 There's been a lot of different shaped axes from tiny hatchets, which can be used for shingling or splitting shingles to broad axes, which would be on the other end of the scale, which would be used for hewing wood and flattening sides of wood. A single bit or a pole axe just has one cutting surface, the other end is flat or blunt and the balance is really different. Traditionally most double bit axes have a longer handle, single bit axes will often have a shorter handle and there's advantages and disadvantages to both. A double bit axe in actuality is probably a little more versatile because it has one edge that's filed for cutting wood and it's filed fairly thin and narrow for chopping. The other edge of it is filed at a chisel edge and that chisel edge is for getting down near the ground and removing roots where you're not going to chip it if you hit the occasional stone. An axe, if it's used properly, is a real safe tool. An axe, if you cut corners, it can be a real dangerous tool. The one thing that we've seen in the past that have been injury related and injuries to ankles or feet has come down to one simple thing. If when you're chopping on a log, if you never let your axe handle break a plane that's parallel with the ground as you're chopping, then you can't cut your feet. And the only time we break that rule is when we're chopping with the log between our body and the axe head. If you've already made the decision to chop the log, the first thing I'd do again is look at the log, figure out what I'm going to do with it. Where's the best place to chop it? If you're limping on a down log, you should try to be limping the log on the opposite side from where you're standing. In other words, keep the log between you and your axe. The second part is when you're limping, a lot of times you'll see that the axe head goes through some of the limbs really easy. So it's pretty easy to get wild in a situation like that. So you should be really clear on where other people are and you should be really clear on where your swing is going. Yeah, there's a lot of times when no matter how hard you try, you have to limb on the same side of the log that you're standing on. And when that happens, just be doubly sure never to let your axe handle or your axe head drop below the level of your hands as you're chopping. The third is when you're swinging is to make sure that you have a clear area within the complete radius or arc of your swing. When you're doing that, you don't want your axe when it's over your head even to hit a little branch. So sometimes there might be a little branch that's out of the radius of your swing, but it's going to be catching your eye and it's going to be interfering with your vision the whole time. And if that there, take the time to remove it. It's trying to be as sufficient as possible. So you're going to strike that wood as many times as it takes to completely sever your cutting surface and then move to the other side instead of making one chop on one side, a chop on the other side, a chop on this side, a chop on this side, three times the succession and then breaking it. Oftentimes in a large log, you're not going to be able to remove your first chips by making a wide cut. So you start with a narrower V in your cut and you'll cut down until your V comes to closure or to a point. And then you'll go back up and usually on the strongest side that you have, you'll reopen your cut so that it's wider. As you come down at first, you take a lot of care to develop accuracy. It doesn't matter. The power does not matter at first. Again, I'm flexing up the knees, especially when I'm getting near this part of the cut. So my axe handle stays parallel. So work on your accuracy as you're coming down. And only after you have that balance and that accuracy then power becomes the third part of the equation. Wait until you're good at chopping before you try to put power into it. A lot of times when you're swinging and you pick the axe up and it goes back past your head on either side and you'll catch out of the corner of your eye a little chip of wood that's stuck on the axe blade. You should not try to power through that chip. When you try to power down through it, it can deflect your axe and you can end up with an injury. I also ended up taking my gloves off partway through because it's getting pretty hot out here. And my hands started getting sweaty and what we're looking at is the least chance of having an injury. And with sweaty hands and the chance of the axe slipping out of your gloves or your hands, it's not worth it. So always do whatever you can to minimize the possibility of an injury to yourself or anybody around you. When I finish this first cut, I'll go over and I'll cut a V on the opposite side of the log. And because the wood is already removed from the near side, when I come over to this side, it's about five or six times as quick to chop. So when I start it, just come down and start my chip. My chip will start out like that. Okay, now my V is closing up and where I want my V to close up is right in the very center of the log. It's closing up a little bit sooner. This time I'm going to open it up on the left side. And the reason is because there's a knot that's closer on the right side. So it's going to be easier chopping on this left side of the log. We've had a lot of injuries in the past. You get working with an accident, all of a sudden you get to the point where you're medium proficient. And when that happens, it becomes fun. It's like, man, am I having a good time chopping? And that's when I've seen most of the injuries occur is when people finally start having fun and they start chopping harder and harder. And I've tried to remind myself of that. And so every time I start having a lot of fun and go, wait a minute, slow down. Make sure you're not going to hurt yourself and then proceed more slowly. I've used a lot of sledgehammers in trail work because I worked in rocky country. And we've got hammers ranging from three to 20 pounds with round heads, square heads, and chisel or peen-shaped heads. We use eight, 12, or 20-pound sledgehammers for crushing rock. The main focus on technique that I want to be showing is that I'm bending my knees, bringing the hammer down flat with my arms straight and swaying from the shoulder. For shaping rocks, you can use four, eight, or 12-pound spalling hammers. And they have a peen on one end that you can split the rock with by hitting a line of blows along where you want it to break. And the four-pound ones are really handy for shaping rocks to build water bars or walls with. And we use the