 That is his axe handle traced out. I had a little bit more here, a little bit more through here, and I'm gonna cut this out on the bandsaw and be able to shape it down from there. We're through. I don't know if you guys can see those nice sharp lines on the octagon. That's really old school. And that head right there, we dug out of the ground. It's been underground for over a hundred years. It was probably made in the late 1880s. That was everywhere here, Donny. Oh, no way! Look at that! Awesome! That is so cool! A horseshoe! Yeah! Did we find a whole thing of horseshoes? That'd be cool if we found the blacksmith's shop. Get another one. No way, really? Yeah. Oh, a three! This is unreal! We're up here in the middle of the North Main Woods. It's just... Look! No, you found an accent! Donny! Donny! Oh, my God! You believe it? I don't believe it! We've been talking about finding an accent for years. This is unreal. But now you see me on call point right now. I mean, we are so far from civilization here. Where's the closest civilization? What are the chances that we would walk on this? We're... Yes. I mean... We're so far into the woods, from the river even. Yeah. Donny knew there was an old loggin farm here somewhere. Wow, we've got molten metal up in here, I think. What's up, guys? Joe Holland here due to viewer requests after that metal detecting dig that Donny and I had of an old loggin camp, 10 miles downriver and 100 miles into the North Main Woods wilderness. Donny and I uncovered a blacksmith's shop that was easily 120 to 140 years old. Could have been even older than that. We ended up pulling out of the ground like 75 horseshoes, a bunch of cool tools and hardware and more exciting than anything to us were six ax heads. Viewers all requested a restoration video because it's one of the things I like to do is restore old axes and study them and learn the history of them. Lucky for us, three of the six axes came back with easily identifiable marks on them from the people who made them. What I'm gonna do is Donny and I each are gonna have one ax from this haul that I'm gonna make handles for. The other ones, I think I'm gonna put one as a display piece for Donny as a huge thank you to Donny and to show my appreciation for everything he does in this trip in general. There's one ax here that's really special. This one is a B Kelly out of Belfast, Maine and you could actually still see the original stamp after sending it through the electrolysis tank and getting it to this level. I'm gonna put a better edge on that cause it's like rusted deserration. I'm gonna make a display for Donny with this and a couple of the other items and present it to him when he gets back from the trip he's on right now as a thank you and to show my appreciation for Donny for everything he does and for this trip in general. So I think a cool display to commemorate our trip would mean something more to him than just a video. So that one's going in the display for Donny. The other ones, we're gonna find one of the other good ones and I'll make a handle for it and hang it and we'll bang it. Stay tuned if you wanna see the process and learn which axis came out of the ground and get a little explanation of what I'm doing here. I got all the axes out of the electrolysis tank. Three are definitely identifiable. One, I can see some letters, I'm not sure on that one. The other one, I'm pretty sure I know what it is and it's pretty exciting if it isn't actually in 1800s Emerson and Stevens, which I think it is. And then the one that was smushed up, that's gonna have to be a later project. But here they are. This is what they look like after 24 to 48 hours in the electrolysis tank and a light coat of oil on top of them. This one, I don't know if you could see it with this camera but I'll take some pictures and share it to you with the pictures. But this one is stamped S. Perry. Our tidbits put together a really cool book of the axe and edge tool makers of Maine and the history and it goes right into details on blacksmiths, where they were from and when they operated. And under Perry, there's just the one, it's 1902 in Island Falls. And I think we're looking at like around that time. So I'm wondering if there was an S. Perry, was it like the father of John Perry that we don't know about. I actually have at least one other axe in my collection with the same exact stamp on it. And it's been a mystery for two or three years on who S. Perry or Sperry is because it's all uppercase. So you can't tell if it's even two different words. But that one's pretty cool. That's in great shape. That's a user. We will definitely be able to use that axe again. I got to clean out the eye a little bit. There's still some rust in the eye, but as you can see, there's a lot of hardened bit left. You know, this was out to here when it was new. So it hasn't even been used that much. So that one's really cool. This one's probably the coolest one out of all of them. This is a Benjamin Kelly out of Belfast, Maine. Super, super highly rare and collectible. You could see B-K-E-L-L, the last letter that you can't see is a Y. And then under it, you could see B-E-L-F-A and you can't see the S-2. But I think I own one other Kelly and there's, I don't know, four or five other ones that I know about. But that's a Benjamin Kelly in a wedge pattern, which is awesome. Still