Ash Axe Handle - Full Tutorial

recently I was commissioned to make a handle for this guy here so in today's video I'm going to go through the full process of how I turn big old chunks of Ash fresh from the tree into usable handles for my tools hopefully this video will be of use to anyone looking to make some of their own handles I'm also going to put teak where the Palam swell happens down here the Exotic hardwood adds a bit of contrast instead of just having it all white and it fits better in the hand without further Ado we're going to start at the very beginning the actual chunk of wood itself now I've had this piece of Ash seasoning at home home for well over a year and it's just about now ready to work I got a phone call off the guy who usually fixes my car telling me he was cutting down load of Ash and I could take some if I wanted so I did he cut them into 34in lengths for me and then to make them easier to transport and dry out I split them into halves quarters and then eights and left them in a dry area to season this here is a piece of Sycamore I saw some fellas cutting down a tree at the side of the road asked them if I could take away this length with me they said yes so I'm going to use this guy to give you a quick demo as to how I split my temp so the tool of choice for this task is of course the fro and our Mall here and we're just picking a point halfway along our log and driving it down you do want to try and make sure your wood is as straight as possible this Sycamore had a hidden knot in it which means we can't use them sections for our handles it also makes it a little bit more difficult to split I had to get a wedge involved here but before long we got it in two broke it down into quarters and then eight and theoretically we would leave this ash to dry in a dry area for about I left this for about 14 months I think just to bring it down to a moisture content roughly 20% this is a state called semi green which means it's not really wet like freshly cut timber but it's not dry like the kind of stuff you would feed through Machinery either but it's really nice to work with with draw knives and spoke shaves so this ax handle was going to be 28 in long so I marked that out here with the tape and pretty much cut it at first I was going to use this big cross cut saw I recently restored for comedic effect but after I realized this wouldn't work cuz I didn't have enough throw to play with this saw I switched to use the still inappropriate rip cut saw which is usually used for cutting down along the timber which you see in the minute but here we are now using this to cut across the Grain and get our length of Ash I use mostly hand tools especially in my videos here just to Showcase that you don't need a big fancy wood shock with all sorts of Machinery to do wonderful woodworking I do get a bit lazy when it comes to the head I used a wire wheel to remove all that rust and then I used a belt sander to sharpen the edge towards the end but you could just use some sandpaper to remove the rust and an AB braas of stone I was just trying to get the head part over with as quickly as possible because I wanted to showcase the real event which was of course the wooden handle now when picking out the section of wood we want to get our handle from we want to make sure that the growth rings are growing parallel to The Cutting Edge of the ax you can see they're all flowing that way here so what I've done here now is taking a pencil just a straight edge I marked out a nice straight piece and I'm thinking the plank we're going to cut from the wood is going to be roughly around here which means all of this needs to go which is fantastic news because that means we get to once more use our frow so we plop our length of Ash up on top of this lovely piece of limestone I found line about the field behind the shed but either way I've sketched a line down along the length of the Ash and I'm hoping we can stick to that as best we can so once I have the fro inside the wood I can't bring it any any more with the mall so I can pop off the handle which is the handy thing about most fro and then I'm just bashing it on either side working it further and further down the wood now our split is beginning to wander away from our line which is all right because it' be worse if it was going in the other direction but either way I'm struggling to get this throw down any further so once we have our Gap I can bring up this wedge here and just use them all to bang these two and they come right apart in no time so this offcut will tou to the side but we could possibly get get a few smaller Hammer handles or maybe even a few Hatchet handles out of it down the line but this here is the main attraction we pretty much followed the line as best we could what I'm going to do is get that strapped onto the bench here and we're going to plan it down so here I have two bench dogs and I'm just going to use the vice here to clamp them into place and now we can work on our face here now the first plane I'm going to bring to this piece of wood is this fell here he's known as a scrub plane I bought him in a big Job Lot off a fellow that used to collect vintage televisions uh either way when I got him he was in poor shape riddled with woodworm and half ratted with few coats of oil and plugging a few holes and now it's going right well the secret to the scrub pane's Effectiveness is this big cambered Iron there that you can see that allows it to scoop out big chunks of material which is great for getting down to size nice and quick it leaves behind all these long channels in the wood which can be removed by using a finer plane afterwards uh but in the past people have found furniture with scrub plane marks left behind as a finished surface so there you go now I would be needing a flat surface to plunk my template down on top of so here I'm using the Stanley number seven with this big long sole that gives us a perfectly flat even surface here I am using that now to smooth it down and there is a template I drew up myself I sketched this template off another axe I had in the past uh pretty much just traced it with a pencil and cut that out on the band