"Have Broad Axe Will Travel" - Roy Underhill- TEDxRaleigh 2011

alright happiness happiness everybody just needs an X that's where happiness lies all right are y'all ready for some big woodworking fun yeah all right if you had a good time to staff ternoon and this morning this is great this is the ancient tradition I am so glad to be here well I am here to share a tale of trees of nature of craftsmanship of risk and of certainty in fact about a couple of months ago had a an interview on a program I was called yesterday today and tomorrow on a public radio station yesterday today and tomorrow and they had someone come on since speak who was representing of course yesterday and somebody representing today and somebody representing tomorrow they asked me on to represent yesterday and there was a net what were they talking about it talking about making things and old tools and so forth tools and making things and there I am I'm supposed to be talking about this he hopes the face and the young guy they had on his twin his 20s he's talking about the new ways what's happening to tools well you know it's it's all lithium-ion is what's happening a laser-guided hand tools seems to be the way of the future you can pick I thought you said this oh hell I was younger than this guy when I started 30 years ago 30 more plus years ago it's a student at the Duke School of the environment and that wasn't even 35 years ago global warming was you know like not a question it was scientific you know was sitting right there the only question at that time was will the soot in the atmosphere cancel out the greenhouse effect that was the only question at the time and there I am you know with my tattered pages of the Whole Earth Catalog and I'm thinking well this old stuff you know there's a few this is appropriate technology working with this stuff by hand this is the grid this is the Woodstock Age Aquarius wonderful or setting up a path for the future now here I am 30 years later I'm representing the old ways the guy talking about the new stuff has got this you know Malaysian plastic molybdenum lithium ion bad all this stuff just eating up at the planet making everybody weaker and that's the way of the future and the concern will you stop asking me about the past this stuff is the future of mankind don't you get nothing well well thank you you know now I'm old enough you know this is an old story though this thing of the old ancestral totem being somehow the salvation of the future just Luke I want you to have this what is it obi-wan it's your father's lightsaber not so crude as a blaster but more elegant weapon from a more civilized time Thank You obi-wan okay don't sew it this kind of thing of getting the the assemble the image and what more could it be than the ax ah ace of steel on the end of a stick but what fun you could have with it it's what got us where we are today it's this transformation of nature nature into culture that I'm here about I need I need I need mother nature I need mother mother nature mother nature where are you don't come there come back there you are oh thank goodness ah here she is I shaded mom here's mother nature thank you if you want to take a place right here yes is Mother Nature I got to say for all the crap we've been putting you through for all the years you're looking mighty fine I gotta say so here is nature here is nature in her woodland abode there the tree the cylinder and here we come that trees are great human beings we love trees what do we do with them we build a house and build our boat to go home we build whatever we need the problem is it were to use them we first have to disconnect them from the ground so I'm going to go ahead and start chopping down our tree here now if I take a swing and I go in straight what would happen do I go in straighter in an angle how everybody knows that how do you know that you know why because you are Americans and you have SAP running in your blood that's it you know this why do we go we have to come in at an angle so we don't go straight in we come in at an angle with our axe you think about all that force toward that three and a half pounds or this is not like the axe the English came over with when the first time this is the American axe so we come in at an angle and that is what makes it work you think about why don't we go in straight why don't we go in straight why is the bit curved why don't we go in straight we all know that but we don't know why so if I were to take the axe and come in straight if I go this way at an angle the chip comes out and guess what the blade can go in so that's what we do we come in at an angle and the chip can come out and the blade can go in all right now do not worry there's absolutely no danger to myself so we've got the chips there now wait there you go now if you would examine that please yes if you were to set back up here please couldn't get your able do that give it a toss all right look at that how much of that was done by cutting with the Blaine how much by splitting much more by splitting so we're using the grain in the wood wood is not Velveeta wood has structure and we understand that structure and so we exploit that weakness in the wood as we work it we then exploit the strength in the wood as we use it so let's go ahead and finish chopping down the tree here gang on their mother nature yeah so we work down chopping out these chunks a kruh talk you all right all right let's see that's just all yell timber like we've always wanted to do timber boom boom pom-pom in our tree comes down thank you mother nature thank you ah so now we've got a cylinder this is great well we've got a cylinder what can we do we can build a log house can't wait that's great if we know how to build a log house what did the guys getting off the boat in Jamestown the English people do did they build a log house no do they have log houses in England now say by seeing the log house where sheikhs was born here's the cabin where we know they don't have log houses so they get off the boat in England they start st. you know daily and how they look at this and say oh look at this it's round oh that will never - must square it up must make Timbers must make Timbers must mortise-and-tenon you know in the Swedes get over our that's good let's take around Lord make log houses wonderful in the English UI look at that and then they're Americans all of a sudden because they learn from each other here in this odd world so let's go ahead and