I bought a job lot of old, hand-forged hatchets for a very good price. They are all pretty beaten up, and two need new handles, but there is life in them yet!
This one is my favourite, an old Kent pattern hand axe. I made a leather sheaf for it during my lunch break (you can see it in one of the photos, maybe I'll take photographs of the process next time) and I felt like sharpening it this evening.
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Axe with home-made leather sheaf
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Edge before sharpening. It's pretty gnarly.
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Using a whetstone. I also used some 150 grit sandpaper and a coarse diamond stone.
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Getting there, slowly. Lots still to come off.
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There is now clean steel along the whole cutting edge.
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Trying to show the edge. It's hard to focus!
Small-holding, coppice and grassland management on a 16-acre site.
Long time lurker first time Badge earner (fingers crossed). I recently restored an old axe to help split wood on our property. I realised that I should've kept progress pics for that transformation. (I have kept the pictures of me adding in splines to the other for any relevant badges that might exist). I restored this hatchet so that I could use it to build a round wood mallet (pictures to come).
Fun rainy day project and hopefully this puts me on the BB board!
This is the axe in its original condition (note the upside down nature of the head)
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Found an offcut of h3 treated timber and roughly shaped it to take the head.
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clamped it down safely and hit it with the wire brush and WD40 then you probably can't see it but drew a 2mm vivid line for the microbevel
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Bastard filed to the line then increased the angle for the microbevel
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Final result
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I was going to cut the handle short but I quite like the option of having it longer and I am going to shape the handle a bit better for more ergonomics in the future.