axe care

hey guys this is Dan wall Walker coal cracker bushcraft today I wanted to talk a little bit about axe maintenance when were in the field and how to keep your blade sharp and also just a little bit about safety you saw when I was cutting with this axe it's a smaller axe this is 19 inches I'm kneeled down I have an anvil stump that I'm working on and I'm splitting my wood one thing you need to remember when using an axe that I see a lot of people forget is if you have a smaller axe like this we need to be in a position that if we miss we go into the dirt rather than standing up and going into our leg so that's one important thing I see a lot of people do and they don't realize the danger than an axe can be but doing this if we do slip up and go into the dirt can cause damage to our axe blade so we want to talk a little bit about that today how we can repair that how if we that doesn't happen we can still keep our axe nice and sharp out in the field and what we need to do once we make this investment of keeping our handle healthy and keeping our blade from rusting so I'm gonna get the camera repositioned get some tools out I'm going to talk about that so how do we take care of our axes because an axe for a woodsman should be one of their most important tools we of course rely heavily on our veldt knife and that seems to be the draw everyone goes to but in all reality if you learn how to properly use an axe this is always going to be your go-to tool before you should ever be drawing your knife out of your teeth if you know how to use this properly we should be able to split logs do finer carvings even carve feather sticks if we need to cut rope twine or anything heavier this is the tool for the job we want to try to maintain our blade that's on our hip as much as possible rather than waste that and keep this up to snuff so when I say that I don't mean that you damage this by any means or misuse this but this is going to hold up to all those rigors because this is what it's built for is for that durability and heavier tasks so first of all when we think about an axe how we're gonna keep take care of it keeping a sheath on our axe is one of the most important things because if this isn't on here and we're just throwing it around there's a possibilities can get chipped or we can injure ourselves so you always want to keep your sheath on keep it closed and in my opinion if you're using it around camp don't just lay it down and keep the sheath in your pocket when you use it sheath on set it down somewhere safe and that's gonna prolong the life your axe for sure so let's first talk about sharpening what do we need to do to sharpen this blade well it depends on what's the matter with the blade first of all when I talked in earlier in the video if we're cutting correctly or we've misplaced a chop or we cut into bark maybe they had some rock or something in it and we chip our blade we need to approach that differently than if we just need to sharpen our sharpen it or hone our blade the way it is so this video is not going to go into reprofiling an axe we're assuming we already have a sharp well profiled axe and we just want to maintain this in the field so let's just start with let's start with the worst case scenario okay we miss what we're chopping at we chop into the dirt we get a chip out of our axe so to remove a chip depending on the size of it we may have to go to a file okay so we're gonna have stones and we're gonna have files so first we're gonna start by talking about files a little bit this is a mill bastard file you can get a coarse or fine but a mill bastards right in the middle that's a medium grit file and that's what you're gonna want initially to start with your axe to clean up that chip so if I had a chip in this all that we're looking to do is we're taking our file and we're filing away from the sharp edge okay and we're gonna take this and you want to sharpen away and we want to be consistent when we do this okay down the edge of the blade the reason why I'm saying we want to be consistent if we just keep sharpening up at this top end we're going to start to get a valley in here okay where we can throw out the smooth curvature of this so we're gonna file the whole length of the blade like that and then we're gonna want to come to the other side and do the same thing and I'm gonna get a little bit more detail with this in a minute I just wanted to go over the basics of what we're looking for and I'm gonna show you guys how we'd actually run this across the blade so that's what we're doing with a file and the file is gonna remove a lot more material than any stone ever would so we're doing this coarse type file we'll mil bastard but our coarser type material removal compared to a stone with our file so that's one tool that you'd want to have around is a file to be able to remove material in order to get those chips out of our axe so once our chips are out we should be close to somewhat of a sharp edge okay now we can go into the next stage which is actually using a stone now there's tons of different types of stones out there and it really in my opinion you need to just get stones and work with them and see what works best for you I used all different ones over the years and I'm gonna show you some of my favorite things to carry right now I'm going to just talk about why they're my favorite if you're gonna carry multiple stones carrying a puck type stone is definitely one of my favorite this is a coarse and a fine side and we can use this stone very easily because the way we palm it and work this on our edge so it's very easily maneuverable for a person to be able to sharpen up our edge so this would definitely be my go to my only downfall with this is if we were going to sharpen our knives and this is all we have we have a very small working surface to be able to work our knives on so there are better options but this will work to sharpen a knife another option is a carborundum stone now you can buy these you see the end of this is chipped off you can buy these I think I paid a quarter for this at a junk store and this will work just as well as our puck the only problem with