inflict culture upon nature I've got to get a few items here it has a treat going through airports I mean to the x-ray this thing they're expecting to see guns they look at the x-ray and they see axes and you know they you know they freak out it so here we go I like this X though this one fits this fits in the overhead compartment on the airplane so very nice ah let's go ahead with this right here I'm going to swing this around this way I don't like the way I've got this arranged because I want to work a little bit more this way so we got this log we're going to inflict a culture upon it and we're going to start out now by defining a plane on it let's do that I'm going to define a plane on the log first thing going to clear the slate a little bit draw a knife it down yeah there we go oh crap I'm barking up the wrong tree ah and now you get it oh man alright so now we'll get but it is there a tree this is the log for hewing and there's different logs different Timbers is 200 American species of wood in Europe boy I don't have any do they have a what's my ax handle made out of what's it Adam be hickory right in Europe what would it have to be would it be hickory a should be ash they don't have Hickory in Europe they don't do they Magnolia that's sassafras now idiots they put on their mountains wrong they put on their mountains wrong come to Ice Age is now trees are slow but they can outrun a glacier see there we go snapped a law and just like you do same way the Egyptians got the pyramids on straight just snap a line and I've rubbed it with willow charcoal so there's a species yeah in Europe when the Ice Ages came to the globe you know which way the mountains run in Europe north-south or east-west east-west don't think you know the Pyrenees the the Carpathians all the way across so here come all those trees and Europe here come all the sassafras trees the bagged Olli ISM is getting cold because in the trying to move south but oh there's a mountain in the way I'm dying and they're dead here in America which way to the mountains run north south because we think ahead right we're Americans so we're thinking ahead we're putting our mountains on north-south and that way the trees can just head down be warm they come back up and there we are we've got all these wonderful species so here we go now I know that we've established that there is grain in this wood there's a plane of weakness from one end to the other and I can exploit that weakness I put a line on here so I'm going to just swing down and pop off this entire side here is that going to work so I can't do it that part but I still like that principle what if I were to if it was only a foot long do you think I could split it yeah so that's what I'll do I'll start working my way down the log cutting in notches every foot or so and this as we say is called the craftsman ship of risk in that the grain of the wood y'all doing all right down there okay all right all right so oh well that'll do it keep your hands up keep your hands up I'll try it I'm going to tone this down a little bit here yeah a little too vigorous we'll get this down here cut a notch down to the bottom of that line you all right all right and we'll just make we'll just do two of these will step down cut another notch and this is healing although I am working with the wood and the grain of the wood and the structure of the wood oh all right okay there you go splitting out chunks down to the line there we go few more there we are and and and alright good so work our way down the log cutting notches down to the depth of the line and then walk to the end and with one perfect hit not called Danny in there ah alright I didn't quite get it all but you want to be gentle on the first go-round because there you are nice job all right cut scoring marks down here we go alright one more here we're going to take off this chunk so we can get into the root of it and split off chunks in between what if you toss it back cuts thank you here we go thank you so much uh hello so we work our way down the log splitting off those chunks now what do you think what happened historically here's the evidence of how that was done if you saw that found that around an old house you'd know it was done where do you think this happen what happens to this that was it looked like that looked like firewood you all right does to me too except when I was a student I was working on a German cabin in Illinois and on a longhouse you got your chinking and your dobbing and the chinking is the wood that goes between the logs and I worked on a house that had these odd shaped carefully beveled little pieces of wood how they had beveled each end very carefully and fitted them interlocking like that in between a simple adherence German Germanic character this authentic of beveling the ends and then of course it wasn't until I started human logs I realized oh my gosh that's like that was that's the chunk they busted off and they just stuck in between and then they cover it with clay what a nice thing all right well that's not it now remember each stage erases the evidence of the things that comes after it so we've got to finish up here now I'll cut in a notch or two down the line and work with the broad X and square this up we've got other tools we can work on it all we go there's the broad X right down to this either Whitman's song of the broad axe weapons shapely naked one head from the mothers bowels drawn one leaf only ah from the red and fire handle sprung from a small seed sown Whitman knew the poetry of the American X well of course I can continue on I can use the ads and work it down here with the ads trimming the rest of the way I don't want to do too much to this let me just do a little bit here I'd like to do is 50% because that's technically known as half ads work uh nevertheless I looked at all this stuff and was thinking you know gosh there's a lot in this and I remember that too how frustrating it was thinking I was onto the new thing so many years ago and putting on that program saying yesterday today and tomorrow and I found out it was a lithium-ion laser-guided future I mean it's not what I had in mind but I think you know what I learned all of that stuff you know sometimes you know maybe what you're doing is is bigger in the past and it probably always has a future but maybe it's here in the present just for you and that's okay too thanks a bunch ah all right I'd like to pass this around if I could okay maybe not

