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If you have re-handled an axe before, most of what you know applies here. The process is the same job. But mauls have a few specific characteristics worth understanding before you start. The eye is larger. A splitting maul head has a bigger eye than a standard axe head. That larger eye accommodates a heavier handle that can withstand the forces involved in splitting wood, which are different from chopping forces. When you split, you are driving mass into wood along the grain and the energy return when you miss or glance is significant. The handle needs to be up...

If you walk into a tool store and ask for an axe, you will get handed something. Whether it is the right thing depends on what you are trying to do, and most people selling axes cannot tell you the difference between a cruiser and a feller or a Jersey and a Dayton. American axe patterns developed over two centuries of hard regional use. Loggers in Maine working white pine and loggers in Kentucky working hardwood had different needs, and different axes developed to meet them. Those regional patterns are still in production today, mostly by Council Tool in North...

There are a handful of companies making American axes right now that we would stake our reputation on carrying. Brant and Cochran out of South Portland, Maine is one of them. Their axes are hand-forged, one at a time, by skilled blacksmiths working a propane forge in a workshop that looks a lot like what Maine axe shops looked like a hundred years ago. The results are exactly what you would expect from that description: tools that are genuinely beautiful, historically grounded, and built to last long enough to embarrass the people who made cheap decisions. Here is who they...

Most people own one or two files, reach for whichever one is closest, and call it good. That works until it does not, which is usually when a tool needs real work and the wrong file either skips across the surface or buries itself and stops cutting. Files are not interchangeable. The cut, the shape, and the length all affect what a file does and how well it does it. Understanding the basics takes about five minutes and pays off every time you pick one up. Here is the whole picture, written for people who use files on axes, hand...

Estate sales, barn cleanouts, flea markets, and the back corner of a grandfather's shed. That is where the good axes are. Not hanging on a peg hook at the hardware store, not in a slick box with a QR code on the back. Out there somewhere, usually covered in surface rust, sometimes missing a handle, usually underpriced by someone who does not know what they have. The question is whether you know what you have once you find it. A vintage axe head can be a genuinely excellent tool, better steel and better geometry than most of what comes out...