Making a Bushcraft Axe

hey guys welcome back to the art of craftsmanship my name is Dustin and today we're gonna be doing kind of a fun project I am an axe junkie I love axes I love restoring them I love finding old ones and making them cool again putting new handles on one of the things I really enjoy doing is doing modifications to hatchets or axes that are either past our prime or ones that I can find lots of so one of the things I've done a bunch of is I do modifications to half hatchets and turn them into kind of a small camping hatchet or bushcrafting hatchet so that's we're going to do today so with half hatchets they they kind of have a specific purpose they were designed for for roofing usually roofers will use them or construction workers will use them you have a hammer on one side and then you have your hatchet on the other side and a nail puller it's just not something that I would use in this form and I have plenty of them but it's something that I think they lend themselves really well to be modified to a bush crafting or camping hatchet I'll do a little modifications on it and then rehand alit and I had this handle that I picked up which I picked it up for maybe 50 cents or so it's been cut off but it can't be used anymore for a single bit like a full-size or even a half it you know normal like a boy's head or even a full-sized hatchet head wouldn't fit on the end of this anymore but this these work really well for half hatchets they have smaller eyes so I can trim this down to the size I want and use it for the handle so we're gonna use this and this is an old Stanley 1/2 hatchet which I think will work really nice so I like the shape of the hammer and the bit and all so we'll do some modifications and I'll show you how I do it first thing we need to do is remove the old handle so there are some metal step wedges in here that I'll save and reuse so I'm gonna try to get them out first and then if we can't get the head out after that I'll just cut the handle off all right we'll head over to the wire wheel and clean it up so we can draw a lot our pattern on this you can see I brought the bottom or the heel of the bit down and back some it's that way then when I can re profile the front of this so it's not perfectly flat it'll curve back and just give a curved face to the bit as well as trimmed away here so I'll trim away the nail Pooler keep this gentle curve from the bottom of the eye the other thing that I try to preserve and try to copy when I'm doing these modifications is these a lot of times the half hatchets will have these bevels ground into them on the top and bottom so I think this is an it's a nice kind of aesthetic touch so obviously the one will still be on the top so I will recreate that bevel here after I cut off the nail pool I'll continue and recreate that bevel on the bottom of the blade I like having a little bit of hammer pole so I'll probably leave about maybe a third or so somewhere around here trim it off and redo the bevels on the end I'll chamfer the end but I don't like all the back wait on these hatchets when they're designed for camping so this will remove some of the weight but still leave you with a little bit of a hammer pole to hammer in tent stakes or you know those type of things if you're if you need a hammer it works but this way it gives you most of your weight on the front of the blade just kind of helps with the ergonomics of chopping for these mods it's much easier just to take your time and just as you're grinding all the shaping and grinding just take your time and keep it cool nobody'll have to worry about ruining your temper that's already there so after shaping down this head and kind of get into the where the place that I like it the shape and the bit and all the bottom cut off and starting to think about putting a handle on it I've looked at this handle that I was going to use and realize that it wouldn't really work this eye is bigger so I kind of looked at my other half hatchet eyes and I realized that these are all kind of a standard size they're small they're smaller than a normal hatchet eye but they're about like a hammer and then when I looked at this one it's almost a quarter of an inch longer it's a lot bigger eye and I wasn't really prepared for that so I started looking through my stash of handles new handles old handles repurposed handles see if I had something that'll fit so let me show you guys a little bit about what I have and kind of what I came up with for the next step so looking through my stuff and I kind of came across this handle which is my double bit candle this came off of the the True Temper Vulcan double bed axe that we did a restoration video on this had some overstrike and was the reason why I cut it off but I started looking at it and saw that kind of there's enough material at the top to fill in the eye completely at first I was a little concerned about not having a palms wall because I'd want to shorten this and I wouldn't have any palms well but then kind of thinking about my other things I have I have a tomahawk that doesn't have a palm swirl