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ABRAMS BOOKS - Buchanan-Smith Peter Buchanan-Smith

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226 pages

English

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A must-have compendium for the axe-wielding adventurer by one of the industry's leading tastemakers Buchanan-Smith's Axe Handbook is a trusted resource for anyone looking to reconnect with handcraft and the outdoors. Beautifully designed and lavishly illustrated, this handbook will inspire readers to rediscover the great outdoors. Peter Buchanan-Smith founded Best Made Co. in 2009 because he loved making things with his hands and wanted to start a company that would not only celebrate the inherent beauty of timeless, utilitarian tools, but would also inspire people to get out from behind their screens and experience the natural world. From the basics and fundamentals of handling and owning an axe to the details on how to find the right axe to everything a reader must know about use and maintenance, this stylish, informative axe guide is ideal for anyone interested in the outdoors. .

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Rural crafts

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Publié par	ABRAMS BOOKS
Date de parution	11 mai 2021
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9781647000110
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	8 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0932€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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HOFFMAN BLACKSMITHING NEWLAND, NORTH CAROLINA

US FOREST SERVICE SACO RANGER STATION CONWAY, NEW HAMPSHIRE

DIVISION OF ENGINEERING PROGRAMS THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK NEW PALTZ, NEW YORK

MIZUNO SEISAKUJO SANJO, JAPAN

THE AXE MUSEUM AT GR NSFORS BRUKS NORTHERN H LSINGLAND, SWEDEN
CATSKILL MOUNTAINS ANDES, NEW YORK

Contents
Introduction
A Little History
KNOWING
1. Anatomy of an Axe
2. Axe-onomy
3. What Makes a Good Axe?
4. Dynamics of the Head
5. Making
6. Dynamics of the Helve
7. Dynamics of the Strike
8. Dynamics of Wood
BUYING
9. Buying New
10. Buying Old
11. Identifying Marks and Labels
12. Notable (and Extinct) Axe Makers to Collect
USING
13. Safety
14. Sharpening
15. Splitting
16. Limbing and Bucking
17. A Few Words on Felling
18. Small Axe Work
MAINTAINING
19. Hanging
20. Restoration
21. Adorning
22. Storing, Handling, Upkeep
Index
Resources, Credits, Locations
Acknowledgments
Very humble objects, like old tools, had the direct elegance generated by a culture sensitive to the requirements of that tool and its user. Style is the way things, ideas, attitudes take form. Style is the tangible aspect of intangible things.
-Massimo Vignelli
To my mother (the artist) and my father (the scientist)
Foreword
This book is a love letter to my favorite tool. It s the culmination of my personal learnings, so it s purposefully subjective. That s why I called it Buchanan-Smith s Axe Handbook and not The Axe Handbook . It s a reflection of the lore, history, and best practices of this surprisingly mysterious tool as I have come to understand it. Axes are deeply personal: to me, to the contributors of this book, to Robert Frost ( this page ), and to a growing number of so many enthusiasts. I hope I can help make it personal for you, too.
That s me on the right, on the remote Japanese island of Yakushima, with the axe I designed for Best Made (photograph by Tetsuya Ito).
Introduction
My first axe
I recall my father s felling axe, a fixture of the family farm in Canada, where I was born and raised. I remember its shapely curved helve with a fawn s foot handle dipped in bright yellow paint for easy spotting if it was ever left in the long grass or deep snow. I remember the axes from the canoe trips I took at Ahmek, a historic boys camp in Algonquin Park in northern Ontario. We d paddle and portage for weeks, equipped with not much more than maps, paddles, cedar-strip canoes, outsized green duck-canvas turtle packs with leather straps. We loaded them with sleeping bags packed in black garbage bags and then lashed an axe to the side. I recall the guide, Dave Conacher, a legend at my camp who taught us that with an axe you could do just about anything in the wilderness, and that without it you were done for.
An object of beauty and utility
I recall the nameless axe that I bought on eBay in 2009. It was an elegant old felling axe with a well-worn helve and a head with a patina that had stories to tell. Years later, I brought it up to the cabin I d eventually purchase in the Catskill Mountains. But for months it rested in a corner of my workshop in New York City. An object of beauty and utility. An emblem of simplicity. From its corner, that axe saw me through a divorce, the death of my dog, and my biggest career change. It saw me say goodbye to all that, and was there when I planted the first seeds of a special sideline project that would grow to become my life s work. In fact, it inspired it.
Best Made Company
