How to make a STRAIGHT axe handle...a few of the secrets

hey gang East Coast Lumberjack here once I get out of all my Garb listen if you haven't subscribed to my uh Channel yet please hit the subscribe button down below and you'll catch all these crazy videos as soon as they come out um I don't know crazy informative whatever uh you get you can't take yourself too seriously at least as you get older so um I'm just in the process of making some handles here and they're uh they're headed over to Europe so uh I'm making three Ash and I thought well what the heck I might as well throw in a a hickory uh so Ben can take it over there and show some of the guys usually there's people you know looking for handles here and there and if people don't know what I make and I'll send uh this little prototype over and Ben can show them what you know what my handles look like uh they're pretty good quality they're straight grained um I'm having a hard time keeping up with orders so things are obviously going good so anyways as I was making these handles I thought I know what I haven't told them before there's something and and usually of course when you're when you're making a handle we start with a bolt okay you start with what I call a bolt so this is a bolt bark on the outside okay this is the uh the sapwood on the outside of the tree and I split them out in a pie shape the whole way around the log then of course I draw my pattern on here and and cut it out of the band saw so I make all my handles by hand now you know I say by hand I mean I run them on the band saw so the band saw is a is an electrical machine but now what what I do once I make the first cut so of course the uh this is how that that handle bolt was and then I drew my pattern out and then I ran it through the band saw and cut it out so now I have two straight sides okay and I told you as before what really matters when you're cutting this the next two cuts is that this piece here where your eye is and this piece here where your bomb swell is have got to line up okay they've got to be level okay if one is this way one is this way as you run that handle down through your band saw it's going to tip okay so all of a sudden your sides go this way and then they twist a little bit so really key point from the East Coast Lumberjack make sure this and if it isn't if it isn't straight and sometimes they haven't been I've got a good example here one I made one here just a second ago and it wasn't straight they're all straight now um there right here this one here so this Hickory one wasn't perfectly straight so if you look at it up really close you can see I cut this piece off so I I sloped it so I cut a bunch more off of this side and left it high on this side so that now if you look at them see that they're all they're both level so if one's off eye to the other you want to straighten that okay so that's because when you run them down your band saw if you make them on band saws which I do when I lay this on the band saw and start running it along when I get down here and it look lifts up it's going to be the same it's on this it's parallel to this so my side pieces are going to cut off very very straight okay that's what you want the the more perfect you make these as you go the easier it is to finish them so if this has a wobble in it when I'm finishing the act with my draw knife and spoke shave and uh rasp it takes a lot more work to make it straight so if you make it straight from the get-go right here it saves you a lot of work all you do is then just take the corners off and basically you just shape your handle way you go so that's one thing okay so they need to be straight that way I thought something else but now it just slips my slippery mind okay so then so now when I go to take the other sides off so now what I want to do is take this piece off okay I want to take both sides off so basically I have a foursided handle in the in the exact shape I want it so because most handles now this is a nice handle I get this from Mitch huitt who's the what 15 time board champion in Australia so he knows a little bit about handles and he's you know fourth generation Lumberjack competitor but he sent me this from one of his buddies out in BC's beautiful handle nice and slim now if I measure that if I measure this handle this way it is 22 cm or yeah 22 millim and 22 mm here it is find my measuring tape I'm making handles again right out straight so course my bench is a mess again so this is in inches uh 3/4 so that's uh it's not 78 it's one back from that uh and it's more than 3/4 jeez isn't that dumb 78 so it's 78 of an inch wide I'm sorry thick 78 of an inch thick and it's um 42 mm wide this way okay so 22x 42 Ms so because of that when you're making now I always make my handles a little bit bigger than what I want them so it just so happens I get some hardwood some hardwood flooring and I've cut my pattern out for making so when you draw your lines along this way okay you see the slopes in this okay there there's slopes in this handle so if you lay a straight edge along the top of this like that you see it's high here it's high here so as you're drawing along that with your pencil or your pen what