because as a slip fit and that works really well so I kind of think that this is the solution to the problem I've run into so we're gonna have move on and I'll show you you know how I'm gonna convert this down to fit this head there's a little bit of overhang here where somebody is hit on the top and kind of mushroom the metal out so I'll clean that all up with a file and then the same thing on the bottom the bottom looks like pretty clean but I want to chamfer this edge a good bit to make sure that when I'm seating this on the handle it seats down really nice and tight so I'll use a round chain saw file to clean up the top and the bottom of this I I'm gonna go ahead and just start moving removing the material from the top of the head so it fits in and then I'll trim it down a little bit to fit once I get a little closer but I want to leave more wood there now rather than trimming it off and wanting to have it back later remember you can always cut off more wood you can never put it back on all right a trick you can do is take a pencil and just put some of that graphite on the inside of your eye right on the lip and right on the inside and then that will transfer onto your wood which will then just show up even more so I'm using basically three tools I started out using my draw knife and that was some room a lot of material that can you can do kind of delicate work with that as well but I use that to remove the bulk of the material and clean it up and get a general shape and I switched over to this which is a rasp of wood rasp that's a rough rasp and this is has a flat and a round side I predominately use the round side because I can use it to kind of get into the concave here and kind of shape that and also move around I use the flat sometimes if I'm doing flat areas or doing an edge but I predominantly use the half round side and then when I get to a spot where I want to be a little bit more delicate with the wood and I don't want to take off so much material then I'll use my foreign hand and this has a it has a rough a rough and a smooth round and a rough and a smooth flat so this works really well and the more smooth rasp when I get into the areas where I want to be a little more delicate take off less wood and not worry about the kind of the rough Rast just chipping out and I will flip back and forth once I get to this point kind of flip back and forth between the rough and the smooth so we're getting a nice tight fit now so I'm gonna go ahead and drive at home so the proper way to hang an axis hold it upside down and hit from the bottom and that force from the bottom pushes the ax down the eye down through obviously I'm getting a pretty tight fit all the way around so I'll do a little bit more fine-tuning and we're getting pretty close make sure it's sitting even as well this way it's pretty good so I'm just looking down the bit it's a little bit twisted to the left so I have to remove a little bit more material to even it out to bring that straight and parallel along the handle so I was just seating this upside down and I kind of heard a split and you can see I got a split here in the back of the eye looks eyelid everywhere also I'm getting some curls here with this split so fortunately there's enough material here so I'm just going to go ahead and remove that and sink it down on further but that's one of those things is just to be careful I may even chamfer that inner edge a little bit better there because it might just be too too sharp it's just cutting into the wood so I'll just try to be a little more careful remove this wood and sink the head down in a little further on the handle all right we look good now we have just tight all the way around no gaps a little bit of curl from where the cheeks are coming down and a nice straight flat across the top of the head so that's solid so we're good on the fit up now so I'm gonna go ahead and trim this off to about where we want it to sit and then take the head off cut the kerf and then set in the wedge home one of the nice things about using a vintage handle like this is that it handles this beautiful patina on it so you would think that you know cutting away this patina is just gonna look horrible but you'll see it gets this like really gorgeous fade of color when I really just get this nice fade so I always try to fade out my scratch marks all these big rasp marks I'll just try to smooth them out somewhat bring in some sandpaper clean it up it's a lot harder to clean this up after you have hung the head on it so just do it beforehand I'm gonna go ahead and cut the kerf and just when you're cutting a car if you want to make sure you set it to the right depth so you can see here I have my the mark of where the bottom of the eye is you want to go about and I have also drew the line for the top of the eye so you want to go about 2/3 of the way down so I'll go ahead and Mark that off here's my bottom here's the top there's the front back so I want to go somewhere around around here it's that way since that and this that's the kind of front and back of the eye I don't want to go too far below