How to Sharpen a Hatchet or Axe to a Scary Sharp Edge!

g'day Scott here from Scotts hobbies today I'm gonna show you how I make my hatchet scary sharp I have a lovely plum hatchet here I hope you can read that made in the USA and it has this lovely beautiful Hickory handle with the nice boiled linseed oil finish that's built up over the years and it feels absolutely lovely in the hand but it has been away in the cupboard for a while I haven't used it for a while and a few years actually and it needs a good sharpen it's got this annoying little chip up here which was from me probably doing something silly with it when I didn't appreciate it as much but now I'm gonna show you one way to sharpen your hatchet get it nice and scary shop I'll show you the setup alright so here's my setup I've got the hatchet clamped to a board on our sawhorse I have a whole bunch of strips of sandpaper cut all the way from 120 grit up to 2,000 grit I got a little stool to sit on you've got to make sure you do this at a comfortable height otherwise you end up kind of rushing and then not getting the angle right and all that kind of stuff and it can be kind of unsafe to be rushing well yeah you know got your hand nearer sharp blade and then I've got this bit of scrap wood it's about a foot long and I've double-sided tape to one of those strips to it and I'm gonna use that kind of in a draw filing motion along the bevel you can also if you have them and want to use them this is an old easy lap 1x6 stone with the fishhook groove in it you can use one of them you can use the edge prototype stones if you want you're just got to make sure they're flat and yeah now I'll show you what I start doing all right so the idea is that we place the sandpaper on here and we scrub it back and forth along the bevel and this will take a while especially for the first the first grit and you'll probably go through a few bits of sandpaper as you can see it's kind of clogging up a little bit but I'll move along the sandpaper and use different parts of it and keep going until this side is all but 120 grit scratches all over the bevel and you've apex the edge by getting a burr to go over to the other side you'll feel it once you get there [Music] [Music] okay as you can see it's getting there but my bit of sandpaper is kind of clogged up and lost it's well that initial bite it gets you want to replace it fairly regularly otherwise it just takes way too long which is why a small diamond stone or something could work great too because you don't have to replace it but this is if you don't have that kind of sharpening equipment the good thing about this cloth back stuff is it doesn't stick on the tape super hard and you can just reuse it and place another one on when you get to the paper though it kind of sticks to it a bit better and won't come off as easy so you often have to replace the tape a few times so yeah now if you ever have to get up make sure you unclamp it because you've got kind of a half sharpened blade sticking out you don't want anyone to walk past and get their leg on it or more than likely I'd get my own leg on it so yeah just put on a podcast or listen to some music and relax while you're sharpening your ax it's quite mesmerizing I find quite meditative all right back to it [Music] okay I've done the first side up to 120 grit I haven't bothered taking all the chips out just because you know there's a lot of steel to come off I'd rather just have it come out over time especially now that I'm gonna look after the axe there's the other side I don't know if you can see it don't think you can but there's actually a burr the whole way along oh there we other like hit it a bit it's actually a burr the whole way along so now we're gonna do this side up to 120 grit and get the burr on the other side get this all polished up and you deep scratches out so it looks pretty and then yeah I'll come back and show you the once I start on the next one okay both sides are done to 120 grit there's a nice bear on that side and now I'm gonna start on 240 grit I'll be back to show you what that looks like shortly okay sharpen it up to 240 grit starting to look prettier already now on to the 400 all right here's the 400 grit off to the 600 now now yeah it takes a lot longer if you haven't done this for a while or you reprofiling an ax for the first time but you know like I'd let this get fairly I'll let this get fairly blunt before I actually sharpened it again so it's kind of my fault but otherwise you don't actually have to start at such a low grit and work your way all the way up and normally I'd probably use some diamond stones on it but I thought I'd show could be done with just normal sandpaper too so that anyone who doesn't want to spend hundreds of dollars on stones can get a nice sharp edge on their ax all right 600 grit here you can see it's getting shiny and I'm going all the way up to 2000 so it'll get a lot shinier I don't think it'll be a mirror finish but it'll be yeah pretty close all right got the that's gonna focus got the 800 grit now onto the 1200 this is after 1200 grit starting to look quite good now now onto the 1500 okay there's 1500 grit and now for the 2,000 interesting way I've still got the same bit of double-sided tape on there it's not a stick but that's kind of good because it's just sticky enough to hold it on there but not enough that I rip the paper to shreds when you try peel it off so this is actually doing it this way it's less hassle when I thought shiny okay here we are polished up to 2,000 grit it's not a perfect mirror but it's pretty sexy looking now if you had a following a finer sandpaper I can only get up to 2,000 locally but you can order it online you can get it even more polished or you can go to a strop and compound on some leather or something like that but before that step what you want to do or this is how I do it anyway is I don't know if I can get that on camera oh yeah since with the last final grit just raise it a little bit and put a bit of a micro bevel on there so you want to do it on both sides obviously and the idea here is it's just going to strengthen the edge just a tad especially when you've got such a wide bevel like on my one and then finish with some alternating strokes [Applause] I don't know if you can make it out but probably not I can barely see it by eye but it's just a very fine micro bevel on there and now it's quite sharp now the last step is to get a piece of bare leather you can use compound if you want but it make sure it's finer than the finest sandpaper you finished on and this is just to remove any remnants of what's left of the birth I'm gonna have to put this somewhere better hang on okay we're now somewhere better I've just got some bare leather here and all I'm doing is just dropping side to side probably do this 30 to 40 times and this will just help get rid of any scraggly bits on the edge or bits of bur that are left you will still have some left from sandpaper but because it's so fine and you finish off with will really lights and alternating strokes it'll be quite small so that leather or get it off perfect and then we'll do a cutting test all right is feeling nice and sharp all right time for some tests this is my favorite one the shaving one seems to either impress people or gross people out let's try a bit of paper this one I haven't done with an axe in us yeah I'm pretty happy with that I remember there was a time when I couldn't even get a a knife to cut normal printer paper all right and I thought this one could be good there's a little bit of a scene there on the denim but make it a bit harder let's see if it'll cut this alright I'm pretty happy with that one final thing because it hasn't been done for a while look at the way that goes on the wood is that gorgeous or what I think it's a great practice to get into maintaining your tools keeping them in peak condition it's just a shame but these days most people's axes I see they just sort of rotting handles rotting away in the ground and that's the heads all rusty and there's no edge on it at all it's alright for splitting if it's got no edge on it but if you want to do other stuff alright well thanks for watching don't forget to Like share subscribe all that good stuff I hope you enjoyed seeing me get this nice and sharp it's my favorite hatchet and yeah have a good one

Channel: ScottsHobbyz

Views: 600,987

Rating: 4.8712859 out of 5

Keywords: Axe sharpening, sharpening a hatchet, sharpening an axe, sharpening my axe, sharpening axe by hand, hand sharpening hatchet, sandpaper sharpening, axe sharpening sandpaper, axe sharpening tutorial, scary sharp axe, shaving sharp axe, diy axe sharpening, plumb hatchet, plumb axe, sharpening a tomahawk, no power tool axe sharpening, axe sharpening tips, razor sharp axe, razor sharp hatchet, beginner axe sharpening, diy hatchet sharpening

Id: N2OMrap14-g

Length: 15min 42sec (942 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 16 2018