Turn Your Hatchet into a Carving Axe

For rapid material removal and sheer joy of use, nothing beats a carving axe.  The axe on the right in the above photo is my grandfathers old camping hatchet.  I have been using this tool since spoon carving first piqued my interest in woodworking nine years ago.  I set up a chopping block in a patch of woods right beside my college dorm room and spent my free time there trying to carve elegant spoons like the ones I saw in Wille Sundqvist's book "Swedish Carving Techniques."  As my knowledge of tool use, edge geometry, and sharpening has increased, I have modified that camping hatchet to make it a more precise and easier to control tool.  With its asymmetric bevels and octagonal fawns foot handle it is now a proper carving axe.

I picked up the other hatchet in the photo a couple of months ago for eight dollars at an antique shop.  It is dull, lightly pitted from rust, and the handle rattles around in its eye.  In short, I thought it would make a good example for a tutorial on tuning up axes.  

I've been carving stacks of handles for the adze prototypes that Pete Galbert and I have been working on lately, so I thought I would start the overhaul by making a nice hickory handle to fit and replace the loose one.

When carving a handle, I like to start with a piece of green hickory, a froe, and a club.  Any chunk of good, hard wood will work.  My other axe has a black locust handle and I carved it from a dry board.  It was more challenging than working with green hickory, which is perfect and buttery, but if all you have is sawn lumber, don't let that stop you.

My handle blank was between 14" and 15" long and much larger than my intended handle in all other dimensions.  The process begins by splitting the blank to rough size, approximately 1 3/4" by 2 1/4".

With the piece split down to size, I move to the shaving horse.  First, I clean up the split surface you can see in the photo and then make the opposite side parallel as indicated by the pencil line on the endgrain.  I will be shaving the blank to roughly  1 3/8" by 2".

My shaving horse is a special beast and I'll be writing more about it in the future, but for the moment just enjoy this glamour shot.

With my piece to rough dimension I use my preexisting handle as a template and trace it on my blank.  Below is the outline of the handle I made.  Print it out and trace it as a rough guide for your own.  A standard sheet of paper was a bit too small for the entire length of the handle so add another inch to the straight section at the top.  The image should fill an entire sheet of paper.

Then back to the shaving horse to cut out the shape.  Because of the curves in the handle, it has to be carved by making a series of stopped cuts with the drawknife, then flipping the blank around and working from the other side to remove the shavings.

With the profile cut out, it is time to thickness the main section of the handle.  A good fawn's foot handle swells in thickness and width at the end.  I like the end of the handle to be about 1 3/8" thick and the working section of the handle to be about 7/8" thick.  I draw lines approximately the same distance from the edges of the blank to leave 7/8" between them.  I stop the lines about 2" away from the bottom of the handle.

Back to the shaving horse to cut down to the pencil lines.

 

Then I scoop out the excess material between the end of the handle and the end of the pencil line.  This creates the transition from the full 1 3/8" thickness down to 7/8".  The transition is slightly concave, but not abrupt.  One thing I love about my shaving horse is its low profile head.  It is easy to clamp a workpiece in place and then reach over the head to work on the other side.  This allows me to hold the piece securely and to almost never have to push my drawknife.  I hate pushing my drawknife.  This is especially handy for small objects like spoons and tool handles and less significant for windsor chair spindles and crests.

 

Once the blank is the appropriate thickness I cut away the corners and make the handle octagonal.  If you are new to drawknives and shaving wood check out Curtis Buchanan's video of shaving windsor chair spindles for a brief primer about following the fibers of the wood and shaping squares into octagons with a drawknife.  I also took this opportunity to refine the shape and profile of my handle and clean up any areas of slightly torn fibers with a few licks of a spokeshave.

I finish at the bench vise by chamfering the end of my handle and cleaning up the endgrain.

That's a handle.  I will set it aside for a few days to dry and then toss it in my kiln to finish drying.  It will be bone dry by next weekend, when I plan to fit it into the axe head.  If you don't have a kiln, just store it in a dry place and wait a week or two longer to fit it to the head.

The next step is tuning and sharpening the head.

Wooden Lathe Tool Rest

The tool rests that come standard with most lathes are generally between 6 and 12 inches long.  These tool rests are probably fine for turning small things, but the first time you try to turn a chair leg, or anything else longer than the tool rest, you will immediately recognize its limitations.  These short tool rests force you to reposition the rest and turn your workpiece in 6" to 12" segments. This prevents you from making the full body fluid motions that yield consistent, smooth, flowing turnings.  It is possible to find commercial iron double post toolrests that are 24" and longer.  They are nice, but can be hard to find and are usually pricey.  I use three simple wooden tool rests for all of my turning.  I put the tiny rest that came with my lathe in a box about a year ago, then I forgot where the box was.  Good riddance.

Curtis Buchanan taught me to turn during a fall and winter that I had the good fortune of working with him in his Windsor chair shop in Tennessee.  My tool rests are based on the ones that Curtis uses.  However, lacking the 3" thick maple butcher block that Curtis used as the base of his rest, I had to come up with a slightly different construction method for mine.

I wanted to design a tool rest that was easy to build from common materials.  My tool rests are made of three components.  The base, which rests against the bed of the lathe, is a piece of spruce or fir construction lumber roughly 1.5" thick and 6" wide.  The portion of the rest that the tool rides on is maple (any diffuse porous hardwood is fine).  Finally, a beveled glue block adds rigidity to the structure.  The construction is simple and requires no fasteners.  The components are simply planed and then glued and clamped together.  The large glue surface area creates a rigid, vibration free tool rest.

