Axe Saga Continues to Breed Suffering

I have some advice. Buy a chainsaw and throw out your axes.

I have been trying to get a decent library of axes for some time now. In the old days, you walked into any hardware store, you bought an axe made in America, and you were all set. American axe companies made great axes. The steel was hardened and tempered carefully. The handles were made correctly. You didn’t have to think much. You just bought.

Today, hardware stores don’t sell American axes. There are exceptions, but generally, you’re going to be buying Chinese. The heads will be soft. The handles will be dubious. It’s a bad situation.

If you want a good American axe, you go to Ebay and buy an old axe head for five bucks, because used axe heads are nearly worthless. HAHAHAHAHAHA. You fool! Try it! A good used axe head will cost you at least 30 bucks, and when you receive it, there’s a good chance it will have a fatal flaw you couldn’t see in the pictures.

I bought a new Council Tool axe. This is one of the few American axe companies that remain. They sent it in a flimsy envelope, and the Post Office apparently dragged the edges on concrete. Back it went. I ordered an old Ebay Collins axe head. It turned out to have a mashed eye a handle would not go through.

I finally got a nice Plumb axe head. It looked fine. It still had wood in it, but that was okay. I had a hydraulic press. Today I bought a handle at a hardware store, and I tried to hang the axe. When you put a handle on an axe, you’re hanging it.

I put the axe in a vise and used a 3/8″ drill bit to waste a lot of the wood so the remaining stuff would collapse easily. I put it on the hydraulic press, and the wood wouldn’t budge. I couldn’t support it in a way the looked totally safe, so I didn’t apply full force, but I applied about 10 times what you would think the drilled-out wood could take.

I took a coping saw and sawed the wood between the holes to weaken the wood more. The blade got stuck in the axe. I drilled and did various things, and finally, 80% of the wood slid out. Great. But the remaining 20% was stuck in the axe.

You would think an axe handle would not stick to an axe, but this one did. It was as if the Plumb people had painted the handle and hung the axe while the paint was wet.

I tried various things, and I used a big punch. Finally, the remaining wood came out, and it did so in a perverse way. One second, it was glued in there, seemingly permanently. The next, it just fell out. Okay.

Now I was ready to insert the handle. Well, not really. There was all sorts of rust and crud inside the axe. I had to sand it out by hand.

Remarkably, things didn’t get any less complicated after that.

You would think hanging an axe would be simple, and that lots of people would know how to do it. You would think almost any Youtube video would be a good guide. That’s not how it works. Because Americans don’t use axes much any more, people don’t know how to work on them. They post videos just the same. Doesn’t even slow them down.

They use wedges wrong. They don’t set the axes down far enough on the handles. They force axes onto handles instead of shaping the wood. It’s like Beavis and Butt-head became lumberjacks and bought Gopros.

I found a couple of guys who appeared to know their stuff, and I can tell you what they said.

You don’t force an axe onto a handle and make wood peel up underneath it. That’s the pea-brain method. You shape the handle and try it in the axe repeatedly until you get a good fit. When you finally have it right, you don’t have to pound anything. You put the axe on the handle, and you bop the lower end of the handle on a piece of wood on a concrete floor. The axe will seat itself where it should, which is just above the little protrusion or protrusions on the handle.

I used a belt sander to shape my handle. It was a little slow, but the result was very nice.

When you get your axe onto your handle, you trim the excess wood above the axe, and you insert your wedge. You can coat it with wood glue, or you can soak it in a product called Swel-Lock, which makes wood swell permanently. You force the wedge into the handle as far as you can without splitting anything, and you let everything dry. Then you trim everything and make it look nice.

I did all this stuff, except for inserting the wedge. For some reason, I don’t have wood glue.

Apart from the wedge, I was done, right? Of course not. Don’t even think it.

Handle makers paint handles with varnish This is bad. If you use a varnished axe without gloves (always wear gloves), the varnish will pull at your skin and give you blisters. Even though I use gloves, I used lacquer thinner to remove the varnish from my handle. Then I sanded it and treated it with paste wax.

After I did all these things, I discovered that I had bought the wrong handle. An axe handle should have growth rings that run more or less parallel to the axe. I knew this, but I forgot to check when I was at the store. My handle has growth rings that run across it. This may not cause a problem, but it’s not what I wanted.

My understanding is that the real problem is grain that runs out. That means you have places where a split between two layers of wood can divide the handle into two parts. I don’t know if I have that issue. I am afraid to look.

I blew $17 on a handle, I researched as carefully as I could, and I still ended up with a handle that may be unusable. I’ll give it a try tomorrow and see if it’s safe.

I can see why chainsaws are so popular. They’re all the same. They don’t have grain that wanders around. And if a part goes bad, you take it off and put another one on. You don’t have to use a belt sander or a spokeshave to change a saw bar. Skill is not part of the paradigm.

Tomorrow I’ll buy wood glue, and I’ll check my handle. If it worries me, I’ll buy another one. I’ll get it right some day.

There was one bright spot in my day. I used the belt sander to sharpen the axe, and it took about two minutes. It was a joke. When it was finished, it was sharp enough to be dangerous. I know. I handled it incorrectly and started to peel skin off a finger.

Look how hard it is to prepare and use simple tools. You know–you don’t have to check–almost no one does these things right. No wonder Americans don’t like hand tools. They don’t know what they’re doing. Hand tools are great when you buy good ones and use them correctly, but that’s not obvious when you walk into Lowe’s with a head full of nothing.

On the whole, I’m more grateful than I used to be for my chainsaws. They haven’t failed me yet, and the learning curve is pretty gentle.