three, four, five-pound hammers for chinking rocks into walls, for driving stakes, for driving feathers and wedges to split rocks, and for shaping rock. A lot of times we'll use big, heavy malls for moving or locating timbers, but that's a real different job than when you're moving rock. The biggest sledgehammer I've seen is my old favorite 20-pounder. And we've used that to crush rock and we've used it to bust rocks that stuck up in the trail. Actually saved a lot of time. We would have spent blasting. It takes technique to swing it, but if you've got the right technique, it's not that hard. People use adze hose and grub hose in areas of the country where there's a lot of loose light soil and maybe some root structure in there. The adze hose is sharpened so it'll cut through those roots and you can pull the dirt towards you when you're digging in a trail bench. There are all kinds of shovels. I like the long-handled, wide-bladed shovel for moving dirt. And a lot of trail jobs you need to be able to throw dirt from one place to another. And for that you need a big, wide-bladed shovel with a long handle. The firefighting shovel is a standard in the Forest Service and they're sharp enough that you can cut through sod and drop through roots well with them. When I'm using a shovel, I use my foot to drive the blade into the dirt and then I lever it across my knees or thighs. I can also use a shovel to scrape by levering it against my body. It's a lot easier on your back that way. If you're digging a lot of things up, you're probably going to need a bar as well as a shovel. The tamping bar is usually five or six feet long and round and has a flat paddle blade on one end and a big round flattened tamping end on the other. And they're good for digging post holes and tamping the dirt back in, but they're not good for prying. You can use rock bars to move anything. I always liked the rock bar best of all the tools. It was the great equalizer for me with a five-foot rock bar. I've got one I called My Magic Rock Bar and if nobody was looking I could move anything. And nobody could figure out how I did it, but there are a thousand and one ways to use a rock bar. You can put it under the rock and lift using the ground as a fulcrum. You can put a fulcrum in front of the rock and pry off of that. You can use a rowing motion to skid a rock along the ground or work with two people and row your boat rock across the ground. You can stab it in the ground to bump a rock forward. They're a very useful tool for moving heavy rocks or logs. The bottom end of a good rock bar is square with a chisel tip and that chisel tip is a two-inch fulcrum basically that you can use to lift with and then the upper end of it is usually round. It's best with big rocks to have a team of people. Once you start using rock bars to move a rock you don't want anybody in there with their hands on the rock because a rock bar can slide across that rock and mash fingers. A tenor carry would usually be about three and a half feet long with a swinging hook in the center of it and it's a two-sided hook that goes in and picks up a log. And when you have a lot of people and fairly big logs you can get a lot of people on it and carry it in a pretty safe fashion. A draw knife again is one of those tools that looks like it's pretty simple but people that are really good at peeling with it you'll see they have a very definite technique. The same is with a pilafki. A lot of times you don't pull straight towards you you actually angle the draw knife at 20 or 30 degree angles so that it's doing some cutting as it's pulling back in the direction of your body. On an axe like this, this axe, the handle's been in about ten years and it's beginning to warp. There's no cracks in or anything like that but it's still not worth keeping because something's going to happen to this eventually. So we're going to replace the head on this. And if you're taking the time to go through and put a new handle into a tool and do it properly you might as well select a good handle rather than use one that's poor. One thing that we look at right off the bat is is the handle straight and if you hold it up and look at it by letting it dangle you'll see if it's straight and you'll see if it's warped in either way. The second is how is the grain laying in that handle? A lot of handles will have the grain going crosswise and when you're thinking about a cross grain and then you're striking down with that tool like this there's a real good chance of that handle separating sometime later during the use. So for the maximum strength for the wood that's involved we look for grain that runs straight right down through the length of the handle and that grain should be fairly tight with tighter growth rings because the tighter growth rings mean a stronger piece of wood. Other times, and you'll see this more commonly you'll have the sap wood and the other harder wood which is there's a line between it one of the woods white and one is darker. When you have something like that again if you're using it that wood will expand and contract at different rates and through work there's a good chance that even if it's a straight grained handle with these different colored woods you're going to end up with this handle not lasting anywhere near as long as it would with a real nice straight tight grained handle like this first one. When we remove this handle we'll start by sawing it off right along here and once it's sawn it'll be placed in a vise or in a property handling tool and the rest of the handle or the rest of the handle that's inside the head will be pushed out through the top of the head rather than down through the bottom of the head. If an axe head, if the handle is really stuck in an old head you can help by drilling it out from either the top or bottom or both sides. There's a single socket right down through the center of these handles and when you think about laying a head on the handle this head is going to seat right down near the fatter part of the handle so it's going to be down this far so what I'd do before I even began it was I'd take and draw a line across this handle here and I'd cut that off because this much is going to be sticking out I don't want to mess with taking the time to shape that extra piece of wood then we'd take a thin saw, a thin bladed saw and we'd cut and bring this socket down another inch if you look at this handle in profile there's a really big lump right here and then the head comes in here if you take your head and you bring it down as close to that lump as possible you want this lump to blend into this wood and all