got plenty of bit left. It's in great shape really. That one I'm gonna give to Donnie just as a display piece because it's such a rare axe and since I already have one in my collection, it'd be awesome for him to have another one in his collection. Benjamin Kelly operated in Belfast from 1822 to 1910. Benjamin Kelly and son. So I have some other axes stamped Kelly Belfast, but with a B in front of it, shows that it was the father. So it would be well before the 1910 closing date from when the sons took over. The next axe is just unbelievable how cool and rare it is. This one I was shocked to see has the man special logo on it. Now, man is one of the largest axe manufacturers in the history of the world. They were out of Lewistown, Pennsylvania and it's like, what is a Pennsylvania axe doing up here in the middle of the woods? It just blew my mind to see that man logo on there. And then next to it, I see H&C Company. Now, lucky for me, I have a couple of friends. One, Matt Bemis is just a main axe historian and just a genius when it comes to that stuff. And another friend of mine, Mike Miller, is a man axe genius out of Pennsylvania. I talked to both of them, we talked it over and the H&C Co is Haynes and Chalmers out of Bangor, Maine and they operated in the late 1800s. They were one of the biggest tool supply companies to logging outfits. So all these logging companies that operated in the North Maine woods, like the one we already found in the blacksmith shop, they got a lot of their supplies from them. So basically Haynes and Chalmers private labeled this axe from man. So man made it in Pennsylvania, put H&C Co on it, shipped it up to Maine and then H&C Co sold it as their axe. So they had like four patterns. I'm gonna look that pattern over and see which one it is. They had a St. John River pattern. They had a Kennebec Wittem pattern. They had a international pattern for the Maine and Canadians. A lot of the Canadians came across the border to work in the logging camps for the winter and they had an Aroustic pattern. So this falls somewhere in between those. I'm gonna look at the catalog, next axe in line. I'm not 100% sure on it yet, but I'm pretty stoked if it is what I think it is. And it really looks like it. I'm thinking this one is either a MD Spiller and Son or an Emerson and Stevens. And I can tell you why. It says in the very, very small, this one's got a lot of pitting. But right at the top here, you could clearly see made and a D before that. And Emerson and Stevens stamped handmade on most of their axes and then under it would be E&S Co. Well, that would be gone, same with the rest of the handmade or the E&S Co. And they would usually have like a weight stamp here, but that's all pitted and gone. And then later they would put the tempers first initial here and the year here. You could actually see a four just as plain as day, a small four right there. So this is either a 1904 or an 1894. Emerson and Stevens more than likely. And then this next axe is in just awesome shape. It's gonna be a user. It has some letters, but I can't tell what they are yet. And I'll show you a little trick we can tell for those. But it's got a huge, huge, lot of hardened bit left. You can see the line there where the blacksmith had the inserted bit before forging the axe. So it's got all sorts of bit left. It's in great shape, big, heavy axe. And right up there, there's some letters. Let's see if we can figure it out with a pencil trick. I don't know if it'll work but I will be, yeah, it looked like another P.E. All right, so it looked like a P and an E kind of like that one with a spary right there. And I'll show you how that pencil trick works as if you go over it with the side of the pencil. A lot of times it'll leave the letters a little bit darker and it'll lighten the rest up. So there you go. So there we have the six axes. I'm gonna set the Kelly Belfast aside right now for Donnie. I'm gonna clean that one up and that's just gonna go on display as it is. That'll get retired. The Haynes and Chalmers, I kind of wanna swing that one and hang it. Man, I talked to the guys that are experts on it and this is like very few of these in existence. There's none known actually in existence. So that one is crazy rare. It's probably really, really valuable, especially to the main collectors and the man collectors, which covers a big market. So that leaves us with two pretty well ready to go ones that we could use. These are rare too, the Sperry or Sperry. I'm gonna call it perries. That one is like in great shape ready to go. That's crazy rare. And then the other one that I don't think is a perry actually. I think it's, I don't know. I hate to even speculate on that one. I don't know what this other one is, but I like it. I like it a lot. So that one, I don't know what it is, but there are some letters. We're gonna almost think it's a Deco, which would be the done edge and tool company, but man, I just, I don't know. The E is just so pronounced on that. So that one's a user. So we'll hang those two. And then the one that's either an Emerson or a Spiller, that one's gonna get a pass for right now. All right. So we got the heads cleaned up. I'll put an edge on them at the end. I hate working with them when they're crazy sharp. In the hanging process. Right here, I got some ash that Donnie and I milled two