this is you're not going to have multiple grit levels what you have is what you have so this is an option this is a propeller type stone so it's very easy to get in here and work with this ok so that's an option and last is just our normal square stone this is only one grit this is a fine grit you can get stones that have two different grits in them and they work fine something like this you can also work and we're gonna talk about that shortly the good thing with a flat stone like this is if you only had one stone with you that's all you're gonna carry this is more conducive to working with a knife than the puck so just keep that in mind and like I said there's so much stuff out there I brought some other stuff out this is a diamond plate with a stone this works great I prefer this more for my knife than an axe but you can use this and you really do you have to just try this stuff I have Nagar a stone I mean Nagar stone at home and drop Japanese water stones they work great but again that might be a series of three different stones to get to that final sharpness and I really don't feel the majority people need to get to that point not that you don't need a sharp axe but you can get to a sharp axe with just this stuff if you know how to properly use it rather than have to go through all them steps because that sharp of an axe you have to have some skill level around to use that or you're gonna constantly chip your blade or bend your blade over if you don't know how to properly use this so what I want to do next is I'm gonna zoom in a little bit I'm gonna just show you how are you run a file over the edge how are your on our stone over the edge and we're gonna talk from there once our edges resharpened what we need to do to keep this axe up and running first we're gonna discuss what if there was a chip now there's no chip in this axe blade but I can still show you guys how will you would go about doing this what we want to do is if we can find a stump that'll work best you can do this freehand by holding your axe and running your file against here but that I don't recommend if you can find something to place your axe on and keep some pressure that's going to be your best bet so what we want to do is first of all make sure our files clean you can use a wire brush and just run it along okay it's called a file card you can run that along here and that'll clean out the shavings some people will also I know some old machinists that they actually put chalk in here and the chalk is gonna help keep a lot of those filings out so you want to make sure you have a good clean file okay this file is uh I believe this is a Nicholson an old Nicholson I bought but you can feel it just running your fingers down if the file is good or not so what we want to do we want to anchor down our axe and we want to work the whole blade and I always like to count how many times I go on one side this axe has a good bevel on it so if I would do on this side here 20 strokes and this side three strokes and then 20 on this side again we're starting to get lopsided we don't want that I know that this axe is in good working shape maybe I just got a chip out of it so I'm gonna normally do maybe three to five strokes on each side if that I mean that's gonna probably be a pretty deep chip and then I'm gonna flip the axe over and work on this side the same amount back and forth until we work that chip out and if the chips very very small you really don't need to go to this extent as you work on this and hone this it'll work itself out if you're doing super fine carving yeah you need to get it out of there but otherwise you don't so what are we looking at basically all we're doing is we're starting at the tip of our file and we're working across the edge like this okay and you'll feel that starts grabbing on that metal so I did three strokes that way I'm gonna flip it and three more so I would continue that process until we start to get that chip out now when checking a blade okay you don't want to run your fingers across it but you do want to just lightly with your three fingers just touch this okay and you're gonna feel if there's a burr you can come up the side no burr and you can feel down the middle and you're gonna feel that's gonna start to get prickly almost you don't want to press hard I'm touching extremely lightly here just like this to feel what that feels like okay so I will continue that process with my file if I need to clean out my shavings of course take your file card and scrub it a little bit of steel wool will do that you can also probably take your pant leg and go like this if you had nothing else okay just to get some of those files out because when that builds up your file can be shot so you want to treat your file just like we treat our axe so super simple with the file this can remove a lot of material so you need to be careful you don't totally destroy your axe my recommendation by an old axe at a junk store and practice on it okay so this is what most people are going to do most people are probably gonna have a puck or some other type of stone and what we want to do with an axe blade okay is circular motions okay so making sure in camera here when we sharpen something like an axe blade we're using circular motions and I'm locking this axe plate in and I'm just moving my stone I'm not move trying to move my axe we're not sharpening the entire blade at want per circle all you want to focus on is small pieces so let me grab a stick there so when I start to sharpen this I'm actually as my puck moves along the blade I'm thinking hey I'm sharpening from here to here here to here here to here small sections don't think I'm sharpening the whole thing in one scoop small circles and focus on what you're doing now I'm actually see if we can show you guys what we're doing here so you can see there's a gap right now in between the axe I'm going to try to keep my hand back there the axe and the puck so what I want to do is I want to close that off and when you get closer this way you're gonna see a good angle here for you guys there's a dark line in between that's actually gonna disappear the second that disappears okay