Two slots in the base accept the bolts that clamp the rest to the bed of the lathe.  The slots allow adjustment  toward and away from the lathe centers to accommodate workpieces of different diameters.  The bolts are threaded into wooden blocks with T-nuts embedded in them.  The blocks slide under the ways of the lathe and clamp the toolrest to the lathe bed when the bolts are tightened.  On my 24" toolrest the slots in the base are 3" from the ends of the base piece.   On my 45" toolrest the slots are 12" in from the ends.  The softwood base does dent under the washers from the clamping pressure of the bolts.  This has no effect on the performance of the tool rest, but if you wish to prevent or minimize this denting, then a harder wood for the base is the ticket.

The dimensions of your tool rests will be determined by your needs and your lathe.  In the photo above you can see that the dimensions of the end of my tool rest were determined by my lathe's tailstock.  I wanted the tail of the tool rest to be as long as the lathe would allow so that the tool rest can accommodate as many different workpiece lengths as possible.  The limiting factor for the length of the tail of my tool rest is the tailstock crank.  

The tail of the tool rest is the portion most vulnerable to vibration.  Because of the cutout the tail of the tool rest is not supported by the base.  The cutout provides clearance for the base of the tailstock and access to the bolt for tightening and loosening the tailstock to adjust its position.  The portion of the tool rest above the cutout should be as wide as possible to minimize vibration in use.  The tool rest pictured above has a full 2 3/4" above the cutout.  

The total length of your tool rest is whatever your heart desires.  I use a 16 inch, a 24 inch, and a monster 45 inch tool rest.  With the 45" long tool rest I can turn the rear legs of ladderback chairs without repositioning the rest.  Each tool rest cost less than $10 in materials and about one hour to build.

 

The height of the top edge of the tool rest should be somewhere below the height of your lathe centers.  How far below depends on personal preference.  All of mine are slightly different and I have no preference between them.  The top edge is beveled back at about 65 degrees.  This keeps the contact point of your tool close to the wood.  When I bevel the top edge I leave a 1/4" flat at the apex and then slightly round it to create a durable contact point.  If a tool (read skew) catches and gets slammed into the tool rest, it will dent.  When that happens I plane the dent away, then recreate the bevel and rounded top edge.  It is important that the top edge be straight and smooth.  When I round down piles of green wood the wet shavings and sap tend to accumulate and gum up the top edge.  If I have more green wood to round down I use a cabinet scraper to quickly scrape the gunk off of the top edge with the tool rest in place on the lathe and then get back to work.  When I finish turning, I plane and reshape the top, a five minute affair.

The slots in the base piece are the most time consuming part of building these tool rests, aside from waiting for glue to dry.  I drill out a row of overlapping holes on the drill press and chisel out the remaining waste.  I also make a cutout in the beveled glue block to allow the rest to be adjusted closer to the centers than would otherwise be possible.

It is also easy to align these tool rests with the lathe centers by using a square referenced on the outside face of the tool rest and aligning both ends of the rest the same distance from the centers

I have been using these tool rests almost every day for the past two years.  They are as functional as the day that I built them and I couldn't imagine working without them.

Reamer Blade Sharpening

This past fall and winter Pete Galbert and I collaborated in designing a tapered reamer for making round tapered mortise and tenon joints.  It can be used for other things, but my primary use for this tool is in creating the joints used in windsor chairmaking.  Since we made the tool available my workshop has switched over from primarily a chair shop to primarily a reamer shop.  I'm very pleased with the reamers, and I continue to minutely refine both the reamers and the processes I use to make them.

I recently finished a batch of eight reamers and thought that I would share the techniques I use to sharpen the blades before I send the tools out.  The short description is that I use an angled block clamped to a granite plate with 600 grit wet/dry sandpaper adhered to it.  It is important to maintain the 6 degree flat taper along the length of the blade so that it continues to perform well in the reamer body.  The combination of the angled block and the sandpaper on granite makes maintaining these blades fast and simple.

The blades are ground to a 70 degree bevel, so I cut my angled block at 75 degrees.  This produces a five degree microbevel which takes me straight to the edge and brings up a burr in 5-10 strokes.  My granite plate is a 3" wide strip cut from a 12"x12" granite tile.  The 600 grit sandpaper is attached with spray adhesive.  The dimensions of the angled block aren't the least bit critical.  It should be as long as your stone, wide enough to clamp securely, and have an angle that produces a slight microbevel.  Nothing fancy.  Mine is a scrap of spruce lumber that I made in five minutes.

 As I slide the blade against the angled block I also apply downward pressure to the blade.  This produces a burr quickly.  Once I have a burr the clamps come off and I lay the face of the blade against the stone to polish that portion and to begin to remove the burr.  When polishing the faces of the blade I use my thumbs to apply downward pressure and I walk them up the blade making about ten back and forth motions with my thumbs in each position as they move down the blade.  It is important to keep the downward pressure from your thumbs directly above the edge you are trying to polish. 

 Polish both faces and then return to the angled block for a few more light passes.  Alternate light passes on the faces of the blade and the bevel until there is no longer evidence of a burr.  When the burr is gone insert the blade back into the reamer body and ream away.

For more information about this reamer check out Pete Galbert's blog here.

Welcome.

Welcome to my little corner of the internet, a place for chairs, spoon carving, tools, and related woodworking experimentation.  I look forward to sharing my workshop adventures and welcome questions and comments.  More to come shortly, but for now here is a sampling of chairs that I make to start things off.