Making an Axe Handle from Scratch

[Music] hey guys welcome back to doubter craftsmanship my name is Dustin and today in the shop we're gonna be making a single bit axe handle from scratch so recently in a previous episode I restored this vintage Collins legitimacy axe head this one was all rusty and the pole was all kind of busted up so I cleaned up the pole irie profiled the bit and sharpened it up so it's ready to go so now I'm going to be making the axe handle from scratch from a piece of ash that I have and this is will be a 30-inch axe handle so this kind of this template I made this from kind of testing a few different shapes and sizes of axe handles and I'm excited to try to use it for the first time and things it's just the perfect axe head to do it so I'm gonna go ahead and add that piece of ash and we'll start laying out the pattern [Music] so for a full-size axe you want your grain to run parallel so with any time you have a quarter sawn piece like this this is an eighth quarter piece of ash the grain in the middle is going to be running vertical as much as possible and then as it gets to the outside it's got a turn so what I want to do is I want to use this piece from the middle and then I'll leave enough on the sides to be able to make smaller things like hatchets or boys axe handles which isn't as critical those will have 45-degree grain structure and that's perfectly fine but this way what I'm looking at here is the actual rings of the tree and the grain running as vertical as possible which will run parallel to the axe head three inches here and then six inches [Music] I'm just checking I have my template plenty tall above the top of the handle so that way I can seat the axe down nice and nice and far this leaves me with at least an inch above the eye to be able to wedge in and then an inch below two so I could set this down here and then the future if it starts to loosen up I could always bring it set it down further then it gives me plenty of room to kind of set that head down and later if I need to so I'm going to go ahead and take this over to the bandsaw now and we'll cut it out [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] next thing we're gonna do is mark off the centerline and my measurements for cutting so I want to find out where the center of my ax handle is and then I'll come out on both sides of that to give myself about an inch thickness all the way down the handle it'll flare out at the end to maybe an inch and a half or inch and maybe 5/8 or so and then all the way up where the head is it'll flare back out at the top to maybe again an inch and an eighth or so the thickness of my eye the width of my eye is about 3/8 so an inch and a quarter inch and 1/8 or so will be plenty enough material to be able to seat that down in there really well [Music] [Applause] I'm going to give myself some guidelines and then I'll cut the handle down to about an octagon and this way mm-hmm you know give myself these guidelines I'll be able to follow these and like I said trim everything down so that way I kind of go down to an octagon and then from there I'll trim it down all the way into a full oval but I still have the guidelines from my original centerline but these are just going to give me something to trim too so I don't go too far [Applause] [Applause] before I do too much more shaping on the handle I want to actually cut out and draw he's a draw knife to draw out that basically the shape of the eye I want to do that now because I can still claim this into a vise really securely and I use my draw knife and pull down so right now we have about one and three-eighths thickness on the entire head so I'm just marking I marked a center line at eleven sixteenths and just drew that so this is my center line I'm going to now kind of draw out the shape of the eye and then I use my drawing I have to remove the majority that material [Music] [Applause] [Music] I'll switch it over now to using rasp and spokeshave I've kind of come as far as I can go with the draw knife and I just want to now I'm doing a little bit of finesse to get this head to fit all nice and tight on here I'm just gonna do it just a little bit just maybe down a core of an inch or a half an inch or so before I stop doing that and then I'll move over to finishing and actually shaping the rest of the handle before I come back and do the final fit up on the head [Music] alright guys so I just spent a good amount of time shaping this down mostly with a rasp and a little bit of spokeshave mostly just rasp gotten the majority of a removed and shaped to the size I like it and kept kind of feeling it making sure it felt really good and then I just moved over to the sander just clean off most of the tool marks and it's pretty good it's it's nice and straight still feels really good I may do some more finessing in the end but I think at this point I'm ready to move on and we do the final fit up to the head on on the end of the handle and roll from there we're getting good [Music] [Music] as I'm fitting the head I'm also periodically checking for straightness it's one of the key things you want to do make sure they keep your head straight on the handle and if you don't do it pretty often you can really come askew and without doing too much so right now this it's starting to just turn a little bit as I'm sitting it on further which means I just have to take more material off of this side down low where I have these pencil marks and then I'll take a little bit off at the top as well so that way it'll help the whole head to start to turn back and back in line with the handle [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] now that we have the handle mostly shaped it's time to kind of decide how far down we want the curve to cut so what I'll do is I'll put the head back on or at least up on top and I'll mark off at the top of the head is gonna give myself maybe about a half an inch or so above that that