happens is when you get to this when you get to this low spot in your handle your pen will go in and what happens is it's not a straight line it goes down and it goes in a little bit where it's high so all of a sudden you get this warbly line along your wood so how do you fix that so again it's a good secret from the old East Coast Lumberjack I'll tell you what I do I took now my most common handles I make are heatherington and my uh racing ax handles for two TI axis and so I call it one's a New Zealand handle one's an Australian handle they're fairly similar the knobs are just a little bit different so what I the general pattern along the back of that this is where the axe head goes and of course it's here's your neck or your shoulder of the axx and of course it sweeps down comes back up into your palm swell okay so on this side I've cut out my piece of hardwood flooring to fit so when I lay that on here okay see how that fits in there perfect so now when I run my pen along it okay I don't have those indents and and where they flop out and flop in okay it follows it nicely and then on so what I did to save to save a little bit of wood is on the other side the second most common handle type I make are Cruisers or double bits so this here fits the double bidder okay you can see it straight from here out to the end but of course it's got the the shoulder right here for the double bitter then it goes out where it is so if I take my double bitter Cruiser this is the shape of it this way if I lay this on here you'll see if it'sit that nice okay so that's what I do to make sure the second set of lines I cut are nice and straight so this piece of hardwood flooring is really straight I've got it cut out to follow the Contour of the handle and I just lay that on there and follow along it okay so that's a little trick from East Coast Lumberjack when you're making a handle and cutting that second side now something else you can do you can say broad I don't have hard flooring r i don't have whatever I'll tell you another little trick and I did this here for years and years okay this is a buxa blade okay now being a lumberjack competitor I got a couple of these kicking around so the other thing you can do the other thing you can do is use your buxa blade I want to show you how that works okay let's see if TI it down here just a little bit so you can see what's going on okay so now I lay this bucksaw blade along here and I just push it down where I want it to go along okay so if we look at this put out here along my line you can see it follows along that straight line pretty darn close okay not perfect it isn't perfect but it's pretty darn close Okay so I I draw my line along here along this bucksaw blade and then when I flip it over to make sure I got the right thickness the all the way along I put it on the same I put the line at the same place on the teeth here and on the teeth here so I know it's straight then and then I'll push it down where it's high and draw my line along here okay so I use this I used that uh buxa uh blade for years years and years and because it wasn't perfect drove me nuts so I said I need another way and again just by doing it over time I got thinking about it and thought well gee if if I have a piece of wood that that is shaped that same way I can just lay it down there and I won't have those highs and lows it'll make it nice and straight for me so that's what I did so I made this this little baby here okay so again maybe you make your handles from scratch maybe you chisel them out with an ax whatever you do but I make mine on a band saw okay most guys have access to a band saw you know they're what well if you want a commercial one it's what 1,000 bucks for for a good band saw and uh you'll make your money back in the first year you make handles not that I want a lot of competition but again I'm not in this to make a pile of money I like I love making axe handles and I love making high quality axe handles and there's a lot to it you got to get wood you got to get anyways there's a lot to it so if I can help you a little bit all the better so anyways that's what I do with band saw so that will give you the straight line right down the back of your ax handles okay and again the light is not working with me here okay so as I was doing that I was making these handles and saying man that's a neat little trick that I don't think I've told anybody yet so there you go from the East Coast Lumberjack you want to keep that handle straight both directions make sure your your palm swell at the bottom where it flares out and the top where your axe eye is make sure those are both perfectly parallel okay so when you're running it through your band saw it's not going to flop on you one way or the other the second thing you want to do is get a tool like that to draw your Sidelines so that they're straight top to bottom and then depending on what the type of handle is sometimes guys want larger handles larger eyes if they want if they get a 1 in or greater than a 1 in eye I know that my 3/4 qu inch hardwood is of course 3/4 of an inch so if I stand my if I stand my pen up along here if I if I cut in do it right tight at an angle I know I'm