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 869,818

Rating: 4.6566844 out of 5

Keywords: education, technology, tedx, tedx talk, Roy, ted talks, tedx talks, Raleigh, ted x, TED, forestry, TEDx, craft, global issues, usa, TEDxRaleigh, tools, Underhill, ted talk, Roy Underhill, ted, english

Id: Au1TbIyLcPU

Length: 18min 4sec (1084 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 11 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/madmaker]

Woodwright's Shop fascinated me as a kid. He and Norm are the reasons I'm a woodworker today.

[u/zurkog]

Added to my favorites list, I love Roy. If I were ever stranded on LOST island, I'd want him with me. We'd have a 3-story A-Frame cabin built by the end of Season 1.

I just wish our PBS station still carried the Woodwright's Shop. :-(

[u/NoCleverNickname]

He poses what I think is a very important and timely question. Do we woodworkers see the future as lithium ion powered and laser guided, or do we recognize the importance of hand tools? Not just their historical significance, but their immense utility even in modern times?

I'm far from a Luddite. I'm typing this on my phone, for one thing. What I'm not saying is forget about electricity and let's all go live in cabins instead. What I'm saying is, there are times when powered tools work great, and other times when work is best done by hand, and it's important to recognize the difference.

[u/leftcoast-usa]

Pretty cool.

Now I really feel guilty about all the things I haven't done because I only had a few manual tools and it seemed too hard. Seems that knowing how to do something is a lot more important than having a bunch of fancy tools.

[u/chewd0g]

That is one sharp axe. Dang.

[u/Peterb77]

A appreciate his point of view.

I love my power tools and will not be giving them up. That being said I have razor sharp chisels and planes that also cannot be replaced in my shop. I'm not sure I'm ready to cut and mill my own logs by hand, but certainly understand that not everything should be done by machine.

Maybe somewhere in between and CNC world and neanderthal shop is where I'd like to stay.

[u/snapperh3ad]

That's some nice, safe axe handling, Roy.

sigh

edit: - I like that he sounds winded most of the time. I feel like they edit taking a rest out of every handyman show.