Sharpening Axes

Nic Westermann gets to grips with an edge-damaged tool

This month, in the absence of any tool to sharpen from a reader, I will cover sharpening my own axe. It’s one I made about 10 years ago and, although a favourite of mine, it’s not the best steel and as such can be rather susceptible to edge damage. I used it to shape a demo piece at Harrogate Power Tool Show last year and, although the wood was very soft alder, there must have been some earth pressed into it when it was cut as the edge suffered quite badly. When I carried on carving, my knives suffered no edge damage on the freshly exposed surface, so it wasn’t embedded mineralisation that can sometimes happen – although in my experience that’s more common in poplar and cherry. The edge damage was relatively minor – not huge chips but a series of tiny notches rather than a general dulling of the edge as I would have expected from clean wood.

First, as ever, some theory. What bevel do we want to achieve and why? Axes are used for many different jobs and the grind for splitting firewood, felling a tree or hewing a beam are all different. I used mine for shaping and it is capable of surprisingly fine control – it is perfectly possible to follow and even split a pencil line with some practice. And you can remove waste at a really good rate.

A carving (shaping) axe, like a knife, benefits greatly from a flat bevel. It’s worth remembering that, unless you are ambidextrous, only one bevel will be contacting the wood so you don’t necessarily need to keep to an asymmetric grind. I do, but only because I’m left-handed and it is nice to be able to pass an axe to a customer to try without worrying that they are right- handed. I no longer make axes to sell so it’s no longer a major consideration and sooner or later I think I will be converting them to a LH bias. So, while I’ll demonstrate sharpening a symmetrical grind, I’ll mention the benefits of an asymmetric one.

First, let’s look at how an axe cuts. When carving, there is a divergence between the centreline of the head and the direction of the cut. This can create a bit of tipping action which will make the head feel unstable. The closer you can bring the bevel that engages the wood to the centreline of the axe, the more controlled it will be. However, if you bring the bevel completely in line with the centreline, as in a side or hewing axe, that whole side becomes a bevel – this makes it so stable that it can’t really do anything but cut flat. Perfect for beams, not so good for spoon blanks, a slightly sided axe such as that shown can be useful, although symmetrical bevelled axes are still probably the most common bevel form. I should perhaps also mention that, although the angle of the bevel contacting the wood compared to the centreline of the head varies in all these cases, the overall bevel angle remains constant – somewhere around 30°.

Whatever general bevel form you choose, where the bevel contacts the wood needs to be as flat as you can get it. The support from the bevel helps a great deal to stop the axe bouncing out of the cut.

I am going to show sharpening by hand as this is much more realistic than sharpening under power. Without either a jig or experience in sharpening you can make things much worse very quickly. As axes are heavy it is much easier to use a block against the axe bevel rather than move the axe over the abrasive. Depending on the hardness of your axe, you could use a file to do this initial clean-up. I find this a bit too extreme though, especially in this case. The depth of the teeth of a file and the resultant scratches would be less than the depth of the chip I was trying to remove. It is generally not a good idea to use a soft stone such as a Japanese water stone in this way – they seem to be very susceptible to being gouged by the edge and it can take a long time to flatten them again.

I used our new PSA diamond films stuck to a plastic pad. Using the coarsest grit, around 30, it was a quick job to cut the bevels flat and get past the tiny nicks in the edge. The coarser scratch pattern made it easy to see where you were actually removing steel and make the necessary adjustments.

It is really frustrating to cut the bevels on both sides, then go down through the grits only to test the edge and find there is still one last nick in it. It is at this point the temptation to tip the abrasive into the edge to remove the last f law is highest. Try to avoid it as axes, like many other tools, cut so much better without a micro-bevel.

I now test the edge before moving away from the coarsest grit. In the past I have tested blades by cutting soft end grain. Any nicks in the edge will show up as white streaks. However, on a really coarse grit such as this, the quality of the cut as a whole won’t be great and it won’t be so obvious what is going on. You can test by cutting paper, this works reasonably well. Your edge won’t cut very cleanly but if it comes to an abrupt stop at the same point every time there is a good chance that you have a flaw left.

The method I trialled this time is one that I have seen before but never liked. You very gently run a fingernail along the whole length of the edge – it’s safer, or maybe I should say less dangerous, if you have a long nail. It still doesn’t appeal to me but it’s amazing how sensitive this method is, you can easily feel every single nick in an edge, and immediately feel when it’s sharpened out. Despite this, it is not something I recommend as the potential to cut yourself is high if you aren’t careful.

When you are happy it is just a question, as ever, of refining the edge you have created by working down through the grits. Realistically this is an axe and won’t be producing the final finish so there is noneed to go to a really high grit. This is a habit I find hard to break, I stopped at 2000 grit this time. If nothing else, the higher level of grit and thus surface finish makes it much easier to see where you are honing when resharpening and doing the initial cut with the coarse abrasive.

As an aside, for Christmas I was given a mandolin, a guillotine-like cutting board for cooking. It came with cut-proof gloves, and I knew from its reputation why they were included. But I deal with sharp blades every day and it seemed like a simple enough operation, so I shunned them – 30 seconds later I sliced the side of my thumb off! It has been an exceptionally painful injury to work with in the cold weather we have been having. It made me realise how vulnerable we are when trying out new techniques, however experienced we think we are. The hold on the honing pad has the potential to cut you and I would recommend wearing a glove at this point. I didn’t for the shots I took as I was trying to balance the axe, block and camera with only two hands, and needed all the feel and grip I could, plus, I hate to spoil it for you, but I wasn’t actually sharpening at this point.

Axes are not a commonly used tool but are amazingly versatile in the right hands. If you don’t have one, a good-quality pattern can of ten be picked up at a car boot sale for very little money, it doesn’t have to be as extreme a pattern as mine, and with a little fettling, sharpening and practice you will soon be able to rough forms out very quickly and accurately.

The sharpening clinic is open

As the name suggests, I would like to help carvers with sharpening problems – this will allow me to focus my articles on tools that are relevant to you, the readership.

I am looking for readers to send a brief email with a description of the tool, the sharpening equipment they are using and problems they are having. Please do not send images at this stage as it clogs up my email system far too quickly. I will try to answer all emails but will only be selecting one tool per article. You would then send the tool to me at your expense, I will sharpen it and make it the subject of the article and send it back to you at my expense.

Turnaround will be up to a month as I will need to get the tool well before the deadline to be certain I can fulfil my obligation to WC of turning in a quality article each issue. If not selected, please do not send me your tools. I don’t have time to sharpen them in my day-to-day business, and I don’t have the budget to return them to you if you do. Also, due to the time scales involved with overseas post, currently this is only open to carvers in the UK.

If you are interested, and I hope you are, then please email me:
nic.westermann@btconnect.com

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