saw onto a thin slip of Ash so here we are now just tracing that I wanted to cut my blank about 1 in thick and in order to do that I needed another surface that was 90° to our reference surface so here I am quickly using my side ax which is a green woodworking tool to hug off that rough material on the edge there next we can use our Jack plane here to get a nice flat plane the whole way along our Plank and now I scribe a straight line that we need to cut the whole way along so here we are once again using our rip cut saw this time for its intended purpose which is cutting down along the length of our Ash hair sometimes wood bends in ways you don't want it to so here I am using a chisel I inherited from my grandfather I don't think he ever used it for woodworking uh mostly opening paint cans judging by the condition I got it but here I am using it to split back open the pieces of wood and continuing my tile I saw it from both ends and when I kind of got to the halfway mark I used this big chisel here just to spit it off next it was time to glue on the two pieces of teak for the Palam swell so I just squirted out a bit of glue onto the timber spread it out and then attached the two slivers of teak and now this teak came from originally the Liverpool docks I was up in Northern Ireland visiting a Timber framing company and uh they had offcuts that were bigger than some of the Timber I buy from the shops so um they said I could take away pieces with me and uh they pointed out this incredibly beautiful piece of teak here and uh I don't know how I made room for it in the car but I I couldn't leave it behind me and uh here it is now going into a piece of Ash and continuing its journey across the Atlantic I forgot to mention that I shaped down the handle beforehand using the sidea pretty much throwing it up onto the chalk block and spending ages hacking away precisely cutting off pieces bit by bit with the sidea side axes differ from most other axes in the way that they have a single bevel and then a flat side which makes them brilliant for facing off pieces of Timber this glue up actually took me two takes the first time I took it off uh the whole thing just fell apart even though I had left it for 24 hours uh I reckon this was because I left it out in freezing cold temperatures it hit negative uh degre which it doesn't really do around here very often uh so the second time I glued it up I put it near the heater and the glue glue seems to have set all right so here I am now just using my draw knife to shape down the successfully glued pieces of teak and this teak was worked relatively well considering it's about as seasoned as it's ever going to be this was a fairly satisfying job and I could have just used a saw but I instead chose to use this lovely sharp draw knife here the next step is to find the halfway line right down the middle of our plank here so I'm using a verier calipers to measure the thickness of the board which we know to be 1 in let's just say 24 mm divide that by two and you've got 12 mil so I set that on the wheel gauge here and I run that up and down the length of the plank scribing a little Mark the whole way along the center you could probably do this with much more simple tools but these are the ones I have at hand so I'm just going to use those once we have our line drawn I'm going to place the head directly on top of our handle here and use this pencil that I've sharpened so that it is a very long lead sticking out the end of it which makes it easy easier for us to scribe along the end there now I'm just coming along with my Tenon saw here cutting down the slit that the head will eventually sit into this is a new or well as an old Spear and Jackson tenant off but new to me I got it off an auction an old Museum was selling off and it's unusual in the way that I've never before in my life come across cross a tenant saw that some previous carpenter has made a sheath for you can see this one that it just slots right into so I suppose yeah that protects the blade from rust and the teeth from dulling when it's not in use how brilliant is that all right so now it's time for the meaty bits finally get to sit back onto the shave horse and use our draw knives to shape out this handle starting with where the head of the ax fits onto the handle so what we're doing here is just shaping it down to that line we drew earlier uh that's shaped Shing out the eye of the head this is probably my favorite part of making any axe handle so you shape it down you squeeze the head in to see will it fit it won't the first time but it'll leave a mark that lets you know where you need to draw it down to the next time round and you repeat this process over and over again until you have the head sitting snug once we know that our head is fitting it's time to round out the shaft of our handle so for that we're using all sorts of tools most draw knife and a Shinto rasp maybe a bit of spoke shaving in there too but predominantly the Shinto rasp although this tool isn't traditional so it does kind of feel like cheating I don't know how itd work without this especially for parts like this where the grain of the tee is not flowing with the grain of the ash I should have thought of that but I didn't binto Ras doesn't care with or against the grain will keep cutting highly recommend this tool for any sort of woodworker if you don't already had one as you can see there I've also drawn a line kind of halfway on the face of our template there so that kind of means I can round out between the line we drew on all four faces of our ax handle visual cues like that make this job much much easier I am doing this job stood up at the workbench instead of sat at the shave horse there's really no right or wrong way to clamp your workpiece whatever works for you you can quite literally clamp this to the kitchen table and have at it uh but for most of my Woodwork in I was working at a bench vice I made a lot of handles at it and then when I finally got myself a shave horse I didn't really like the transition perhaps if I spent more time at it I'd be better able and I'd be sat at one right now but here I am at my workbench happy out flying