Fixing the Cheapest Axe I Could Buy

how's it going Lads welcome back to the garage today we're going to be looking at this orange fellow here so recently enough I was driving past an army surplus store I rarely buy any guns from these stores but uh I always kind of like to you know Pass Time Knows My Way Through The Eyes so I saw this fella for sale for six Euro and I thought to myself you know for the sake of six Euro I'll buy it I'll bring it home with me and I'll see what I can do to it now just by looking at the tool you can tell it's failure to equality cheap plastic Handler uh the edge profile isn't even symmetrical and this is the better of the batch I looked through the whole lot and this one was about the closest to symmetrical I could get um so what we're going to do is we're going to reprofile that get it nice and sharp before I do anything we're going to re-handle this now I have a good bit of ash left over from just years of collecting and letting it dry so I think I will remove the handle and put on an ash one something like this now I'm not too sure whether or not I'll cherish or not basically chatting is where you burn the ash handle and then wash off the outer layer of char and how can you leave you with a black color like this now that's very good for protecting it against um woodworm and rot but it also can make it more brittle if you don't go too far that's generally not a problem though you also need to keep them well oiled if you're doing this another thing you can do is set my chairs so basically the same process of burning it but I just didn't go as intense and I sanded it a bit more afterwards so that kind of brings out the grain or you could just leave this entirely plain Ash like this fella here that's right acts about to play somewhere that I just left untouched I find it so here we go this is an ax handle I made a while back out of Ash and all I did was put a bit of oil on it and uh seems to be doing the trick nicely so I decided once the handle is actually done the first thing you need to do is go about removing this sucker so the first Port of Carl was to remove the old handle from the head so I threw the head into the blacksmith's Vice there and then we used a coping saw to actually saw through the handle and just pop it right off now that was the easy part the next part was removing what was inside the head at first I tried with a punch just to knock it all out but that wasn't working they had some like hard epoxy resin thing on top so what I had to do I don't like doing it but I had to pull out the power tools for this one so here I am with a dewilder drill just have a masonry bit on this and I'm just boring the way through it and then once we have two nice sized holes board through the head I come back with a punch and I use that to knock off all the excess materials so now that we've gotten rid of the handling we just have the head on its own it's time to worry about our Ash handle so I went to way up to the left where I've had some nice Ash drying for about two years now this fella was on top of the pile so I reckon this is a good chance to give you a quick lesson in Grain selection so when you're picking out wood stews and handles you want the growth rings which are these lines here running as close to parallel as possible with the direction the actual ax head is facing you can see there now I've done it with this one now an example of a poorly handled Sledgehammer there's this fella here and you can see that the grain is running completely perpendicular so it's going to do the trick for a while but the grain is more likely to crack along there than it is to crack sideways this way but what that means for our ax handle here is that we want the kind of end to be facing from this section here as opposed to like um this section out of here so once I found the section of this piece of Ash I wanted to use as a handle it was time to cut it out of the bigger lug so in order to do that I used a tool that's known as a fro now it's a tool not a lot of people have seen before and a lot of people ask me why don't I just use an ax to split them with a throw it's easier to be more precise and once you get the throw in there you can just kind of lever it and that will pop the thing apart so we have them all there now and we just bash the thing open and just like that we have our piece of Ash ready to go so obviously it's a very rough piece of wood at the minute and to refine it now we need to bring it back up to the Vise and here I have a nice wooden plane here set to take a fairly deep cut and I'm just using that to make it's nice and square that'll be easier for us to work with the piece was also a bit too long so I just chucked it into the bench hook there and just use the practice cut saw to shorten it down to length so this ax head used to belong to my grandmother's father so it's been in the family for quite some time now but I recently put a new Ash handle on it there um it was a copy of a copy of the original handle which had rotted away so it's kind of nice to think that this handle shape is kind of slightly evolving every time maybe some point down the line I'll trace this handle I'm making here today but yeah it's just a nice shape of handle there's no exact measurements or there's no template of it I just kind of eyeball it and yep seems to be working for me so far so there's a lot of carbs in this saw and in order to cut them out I just have my Tenon saw here and I cut down the middle of the curve and then next I grab a malice and chisel and I just cut in from the side until eventually I'm down to the level of the cost and there we go