How To Transform Any Axe Into A Laser Beam

in today's video I'm going to show you how I reprofile and sharpen my axes [Music] [Applause] it's gonna be exciting so the first thing I'm going to do with any new hacks that I come across is to thin out the geometry almost every ax that I've ever come across has been too thick behind the edge for any serious cutting at least in the hardwoods that we have where I live for an ax to cut it needs to be thin for an ax to cut fast it needs to be thin you want your ax to penetrate as far as possible into the wood with every hit obviously a thick ax does not penetrate some people believe the X needs some thickness behind the edge in order to chunk out pieces of wood this isn't necessarily true the ability to chunk out pieces has more to do with the cutting technique than the ax profile this is something better left for another video if there's any interest an X needs to be thin enough to have good penetration into the wood but not so thin that it becomes weak and unable to cope with the high forces involved so how thin do you go well unfortunately I can't really tell you this is something you might just have to experiment with the type of wood you cut and the type of ax head also plays a role again almost every ax that I've ever come across needs to be reprofiled to thinner geometry for any type of serious cutting performance so here's what I do to thin mine I'm going to be using a 2 by 72 belt grinder if you don't have a 2x72 just know that everything I do in this video can also be done using a 4 by 36 inch belt sander Boat companies now are pretty much making all the same belts for 4x36s as they are 2 by 72s a 4x36 cost a little over a hundred dollars new but I would look around the yard sales and Craigslist first for a used one sometimes you can pick them up for as little as 30 to 40 dollars if not for free if you're asking whether or not this can be done by hand yes it can anything can be done by hand with enough time but in all honesty no you will not get very far reprofiling an ax with a sheet of sandpaper we are talking about removing quite a bit of Steel here and sandpaper in this case just won't cut it literally for this you really need power tools so let me see if I can explain this here relatively quickly and in layman's terms so what we have here or the area that we are thinning is actually right here in the center portion of the ax these are the X cheeks right in here and this is what we're thinning out we're thinning this middle section we don't want to thin out down here towards the bottom and we don't want to thin out any more down here towards the top that's because X's have somewhat of a taper from end to end get a straight edge I'll put this on here and if my camera will focus you can see how we we have the middle of the axis thicker than the two ends now what that means is is the top here top of the X the bottom of the ax here at the bottom corner is already very thin we don't want to thin that out the only portion that we really want to thin is here in the middle where it is relatively thick we want to keep the strength up here in these Corners because these Corners are prone to chipping off and breaking off they're the most susceptible to damage and most susceptible part of an ax to damage when we are thinning this we want to make sure that we hold this ax flat on the platen and we pull it back and forth in a nice straight line allow me to demonstrate so when I'm grinding this I would be pulling this straight across the platen I'm not going to be rocking it like this pull straight across grinding straight across now if you do this correctly you will end up with this sort of Half Moon shaped grind line here and that's how you can sort of tell whether or not you've done it correctly sort of this is you know this is ax grinding this is not sending a rocket ship to Mars foreign the first belt I'm going to be using is a 36 grit ceramic belt this belt has a very high material removal rate and due to their coarseness and ability to cut they keep the steel fairly cool keeping the ax as straight as possible on a flat platen I'll go ahead and start removing material with the 36 grit belt I want to do all my material removal with this belt the remaining belt for Scratch pattern refinement only again it's very difficult to tell you how thin to go here it's one of those things that sort of make access fun to play around with discovering just how thin you can go I think a lot of people worry about overheating their ax using belt Sanders in my experience I find it very difficult to overheat an ax as long as you're using a fresh belt and not trying to remove a lot of material with a belt that is not coarse enough for material removal the coarser the belt the cooler it will run so don't try to thin an ax with a 220 grit it won't work also axes have a lot of mass much more so than Something Like a Knife the mass absorbs a lot of the heat like a big heat sink and keeps the thinner steel from overheating the ax would have to get up into the three to four hundred degree range for it to have any effect on its temper and that means you'll know well before it gets hot enough to ruin the temper on your ax also as you can see here I'm not grinding right up to the Apex while I am thinning I will blend this area later with a slack belt to give me a convex Apex this also helps keep the heat down right at the thinnest Point again heat isn't really something to stress about with axes if you can touch the Apex it's not near hot enough to have an effect with an ax once I have the thinning slash repo filing done I remove the platen and switch over to a slack belt this Blends everything together and gives the X a nice convex Edge and at this stage I'm still using a 36 grit ceramic belt to help blend everything together now I'm switching over to an 80 grit ceramic belt to refine the scratch pattern along the Apex in my experience you really don't want a very refined scratch pattern along the entire grind area if you put a mirror polish on the entire grind face that we've been working on it will stick in the wood like crazy really the coarser the better along the main bevel face the only area that you want a little more refinement is at the Apex also I'm not removing hardly any material at this point I'm only refining the scratch pattern so now I'm switching over to an a100 trisect belt I really like these belts for Scratch pattern refinement along the Apex and both axes and knives and they run very cool in my opinion due to the waffle-like abrasive structure I do not believe anyone makes these type of belts for 4x36 so an absence of these belts four or four by 36 I would use some sort of Scotch Brite slash surface conditioning belt for a 4x36 they also work very well for this application and they come in several different grits and lastly I'm switching over to an X5 nor X belt this is the last belt and it leaves a really nice finish along the Apex and you can probably see on these last stages I'm twisting the ax at this point to follow the curvature of the Apex I use a buffing wheel with green compound for the final sharpening stage it works just as well to use a strop if you don't have a buffing wheel and at this point we are extremely sharp this is where you want to make sure you do not drop this on your foot because that would be bad so this is a really nice cutting ax now keep in mind this is Oak and Oak is a very hard wood I'd love to see what this does in softer wood like Pine Spruce or Douglas fir but we just don't have those kinds of wood here it just cuts so nicely now foreign now that you thinned it out it probably splits like crap doesn't it foreign okay so after a good bit of cutting and splitting I haven't touched this at all I haven't even cleaned it up you can see we have really good Apex stability we don't have any Edge damage whatsoever it looks really really nice for the amount of splitting and cutting that we've been doing we've gone through some really hard nuts some pretty dirty wood and this is looking about as good as it can possibly look you can absolutely transform a poor cutting ax into an absolute laser beam by reprofiling to thinner geometry Apex sharpness does matter for axes but not near as much as thickness behind the edge so this is just the way that I have found that works best for me there's certainly other ways to achieve the same main goal so thanks for watching and we'll see in the next video If you're not subscribed please hit the Subscribe button and don't forget to like the video see you next time foreign foreign foreign [Music]

Channel: OUTDOORS55

Views: 297,747

Keywords: axe, axe sharpening, how to sharpen an axe, axe restoration, ax, axe cutting, how to cut with an axe, how to sharpen, garden tools, axe skills, ax sharpening, sharpening an axe, beginner axe sharpening

Id: B5HOCj9OotY

Length: 12min 37sec (757 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 29 2022