going to have 3/4 of an inch if I stand it up of course I've got I just gained another almost an eighth of an inch along here so if I gain an eighth of an inch on both sides of course I have a full inch and if I know I have a full inch and the guy wants an inch and eigh or something then of course I'll just start my band saw cut outside that line a little bit when I'm coming down I know what the other thing is I wanted to tell you the other thing I I've struggled with and I've mentioned this before but again unless you go through all my videos on this YouTube channel you won't get that so I I what I thought I'd start doing now is throwing some of this back in again so if you watch a recent video you'll get stuff that I've said a year or two years ago on the on the YouTube channel okay so the other thing that I've had a hard time doing is when I and you may you may find this as well but when I run through the band saw if I cut this side the whole way off this side the whole way off and then I make my slot for my uh wedge it doesn't go straight and I do not know why that happens so unless just taking the outside piece off it's it's a little bit different whatever it is but I've I had a for for a long time some guys even said Cumberland don't put the flipping slot in there for the eye because it's not on the center okay and and it drives believe me guys it drives me more nuts than it does you cuz I'm a perfectionist but what I've learned what I've learned to get that straight I just cut in here about 2 in on one and then I stop I come back out Center it here cut down here the whole uh depth of the wedge slot come back out and then I take this whole side off then so I've got this one down two inches the first line down two inches the the wedge line down where it's supposed to be and then I take the whole other side off and I find when I do that they're all nice and parallel okay let me show you what I mean okay it just take me two seconds to do this but this is my Hickory and I'm going to show you what I do on the band [Music] saw [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] okay so you saw that I did one little cut as I mentioned okay stinking light drives me nuts okay there so I did one little cut in here 2 in I cut my wedge line or where you're going to put your wedge eventually down here at the depth I want it and what depth is that do we know what depth that is now I'll tell you a couple things if you don't make it deep enough the first thing to happen when you're wedging your wedge will go down there so fire and because it's not in the re your fire and you're wedging it out sometimes that will split and it will carry right down come out the bottom of your eye and split down your handle so making it uh not deep enough is a no no now typically I I usually say you want your wedge line in at least halfway down the size of the head so if you have a 3-in head if your head is 3 in high so the height of your head I mean this way okay the height of your axe head now this is a neat little axe head that uh Scott Reed made for my daughter when she was little and it's really light actually I might sell this okay so if you have somebody that wants to do ax throwing and they want a really light Little Axe okay Scott Reed made that he's he's our hot saww Guru here in the maritimes really neat guy so i' pop a well actually I have three grandkids now let's take that back I think I think I'll save this for the grandkids okay Papa handling that for them but anyways so what I would do on this one here is you want it at least halfway down the depth of the eye here is a lot different ax this is a to a TI okay 4 in so I would make my slot at least 2 in down on this on this uh axe head so that would be my rule of thumb is make it at least halfway down that sometimes you might have to go it depends that's probably if you if your wedge is shaped unless you have a really really really gradually uh sloped wedge it won't get the whole way down there okay so having said that about half the depth of your axe head so most of these handles I'm making here for a 4in head so that's going to be a 2 in that's probably maybe two and A4 two and a half inches down there and then I did my other and of course I was just going to keep on going right down to take this side off look okay nice and straight so I finally solved this one by learning to not go the whole way down and take both sides off before I put my wedge slot in there so now what I'll do is actually I do two inches down one side do my wedge slot then then go down the other side and they're all parallel so it took the old East ghost Lumberjack I bet it took me 20 years to figure that one I so I just saved you 20 years of frustration and put it all here in a video so you know how to do your your wedge slot so there how was that for an informative video anyway subscribe to my channel if you haven't yet and uh join us again next week as soon as these come up you'll uh you'll be the first one to get them take care

Channel: EastCoastLumberjack

Views: 2,278

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Id: nt6Gzz6YNZE

Length: 18min 11sec (1091 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 12 2023