.

We live in a funny country now. We have bad Chinese tools and clueless hipster tool buyers who have no idea why good tools matter. I can’t understand why people continue to buy tools now that they’re bad. Using a good tool is a pretty pleasant experience. Using a bad tool is usually very unpleasant, and often, the tools we buy are so bad they aren’t useful at all; it’s impossible to make them work no matter what you do. Companies manufacture tools that don’t work, and we still buy them and try to use them. Strange.

I may continue to be clueless and unskilled after I get my axe hung, but at least I will have a good tool. And I’m not wearing skinny jeans. Two things to be grateful for.

I guess I’ll get a beverage and a parrot and watch a Fred Astaire movie on Turner Classic Movies. Tomorrow, more assisted living.