second that line disappears you know you're on the right angle and all that we're gonna do is light circular motions and I mean light they don't have to be hard and work our way up the axe head just trying to be consistent only focusing on a small section at a time and back okay you can turn the axe around and do the same thing we're just leaning our stone in until that black line disappears between the axe blade and our stone the second that disappears you want to keep that angle and just start to work again if I went down and up I want to do the same thing okay just like that so that's how we want to sharpen how many passes would you need to hone well you know I could feel this this was pretty sharp pretty sharp to start with so I could just feel this and you're gonna feel when you do this you're gonna feel I could feel right through this section is I could feel it's sharp not as much here so what I want to do is just work that through again remember doing the whole bleh we're not just working parts of the blade now we're not trying to re profile if we know our blades good you want to keep it good we're just trying to read hone this alright one passed through and that already is touching it up a little bit so just doing that is rehoming our axe back to where we need it and keeping it good and sharp now you can go further with this if you wanted to if you want to use water stones you can if you wanted to strop this then you can sometimes I'll take a diamond rod and I'll actually work this on the diamond rod a little bit but this right here there's not too much I can't do with this and I consider myself pretty proficient with an axe there's not too much can't be done with how sharp this is some of my wood crafting axes I do get a lot sharper than this but for my all-around bushcraft axe this is definitely where it's at so that's just up close how you use your file and use your stone to get a good sharp blade on your axe now that we have a good sharp edge on our axe we have two things we need to take in consideration our wood handle and the blade itself what do we need to do to keep these things in good working order and not having them damaged well one thing we can do is we can take birch oil which I did a video on birch oil and you can take birch oil if we can get this one open here take a little bit of birch oil you don't need much and we can just work that in into our handle now that a good thing with birch oil is it's gonna offer some tackiness so when you start once you get this worked in its gonna offer protection for your wood and your woods gonna sir soak this in but it's also going to add a little bit of tackiness to your handle okay so in wet conditions or anything like that you have a little bit of that but that's gonna lend well overall so you can use that birch oil boiled linseed oil is also another thing that you can use on your axe handles now I did have the question asked to me not too long ago if you have a brand new axe and you're going to apply any type of oils let's say boiled linseed oil to that how many coats well you'd be surprised how much that wood is actually gonna soak that'll in so when I said to the person can they look at me like 10 coats of oil but that handle you'll know when that handle is soaked in enough oil and it's gonna take some time to soak that of oil in the first application you put on it'll probably soak in in a couple minutes the second one probably an hour and it'll get slower from there but you always want to keep this handle oiled up and don't allow it time to dry out so that's one thing you need to worry about once that gets totally saturated you're good for a long time before you need to reapply so they're my two preferred methods for the wooden handles on me on an axe and any kind of wouldn't handle tools birch oil or boiled linseed oil so what about our blade well any kind of oil would work anything from motor oil to vegetable oil to walnut oil would be fine you can also take I did a video on rendering callo you can work tallow into that no problem whatsoever also if you would take something like tallow and wax a Talon wax mixture you can just work that in what we're really focusing on is where we worked our blade that's going to be most prone to rust initially so we're just working that in and getting a good coat in there one little trick you can do if you take your sheath you can work some oil into your sheath because you should be keeping your sheath well oil too for the simple fact you don't want your leather to dry out so working oil into this and having a little bit extra in there that's gonna also protect from moisture or anything else for your axe head if you're out real wet conditions one big mistake people make is they say well my axe is good it's all cleaned up I'm gonna let it there I didn't use it today it's fine well moisture still gets in here we're working with natural materials here you need to remember with the leather so that's gonna hold moisture you let that go and this thing was wet inside you're gonna bring out an a rusty axe and then we're gonna be way back to square one with working on this so always make sure you're out in wet conditions even around camp at night you might want to open that up and keep dry that out good and then on the next day or when the Sun comes out open I'll put in a safe place and let it dry out good and then put the sheath back on so that's how you want to take care of your wood your steel how we take out chips how we sharpen our axe and remember that when you learn to use this properly it's going to be your absolute best friend in the woods this was Dan Wallach with coal cracker bushcraft I hope you enjoyed this video I have a lot more in the works see in the next video guys

Channel: Coalcracker Bushcraft

Views: 103,436

Rating: 4.9670701 out of 5

Keywords: axe, gransfor bruks, small forest axe, how to sharpen an axe, axe sharpening, how to care for an axe, boiled linseed oil, lansky puck, how to sharpen an ax, forest ax, cutting wood with an axe, bushcraft axe, how to handle an ax

Id: ZDJ0rmIg3rg

Length: 19min 37sec (1177 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 27 2016