that and you see that's about maybe a little bit more than two-thirds but I'm not going to go past that line so cut down and that's where I'm gonna sink my wedge down to you just want to be really careful about cutting make sure your as close to the middle of the eye as possible you just take your time you can always start sawing even and then you just kind of tilt your saw back and you can run a straight line down tilt back up even your saw blade will follow that line now I was working on the backside but you can see the saw blade stayed straight and true down and middle even though I was just working a line on the back it fits in really nicely and I've drawn on the depth which just shows me how far down I can my wedge can go before it bottoms out in the eye so I made a few markings on here just so I know where that is so if I am hitting it and it goes all the way that deep on though to stop so I'm not trying to hammer it down and split that split the handle so I'm gonna go ahead and put a little glue on here I like to use glue just to keep it in place and this is just type on to which is a wood glue waterproof wood glue and we'll go ahead and tap it in start it up and then we'll take over to anvil and send it home so you can see here's my pencil line that I marked right on the top when I marked it for the depth it says all the way down as far as it can go seated really well and you can just see that I have a lot of mushrooming out so it's just the action here mechanical hold that it's doing inside the head is just really strong really tight so I like to just take my time use a chisel and just clean up I'm going to chamfer all the way around a nice chap around the eye when I got this double bit axe it had these nails in the handle and I wasn't sure what they were for when I first got it but then once I measured them you can see this first nail is right at six inches and the second nail is it 18 inches so you have six inches and then the foot so these two nails are exactly a foot apart I'm going to use those for my mark so I'm going to just put a mark right below this nail just about an inch below alright that feels really good I'm going to go ahead and just sand the bottom a little bit and chamfer this bottom edge all right she is sharp sharp sharp now all right so I have the boiled linseed oil now and I was used boiled linseed oil to oil my handles so it's go ahead and hit this area that's got the clean wood just get this really nice transition between this new wood that's been uncovered there's just gorgeous patina on this older handle I just love this transition between the two all right so this turned out really nice and I was kind of excited to use this handle and the more I think about it as kind of a tomahawk and the straight handle it just really reminds me of a really good throwing handle it feels good and I just think this will just be a really nice throwing hatchet so I'm gonna actually have some friends over tomorrow night we're gonna have a get-together and a party so I'm gonna bring it along and get everybody a chance to throw it and see how she throws how she sticks all right guys were well we're here so I've got some friends around some family we're gonna go ahead and try to give this a shot it's just really good handle length it's gonna work really well for kind of a camping hatchet backpacking hatch but I think it's also gonna work well for a throwing hatchet so let's go ahead and give it a shot see how it sticks over Hector's ah Tommy Boy yeah he likes shiny little self look it's me it's Tom second try ready all right one two three oh that was close guy you have the heck Wow hey area is second try there yeah finally one two three all right guys so this turned out really well I'm really happy with it I just really like the way the shape is I like the head and it feels really good I think it's gonna be just a great like camping axe backpacking axe it's gonna work really well so it's been fun we had a good time throwing it it's maybe not the best Thor but that's okay so if you liked the video go ahead and give us a like subscribe if you haven't already and hit that Bell a lot of you let you know when we're putting out more videos we're really trying to put out more videos this year do maybe one a week that's we're kind of aiming for so keep an eye out for those and follow us on Instagram because we like to put up pictures of things I'm working on the shop and then sneak peeks of the new videos coming up so you'll be able to see that and kind of get a heads up of what we're gonna put in the video so we hope you enjoyed it this is a good project and we'll see you guys in the next one you

Channel: The Art of Craftsmanship

Views: 429,925

Rating: 4.8419275 out of 5

Keywords: bushcraft axe, bushcraft, half hatchet mod, axe mod, modification, axe making, axe reatoration, camp hatchet, bushcraft hatchet, metal shop, wood shop, axe throwing, axe target, hatchet throwing, hatchet, half hatchet, reporposed handle, axe sharpening

Id: PhHuzlPO_mg

Length: 35min 19sec (2119 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 27 2019