to three years ago. We've tried to mill some ash just for handles over the last couple of years. So I'd have plenty to keep working with, as you could see the axis behind me there, up there, and just crates of ax heads underneath there. The only handle. So rather than by material, we cut down our trees and we mill them, and we mill them specifically for handles. So I like to use ash. That's what we have in Maine. That's our best bet. We have ash and maple here that work really well. Sometimes you can get horned meme and birch too. But ash is number one choice. Hickory is your number one choice for ax handles anywhere, but we don't have any hickory in Maine or very little. So I'm gonna make my ax out of ash just because I prefer it and I love ash. I'm gonna make Donnie's ax handle out of maple that we milled like four years ago for the same. Donnie likes the maple because a lot of the logging camps would have maple up there, more readily available in the North Maine Woods. And when they break a handle, they'd go to their maple reserves and make handmade handles out of maple. So we're gonna put maple in his, ash in mine, and I'll show you the process. You never want a knot in your handle. So basically what I did there was cut off a knot so I got somewhere to start fresh. You will see some sap leakage in this maple. Ambrosia beetles, little tiny beetles get in this and they eat, I don't know if you could see that, see this dark line right there? There's a little hole right there. That's where a little tiny beetle got into the wood when it was alive and they burrowed through and then the sap leaks and it stains the wood. And it makes for kind of cool, cool look and gives it some character. So as you can see how it leaked across the grains, this is gonna be Donnie's handle. And this is a maple that we cut off his property. She's probably five or six years ago and milled out for the expressive purpose of making axe handles. Axe handles are really unique to the people who use them. They're all, they could all be custom fit. And Donnie liked this axe handle when I showed it to him. It's a little bit more of a traditional main handle where it's straighter. It's straighter through here. It's got a little bit of a bend and a nice fonds put at the base. So I know he liked this one. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna trace this just for shape and then I'll try to match it to his hands for diameter. And overall length is gonna be the same as this one. This one's about a 28, 29 inch handle. This is the one we're gonna copy and trace to make Donnie his axe handle. Fairly straight, but it's got a nice little bend to it. All right. That's our shape right there. What I'll do is I'll just put the marks where this one popped out. But whereas this is a custom fit, we're gonna custom that to the actual axe head that we're gonna hang for Donnie, which I guess is gonna be this parry. I know it's rare. And I know there are very few of these out there. And this is made by a blacksmith in Maine that there are not many of them. So we're gonna hang it for him anyway. We're gonna hang this one for him. We'll put a new edge on it. We'll clean it up a little bit. And this is gonna be a user for him. All right, that's the important part to make sure the eye's gonna be straight and then it fits the eye. And then I'm gonna draw in a little bit extra curve on the back for him and a little bit extra heel on the bottom of the handle for him. We're gonna cut that down to length with a chop saw. And then I'm gonna bring it over to the bandsaw and carve it out. We'll save that piece for a shorter handle. As you can see in the grain, grain's really important for strength in axe handles. So it's important to have flat grain or parallel grain with very little run out. And that's why we mill this wood the way we do. That is his axe handle traced out. Add a little bit more here, a little bit more through here. I'm gonna cut this out on the bandsaw and be able to shape it down from there. That's what she's gonna look like for the most part. I'll take that nub off right now. Then the next move's gonna be to get a center line through the whole thing. There's a little bit of a figure right there where it might have been a branch to start. It's not really a knot, but I don't think that's gonna bother. We're gonna take this down quite a bit more. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna get a center line, then we're gonna thinner down. So just by eyeballing it, what I'll do is I'll throw a center line, chuck in the stencil, throw a center line across the top like that, just by eyeballing it. So we're pretty good centered there. And then I'm gonna run that center line freehand down the middle of the front. So it looks like that. Pretty straight. And then I'm gonna follow the same line off the back. And these are pretty important to make sure that you got a nice straight axe handle as you're making it. You can make a lot of adjustments and tweak during the process. And there's several ways to whittle this down. I'm gonna whittle it down at first on the bandsaw. But first what we're gonna do is we're gonna put our axe head on the top, trace out what the eyelet is so we know our width. And then we're gonna shave it down from there. All right, that was really rough. That was a really rough one for the eye, but we're basically, you could do this a couple different ways. You can measure it or just trace down through. I still got a lot of rust in that eye. So my lines didn't come out great, but that's what it is there. So I know I gotta take a lot of material off this axe handle to get it down to where it's gonna fit. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put it back on the bandsaw and shave this much off the outside of each side. And I could even shave more down the handle because we're gonna make it so it fits his hand. So that's just some rough stock removal, material removal from that handle. To get it down, you know, the rough stuff and some of the bigger stuff off before I bring it over to the belt grinder. Next step's gonna be to clean out that eye. It's still got a decent amount of rust in there. We gotta get that to clean metal so it makes a nice snug fit. I'm gonna run some hand files through that and get it down to where it's clean so that way we can actually fit this handle exactly to it. All right, we got some files. So let's run a rough one through there first. Get it started. There's all the rust that came out. Now that the eye's clean and we have the handle pretty well roughed out, I'm gonna take her down with the 2x72 belt grinder. So this here is a Norton Blaze belt. This one's 24 grit. And we could spin up to like 4,200 RPMs on this thing. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna put this belt on and put the dust collector on, shaping her down. First thing I always like to do is get the right fit of the head. I don't care about the rest of that because if you can't get the head fit correctly, you might as well burn the rest and use it as kindling. So we're gonna work on getting that head fit snugly and correctly and at the right angle in the top first and then we'll worry about the rest of the handle after that. Still squared up actually. You get a straighter cut that way. Let's make sure I got a good cut curve so it doesn't go offline. What you wanna do is I mark where the bottom of the axe is gonna be when this head is hung on here. And you wanna go down about 2 thirds of the way down with your kerf cut so the wedge can go down and open this top up and mushroom it and hold the axe on. So I'm gonna cut that with a bandsaw right now. Right down the back center cut. Right down the point on the front. Next move I do is I will fit this head on about 15 times before it's snug because I like to work it down so you get a nice tight fit the whole way. So I'm gonna bring it over to the vice and the metal over the metal bench over there and tap it down with a sledgehammer on the bottom. But before I do that, you wanna take off your sharp edges and your points because I'll be pounding this down off of the head with a drift. And if one of those catches the floor potentially could crack further up than you want. So if you round those off and it hits the floor it just bounces. So we're gonna round those off right now. That's all you need to do to ensure that you're not gonna crack this. If it hits the floor it comes flying out. Force it because you don't wanna pop out the sides of the cheeks. Cheeks are the thinnest part. That's this part right here and here. So once you get to where it's snug and not going anymore then you could see where you have to remove more of the wood or you see where you may be gone too far and you wanna be able to bring that back out as you work that head down. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna keep doing that maybe, I don't know how many times it depends. This is the part where I go really slow when I'm making a head because I'd rather have a nice hard fit. I have one of my blacksmiths make for me and I pop that back out. So there you can see where it's like super snug that fit. So from there down I'm gonna actually have to take that off with a belt grinder. Pretty easy. All right, back to the sledgehammer. Do nicely. And the other thing we're looking for is that the bit, just to make sure it doesn't only kilter that way or that way or this or closed or open. So that's why I work it down slowly and I double check it quite often. And you fight for every inch all the way down if you do it that way, but you get a nice snug fit. You could see through here it's gonna be a really nice fit. We're getting close, let's try it. The top doesn't matter because we're gonna wedge it but the bottom's the most important. So it's super important that we're tight there, there and along the cheeks too. So that way there's no play at all or there's no moving. Now that we have it on there, we checked it the whole way down to make sure our blade is perfectly straight with that centerline front and back, which it is. We're good to go. I don't think I'm gonna do much more on the top until we get into the hand sander. Now we can work down the handle and custom it to how we want it to feel. We got our most of the way there. The head's fitted on. Truda made this an octagon handle. So they're a little bit tougher to make because you gotta keep your line straight. So we got an octagon from here up. It's thin and it's curvy. That's how they made their handles back then and gave them some extra whip, made them a lot more or a lot easier to use. The octagon helped with accuracy if you had straight lines and a lot of the old-timers liked an octagon handle. So this one is octagon down to here where it's smooth because right in there you wouldn't wanna get blisters or how many sharp edges and that would be worn down round anyway. So that fits pretty nice there. Nice straight lines up here on a curve. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna run an orbital over it keeping those same straight lines with just a high grit sandpaper so there's no sand marks from the belt grinder on there. And then we're gonna finish her up. How much room we have for a wedge. We're super tight here all the way and the top of the eye is always bigger than the bottom of the eye. It's like an hourglass. So it looks like we have about, oh, three, four, three sixteenths, maybe a quarter inch of play on that side and that side to drive a wedge in and open that up. You want the wedge to go down two thirds of the way down the axe. So we're gonna make a custom wedge for this head. Pretty good on the width. Let's shave her down. All right, so that's what the wedge is gonna look like. Put an ash wedge into a maple half in the ash but it should spread that maple enough so we got a nice tight fit and never loosens. Now a lot of guys will glue that wedge in. A lot of guys will use like a metal step wedge. If you do a nice custom fit like that it should never ever move either way. So the best way I found to seat that wedge is to tap her down like this. So we're pretty tight right there. A little bit more in the back especially on your axe when you're doing that. So you want to make sure you got the right size wedge. I want to get in a little bit more but I also don't want to blow that cheek out. A nice tight fit on the top with our wedge and the butt and the end knob is cut, trimmed and sanded. We are good to go. Now it's pretty dirty just from how dirty my hands were. I had to stop the project and go help a buddy with a tractor, put an axle in a tractor. That's why I'm a little bit dirtier. So what I'll do is I'll just lightly sand the half here where it's got the octagon. I don't know if you guys can see those nice sharp lines on the octagon. That's really old school but there's your hang and then the last thing to do on this one other than finish up I have to finish up the half with whether I'm going to oil it. I haven't decided if I'm going to oil it. I might put a little burn on it for to raise that grain a little bit and give it a little bit different look and probably some pine tar. But the last thing is to put an edge and sharpen this axe so we can actually use it. And I hate to do that too early just because I'm popping that head on off, on off. And I hate to put an edge on there early and slice myself because it's pretty sharp now but it's going to be super sharp when I'm done. So I have some belts that I use just for just for the metal over here. If there's anything left on this belt we'll find out and we'll put an edge on this. So as you drop down you want to lower your RPMs too so you don't overheat that bit because heat will take the temper out of that bit. So right now you can put your finger right to the edge of it and if you're using a nice sharp belt, nice clean belt, then it won't overheat at all and then that's why no gloves so I can get a good feel of what's going on, sharp. Yeah, so that's 32 and a half degree bevel with about a, it's got about a, so she's going to be a splitter. She's going to be a chopper but she's definitely going to be sharp. All but done now. Now just to put the finish in touch with some sandpaper and I guess I'll just use the orbital sander just to take that grime off from my hands and then I'm going to finish the wood and it should look pretty good and be ready for usage. Alrighty, so there's all eight sides. I don't know how well you can see whereas maple's super light and white but this has very sharp octagon edges to it right there and all right, there's a little secret snake oil mix I got going and that'll put a nice cool color on this handle and it finishes the wood so it can't dry out and expand, kind of let that soak in as much as you can into the handle. Get it on the head so it won't rust. This axe has had enough rust on it for the year. She's been sitting in rust for about a century. Maybe more actually. All right, she should be ready to go. She should be all ready to go. Once that snake oil gets in the handle as good as it's going to get, we got a nice old thin curvy octagon handle on a super, super old accent that we dug out of the ground and she is sharp. So the last thing to do I guess is to go chop something with it. Pretty good, it's good and tight. Nice comfortable handle. She's a beauty. There you go, Donny's got a new axe. Turn an old one into a new one. She's ready to bang away. So there she is, we got a nice thin curvy octagon handle made out of main maple just like they did in the old days and that head right there, we dug out of the ground. It's been underground for over a hundred years. It was probably made in the late 1880s by a blacksmith in Northern Maine. He's got a stamp on there and she's ready to be put back into use. It's pretty hard to believe you can dig something out of the ground like that and put her right back into use. But there she is and that one's for Donny. Thanks for tuning in guys. If you liked that video, let me know in the comments and we can make a lot more like that. I promise you that.