French trade axes

[Raymond Richard]

Finished these up yesterday. This is a style I've been thinking about making for over a year and finally got around to trying it. There's so many different styles of this ax I decided to go with this one what ever that means. Here's the Mother and her off spring. Both heads were forged from solid bar 1065. Mother has a ash haft, the son has a curley maple haft. The father must have been a doug fir. Here's an interesting link: http://www.lanouvelle-france.com/

[McAhron]

Ma and pup,aint they so cute

[B.Finnigan]

Those are nice Ray, very clean, simple and sturdy looking. Are you making your own handles? I want to start doing tear drop or oval eyes but I am not a wood carver (yet) and I dont want the wood handles to be limited to only what is pre-made.

[Raymond Richard]

Brent, The larger hafts are premade. The little ones I'm making. With the premade ones at least for me there's still a good deal of work envolved fitting and finishing them. The little ones are actually more time consumming than if I was making regular size ones. I keep trying to figure out a better way of making them but so far I haven't.

[Alan L]

Nice ones, Ray! Well done on the notch.

Brent, just 'cause the eye is a teardrop doesn't limit you to premade handles. Like Raymond said, even with the premades there's a lot of fitting to do. If you've got some rasps and scrapers you can do it just fine with any roughly-sized hunk of wood! I've been known to bandsaw a rough blank and then shape it with drawknife and spokeshave, followed by rasps and scrapers. Takes about an hour to fit one up that way.

[B.Finnigan]

My wife just got me a wood lathe a couple weeks ago so I can at least make some rounded hafts out of whatever wood I choose. I have plenty of rasps and I made a draw knife last month so I guess I better get busy.

I am still trying to get hot steel to go where I want it and now you guys are telling I have to become a wood carver to?