the stress of chopping is right on this part and that's where these cracks usually develop if you take and you remove some of this wood by rasping it down before you put the handle in you're actually increasing the strength of your overall handle and you're doing two things you're increasing the flex and you're decreasing the chance that this handle will break right at this point I just put my belt sander upside down in the vise and then just start rocking the handle itself on the belt sander and you can take it down real smoothly and efficiently that way and that's turned out to be one of the best things that I've done so it fits tightly and when you put the head on it's only going to slide part way down the handle when you do that you turn the axe handle over the head's part way on it and you pound down with a piece of wood or a rubber hammer and that head will actually slide up the handle as you're pounding down on the wood you'll find that it gets caught you can knock that head back off again with a piece of wood or a hammer you knock the head off and you'll see right on the handle itself where it's digging into the wood or there might be a little bit of mark there and that's where you're going to raft down so the head itself as it slides on will tell you the fat spots where you have to raft off a lot of times it's real easy to raft too far on one side or too far on the other and the head will be setting off from the axis of the handle when the axe head is finally sat down all the way to where you want the head seated square on the handle you've got this hole up on top and we've thrown away our plastic wedge and what we usually use are wooden wedges and we'll drive that wooden wedge as far down into the handle as it goes and then we'll saw off the top of the wedge where it's sticking out and once that's done we'll usually seat it with one or two grady wedges and these are little metal wedges with steps some of the pole axes or single bits that we have will come with a lot heavier handles on them and these single bits often times these are pretty nice handles that they come with they come as blanks it's really rough through here and you'll sand these handles down so they fit your personal hand these handles come varnished and this varnish is not a real advantage in a lot of ways because the handle isn't going to keep it will dry out with the varnish on it if you remove the varnish with sandpaper when you end up with that then you can coat the whole handle with linseed oil and keep the wood really oiled and supple any time we're dealing with work with cutting implements whether they're tools or knives or saws and the better shape they are the more effective they're going to be this is a not atypical Pulaski that we pulled out of the back of a pickup and in addition to sharpness we're also really concerned with the shape of the head if you see how this is rounded and you start thinking about chopping on rounded logs or chopping on rounded limbs thinking of two round objects coming into contact with each other if you look at a squared head or one that's flattened across the cutting surface and if this strikes a rounded object there's going to be a lot less chance of it glancing off and hitting you or ending up in the ground the second part about head shape is if you take a board and you think about a round head coming into contact with this it's only contacting in a very small area of the cutting surface it's contacting at one time when we have so much energy and you're chopping you're not getting a very effective use of your energy for the amount of work that you're putting into it when we look at this head here and we think about it coming into contact with a board there's a lot more efficiency so that's basically what we do with head shape when we start with a lot of tools when they come as blanks and they're not used and we start filing them back to a flattened shape we'll do most of our filing from this point here to this point here and we'll let the edges take care of themselves when we're filing we want to be careful have your gloves on have a file garden handle there when we're filing usually we use a single cut mill bastard file that's either 10 or 12 inches long and the single cut means that there's serrations on the file that are running at an angle to the file but they're only running in one direction this file is used and you only cut on the push stroke you don't pull, you just pick it up and you cut on the push stroke again most of the time that we're filing pilaskies or double-bitted axes we'll drive them into a log or a stump I'll drive the implement that I'm filing at a slight angle so that the top surface that I'm filing is facing slightly towards me so that I don't have to lean over the tool and file directly down into it, I'd rather be able to stay back and file at a slight angle to the tool so I'll end up going down and filing the center of the tool first and then when I have to finish it up I'll finish up by finishing on both ends once this side is finished I'll go around and I'll do the other side and when you end up getting both sides done what you're going to have is a slight wire edge or you can see it by looking in the proper light that wire edge can also be taken off with an axe stone, take the smooth edge we just go real lightly in a circular fashion on that wire edge until it disappears once you have that wire edge there taken it off there's no axes or pilasques that you shouldn't be able to shave with the one way that I can tell very easily is I will take my glove off and I'll take my finger and I'll touch my fingernail to it and if it sinks into the fingernail with no weight it's sharp enough to shave it but I don't bring my finger down bring it so only the fingernail is exposed to that head when we turn over and we go on the chisel edge we do the same thing when we're filing on the chisel edge we end up filing at a much steeper angle and that's to try to keep this cutting edge thicker and this is the part that we use for roots once we're finished with this and it's then we'll usually grease the axe and put it in a sheath if you're proud of the work you're doing you're proud of the tools you're using they're an extension of your hand that's what the first tools were and you take good care of them and you care about the work you do it has to be fun and how we name our tools we name the rocks, we name the logs we name them things you don't want to hear but that makes it fun too and when people are having fun they're more apt to take pride it's just the the good feeling about self-work tools it all really does go together