I'll trim off but then I'll mark about two thirds of three quarters of the way down through the head on the handle so I know how far to cut my kerf and so that'll be the actual cutout that I'll cut that will fit the wedge in to hold the head on so right at the beginning you want to take your time to make you make sure you establish this first cut just eye down the middle make sure it's nice and even and just just take your time put a nice even cut in because your blade is gonna want to follow that initial cut so just be careful about it you can also kind of rock back and forth and I'm now I'm kind of working down this edge so I can follow the line that I see here and then rock back up and my saw blade will want to follow that cut that I have started on the front edge I'm gonna go ahead and cut out a wedge this is a scrap of hardware that I have it's a nice contrasting color it's I think it's cherry but I'm not sure it could be IPE but they're both about the same color and have a similar grain structure so but I'm gonna cut this at two and a half inches and I'm gonna do an angle from about a little over a quarter of an inch at the top down to the edge and I'll mark that off and then I'll cut from here down and just go make a an even straight line down to my two and a half inch mark so again you just tap it on so it won't fall off flip it upside hang it upside down and that's where the term hanging in axe comes from so we're hang it upside down and then I'll just go ahead and start tapping on the back and it'll start working its way up you can usually hear the sound change as it moves the pitch of the the hammer hitting the wood will change a little bit so you can hear it starting to get a little deeper which means now it's just a solid piece of wood and metal together that should be good I got a nice seat just a little bit of curl in the front just fine everything else is wedged in cuz I've chamfer the end of that I know curl that means it's just wedging and really nice and tight inside that inside the eye of that axe head it's not completely necessary to put glue on your wedges but I like just the extra hole that it gives it also adds a little bit of lubrication which will help it slide into the car a little bit better [Music] so unfortunately it's not the prettiest wedge job I've ever done but it did start out really tight the wood inside the eye was just really nice and tight so you know I got probably about half the wedging on the back end which is which is good and there is a nice mushrooming out on the side so I'm creating that mechanical hold of the would actually mushroomy out above the eye so even though it doesn't look pretty we'll go ahead and trim this off clean it up and see how well it looks from the top [Music] [Music] [Applause] I'm gonna go ahead now and chamfer this top edge and just clean up some of this wood that's split out as well [Music] [Music] another I had the ax hung and I'm not I don't need to have him on the end of this anymore I'm gonna go ahead and trim off the shape of this fawns foot and I don't necessarily want to bring this line all the way back to this edge and a complete swoop because if I do ever need to take this handle off and rehang it again I want to have a little bit of a flat spot to be able to hit it so I'm gonna bring it up to about here and I'll just do a nice even round over [Music] [Music] [Music] alright guys we're getting close to the end so I'm just gonna go ahead and clean everything up now with with a cabinet scraper first to make sure I have all the tool marks off from all the rasping and then I'll just hit it with a just a quick once-over probably like 220 grit sand and then we'll it up we'll be good to go [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] we're just finishing up oiling it now and I'll go ahead and wipe off the excess oil and then we'll give it a few minutes just to sit and soak in and we'll take it outside and give it a test run alright guys we are all finished it works really well I really like the length of this handle I used kind of longer handles kind of a standard 36 inch handle for a lot of years and I find that I do you know over strike more often than I like to so this feels really good I really like the length of it this is about thirty inches so feels really nice I feel I can control it a little bit better and it's kind of I think it kind of lends itself back to kind of more the older years of vintage years where handles were just a little shorter they seemed like that they had a little bit more control or something I'm not exactly sure but I like the length this handle feels really nice so this is a fun video is really nice to make this from scratch with ashes a new wood that I haven't used before and I really like it it feels really nice it's beautiful looking wood and has great grain structure so I think it's gonna work really well obviously only time will tell but for now it's really nice so thank you guys so much for watching this has been fun make sure you don't forget to thumbs up this video and like it leave me a comment down below what you think and also make sure you look back if you didn't see the video where I restored this Finch is that vintage axe head make sure you look back at that video as well with a link to that video in the description down below so again this has been a fun build really nice I really like this handle it turned out really well I'm really happy with it so thank you guys so much for watching and we'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: The Art of Craftsmanship

Views: 122,032

Rating: 4.954895 out of 5

Keywords: axe handle, single bit axe, hanging an axe, axe hanging, making an axe handle, restoring an axe, axe restoration, axe junkies, ash handle, wooden axe handle, ash wood, collins legitimus, collins, legitimus, collins axe, usa made axe

Id: vO4wZ4Evnuw

Length: 25min 45sec (1545 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 27 2019