it it's this part at the bottom of the axe by the Pam well you'll probably want to spend the most amount of time it's where there will always be a hand positioned so if you get this wrong it might be a bit uncomfortable but that's all right it's always better to leave more material so you can remove it as you progress with your axe uh but here I am now with the Shinto rast really taking the time to curve in that pan well now we're on to the cheating part I've got a wire wheel strapped onto my bench grinder here so we're just using that to quickly Blast Off the rust that is accumulated on the head of the axe originally when I started restoring tools I used to use the WD40 and sandpaper method but this is a little bit more clean and less labor intensive uh but for anyone who doesn't have a wire wheel stra to a bench grinder I'd recommend you try the same all right now we're on to our sanding so I go straight to a 120 grit sanding pad here a lot of people give out to me for using the ones you're supposed to use on the orbital sander instead of just the standard paper because it's slightly more expensive uh but I like the convenience and the shape of the pads they're strong so you can pull on them with both hands around the shaft and also they're just not going to fall apart on you as easily so here I am now standing up to 120 grit no higher because if I were to the grain would be so fine it would clog up all the pores in the wood and our oil wouldn't be able to penetrate as deep so as far as 120 grit is as far as you need to go all right now it's time to marry the head with handle hopefully forever so first of all we let Mrs inertia work her magic and then it's time to wedge her into place I don't have any soft Jaws on my vice as of right now so I just wrapped my gloves around the shaft and locked her into place and now it was time to drive in the teak wedges now I forgot to press record when I drove in the main wedge but pretty much I glued up piece of te wedged into place and I also decided I'd try two smaller wedges running perpendicular to the main wedge but again I forgot to press a cord on that one too but but hopefully you get the idea from seeing one of the smaller wedges going into place as to what I was trying to get at here can't cope with it can't cope without it here we are using our cofin saw just to cut off all that excess I left plenty spare here and then I used the Shinto rasp again to shave down to the appropriate height I mean how could you not love the Shinto rasp look at it eating into the end grain like it's nothing then I get this chisel here which we use to shave off a nice fine surface at the end those exposed fibers will allow the oil to soak in good and deep which is important cuz we really do want the wood to swell out where it's touching the head now it's time for another highlight the oiling process so my current process involves one coat where I mix Danish oil with a small drop of white Spirits the white Spirits thins out the Danish oil meaning the FR coat can penetrate good and deep into the wood I usually apply five more coats of just pure Danish oil give given about half an hour between each coat then I use a product suitably named ax wax this helps seal in the Danish oil while it's also given the axe a nice lovely finish I much prefer an oil and wax finish on all my wooden handles above a varnish finish varnish or lacquer almost creates a barrier between the wood and the user which I just don't really like I can't really describe it but it just kind of looks plasticky to me so now we have a fairly attractive looking ax but as it stand it Wen cut butter I remember remember the day I bought this axe I was up doing a craft fair up the country I was taking a stroll about the place around about lunchtime and the heavens opened and it just started pissing rain so I ran into one of the tents uh just for a bit of shelter and 5 minutes later the rain started to clear and I was walking away with a little rusty ax hanging from my pockets had it not been raining and had I not gone into the tent at that point I probably never would have bought this axe head and hence never would have made this video you're watching right now funny is it the butterfly effect but here I am cheating again using this Parkside bench grinder I got from doing a sponsorship campaign with them not so long ago so I just use that to hone down a nice quick Edge on it but a belt sender will only get me so far if you want a really sharp finish you're going to have to use some sort of stone so here I am using my Diamond Stones here just sharpen it up to 1,200 Gris might be a bit overkill for an next but either way we're going to bring it back to our bench and use our strap which is just a bit of leather strapped onto a bit of plywood I have a very fine abrasive compound I think that brings it up to 18800 grit it also removes the bur and also leaves a nice shiny polished finished on our Edge there now for the first time in 16 years I've finally stopped biting my nails which is wonderful cuz I get to do this new sharpness test so how this sharpness test works is you place your thumbnail on top of the edge and you pull it back if it slides right up off means your Edge isn't sharp enough if the edge scrapes a very fine little layer off your thumbnail that means you've gotten sharp enough I'm sure that'll probably be the last time this ax will be used to cut someone's Nails how does it perform against an actual piece of wood we a fallen sicore here I'm just going to play around with it for a few minutes so there we have it Lads that is how I make my axe handles these days uh but the phone isn't over yet I'm going to end the video here but once you have a new handle you're supposed to oil it once a day for a week once a week for a month once a month for a year and then twice a year after that so I've just got some boiled Lin seed oil here and we're just going to give it a quick rub in thanks for watching goodbye and good luck

Channel: Eoin Reardon

Views: 67,462

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Id: fFYw2tuZ3cc

Length: 18min 10sec (1090 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 20 2024