that's our carb so there's a few curves on this so just repeated that process a few times until eventually you could bring it to the spork shave so with the spoke shave here we're just kind of going with the grain so downhill into the curve I'm trying only to make it thinner on the sides without going too much into the front or back of the handle using the spoke shave like this is normally one of my favorite jobs in handle making this is kind of satisfying everything kind of rolls together for you normally I'd like to be doing this in a Cooper's mare which is a whole kind of contraption that you sit into and you basically use your legs to clamp the work piece you're working on into place and then it's a lot easier to work on with a draw knife or a Spoke shave now I have one that is down in the shed I'm waiting to move into at the minute so for now we have to Tamp it into our Vise here and lean over and work like that it's Grand because this can take a bit of a toll on your back when you're going at it for a while another thing I did while I was at the vice was just cut the slit for the wedge so again we're just using our Tenon saw here to cut a slit at the very top of the Handler and that'll make it easier for us to pop back on the head but more importantly it let us drive in a wage later and lock the head into place we're nearly there with the handle one thing I like to do before we're finished is just sand everything down 60 grit sandpaper just kind of evens everything out if you have any tear outs or slice imperfections or anything like that that'll take care of us you're never going to get a perfect but with sandpaper with everything kind of rounded over you tend not to see too many mistakes as well at the end I'm going back with the spoke shave here I'm just going to carving out the bottom just to make this part thinner here so it'll kind of grip into your hand better lastly then I just came along with and I saw here I'm using that just to cut out I think it's called the Lamb's foot shape on the very bottom of the handle here so once with the handle nearly done it was time to start working on the head now the head came with this horrible black paint thin thing on the back of it I'm assuming for rust protection or something I didn't like the look of us so I thought I'd remove it I started with just a chisel and scrape it off and you can see there it doesn't look great at all I tried then coming along with a metal rule that I turned into a scraper and that kind of worked fairly well but at the end what I ended up doing was just sanding the whole thing down and you'll see in the next shot now I think it turned out fairly nice so I gave the ax head a nice machine it's looking great the next thing we need to do is let inertia work its magic foreign there we go so once we actually had the head on the handle it was time to re-profile the edge so I have the timer going here and I have a little um ax jig that I bought along with this a while back now I really try not to use power tools as much as possible in my videos but um the profile on this ax was just terrible so um I would have been at it all day with a sharpening stone or a hand cranked grinder so this is just the easiest thing to do just I also took it to the strut then which is just a piece of leather and that'll give it a nice polished Edge but it'll also remove the Burr that might have built up while we were sharpening it so I don't think I've got a cherish I think I might give this away down the line and uh whoever gets this might decide they want to share it or leave it alone so I leave it for now but I'm looking for my linseed oil and I can't find it anywhere so my heart is broken you can sense it's oily presence but it's nowhere to be seen while back some crowd gave me um some oil ax and I haven't really used it since so I suppose it's a good excuse I is we'll see now will it do the same trick this is just called oil ax I think by walrus oil ax oil sorry so we rub that in there it's just not the same so I'm sure it does does the same thing Sears it protects it but it doesn't even smell like linseed oil doesn't smell like anything also I think I forgot to shake it I just a piece came out like kind of yeah see it comes out as like a gel so maybe I put it on wrong good Lord see you wouldn't have a problem like this if you didn't seed oil they say you should oil an ax once a day for a week once a week for a month once a month for a year and then once a year every year after there you go so here we have it Lads nice and sharp now I was just testing it out there and the piece of Ash we started off with it's cutting away nicely enough probably make a useful enough Carpenters hatches as well as only time will tell how well that edge will hold I don't imagine the steel is going to be of the highest quality so I wouldn't imagine it being very long amount of time before I'm gonna have to sharpen this uh yeah I think this should go to show that uh you should be able to go out buy yourself a cheap ax head I didn't use too many power tools here now there was the drill and the tormec but most people have a cordless or a quarter drill lying around at home they could use to bore out the plastic that was still stuck in the head and you can get by without the tarmac I just I'm in a rush for time now I'm off to Claire later on this evening so I wanted to sharpen it nice and quick so yeah there we go that's sound for watching and I'll talk to you again in the next one good luck

Channel: Eoin Reardon

Views: 358,229

Keywords:

Id: ipHiPNA8rsA

Length: 10min 32sec (632 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 05 2022