Around The Shop RSS

A loose axe head is not a minor inconvenience. It is a spinning piece of steel looking for somewhere to be. The wedge is the thing standing between a well-hung tool and a trip to the emergency room, and most guys don't think about it until something goes wrong. Here's everything you need to know to do it right the first time. What a Wedge Actually Does When you hang an axe handle, the tenon (the shaped top of the handle) passes through the eye of the axe head. The tenon is slightly tapered — narrower at the very top,...

The double bit axe is one of the purest tools ever made. Two bits, one head, perfectly balanced, no wasted steel. The loggers who built this country's timber industry swore by it. A lot of guys still do. When the handle breaks or rots out, though, people run into the same problems. The hardware store doesn't have one. The ones online are confusing to size. And nobody seems to agree on whether the handle should be straight or curved. Here's the answer to all of that. Why the Handle Has to Be Straight This is the question that trips people...

The hardware store has handles. You've seen them hanging there in a bundle, wrapped in plastic, tagged with a size that may or may not mean anything useful to you. You buy one, get home, and discover it doesn't fit the head you have. You sand it down. It's still not right. You wedge it anyway. Three weeks later the head is loose again. This is how most guys end up just buying a new hatchet instead of replacing the handle. Which is a shame, because replacing a hatchet handle is not complicated. It just requires knowing a few things...

If you've spent more than twenty minutes researching bushcraft axes, you already know the answer the internet wants to give you: Gransfors Bruks Small Forest Axe. Swedish steel, hand-finished, beautifully made, and priced somewhere north of $200 depending on where you find one. It's a legitimate axe. Nobody's arguing that. But there's another answer. One that comes up constantly in the serious forums, quietly, among guys who've actually put both tools to work. It's made in North Carolina. It costs considerably less. And on the right handle, more than a few experienced woodsmen will tell you it keeps pace with...

If you search "best axe for splitting wood" right now you'll get a page full of roundups that all recommend the same three products with Amazon affiliate links attached to every one of them. The writers have usually never split a cord of firewood in their lives and the recommendations reflect that. This is a different kind of article. We sell splitting axes. We've used splitting axes. We have opinions about what makes one worth buying and what makes one a waste of your money. Here's the honest version. First, a Terminology Problem Worth Clearing Up A lot of guys...