Best Made Company started in my garage. It was just me, a few cans of bright enamel paint, a tub of marine spar varnish, and a dozen axes. Best Made came to be known for its bright, bold, graphic, colorful axes-axes made to my specifications by Council Tool, a third-generation forge on the shores of Lake Waccamaw, North Carolina. We didn t just promote and sell axes. We told stories about them. We showed our customers how to use them and restore them. In our catalogs, we showed them being swung in the wild places where they belonged (even if some of our customers were only hanging them in their Tribeca apartments). We shipped thousands of axes to every conceivable corner of the world. Before Best Made, axes were most often relegated to a toolshed. Now they were hanging in art galleries, museums, and boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies. The Best Made product line grew into the hundreds-from axes to first-aid kits to toolboxes to chambray shirts to high-performance down jackets-and in less than ten years we were a full-fledged retail brand with thriving online and catalog sales and stores in New York and Los Angeles.
The axe is embedded in our DNA
Working the retail floor at Best Made, I d watch customers pick up an axe for the first time. There was always that quiet awe. They d remark on its weight and sharpness. Sometimes they were speechless. I think that s because the axe-unlike any other tool, maybe any other object-is deeply embedded in our DNA. It s the oldest tool known to humankind, and when you hold one, let alone swing one, you re connecting to an ancient muscle memory.
I took to the hills of the Catskills
I left Best Made in part to write this book; it has been many years in the making. To tell the story of the axe, I had to listen to the stories of others. So I rounded up axes from all over the world; I scoured the flea markets of the Northeastern Seaboard. I gave old axes new edges. And I gathered friends and we took to the hills of my property in the Catskill Mountains. I met with US Forest Service trail workers, burgeoning axe forges in Maine and North Carolina, makers of premium synthetic diamond stones, third-generation lumbermen, and lifelong axe collectors. I watched as engineers snapped axes under pressure tests in a pristine lab in Upstate New York.
From Sweden to Broadway
I dug deep into my notes of past adventures, too. I recalled the night I slept at the Gr nsfors Bruks axe factory in Sweden after a meal of surstr mming (rancid herring) with owner Gabriel Branby. I revisited the first axe restoration class that my friend and former colleague Nick Zdon and I taught at the Best Made workshop at 368 Broadway: It was just Nick and myself, three young dudes, and a tiny woman my mother s age who turned out to be one of the most ardent axe enthusiasts I ve ever met.
When I started Best Made I saw the axe beginning to disappear from hardware store shelves, and from conversations and culture in general. Ten years have passed and I am happy to say I see a lot more axes out there: on social media, in stores, and for sale online. I hope Best Made played a part in that. When I started Best Made there were only three axe forges in the United States. Now I count five. (I know this sounds small, but establishing a forge in the twenty-first century is no small task.) But even with the renewed interest in the tool, books and other resources about it are scarce. This book is designed, like a good axe, as both tool and inspiration-I hope that it will serve an invaluable role in the lives of beginners and experts alike.
A 1789 advertisement for one of the first examples of the poll axe. (source: American Axes , by Henry J. Kauffman, 1972)
A Little History
The unfolding continuum
The axe is the oldest tool known to humankind, and it s the result of thousands and thousands of years of axe makers subjecting the tool to one of the most powerful forces of change that humans can commit: the act of tinkering. From the very beginning, human beings have sought to make the axe sharper, more balanced, and more efficient. They ve strived to make a perfectly simple thing even more perfect. Here s the history that shaped the axe you hold in your hands, admittedly with a bias toward the nineteenth century, which saw an explosion in both making the axe and marketing it. I hope that reading it will place you along a continuum that began hundreds of thousands of years ago, and right in the middle of a story that s still unfolding today.
From stone to steel
The very earliest iterations of axes were created around 2 million years ago from stones by early hominids, who chipped off bits of material to create a jagged cutting edge. The two-sided stone hand axe came about around 600,000 BCE. Axe knowledge spread quickly through the civilized world: Some archaeologists estimate that about half of the world s populated areas at that point were using hand axes. Remarkably, they were fairly standardized: Material aside, a hand adze from that period found in modern-day England is indistinguishable from one found in East Africa.
The first helved axe
The first helved axes probably came about in what is now northern Europe during the Middle Stone Age (10,000 to 8000 BCE), when a cutting edge was sharpened onto the base of a reindeer antler. By 7500 BCE, northern forest people-in the equivalent of modern-day Denmark-created an axe-like tool by joining a chipped flint celt to an antler helve. This created a better cutting edge than the antlers themselves did, which could be used to cut down small trees and make dugout boats. The first helved stone axe was created just a little later, around 7000 BCE.
From there stone axes got thinner and sharper, until they became copper around 3000 BCE, then bronze, then iron. Between 500 and 200 BCE, a heavy wedge-shaped axe with an oval shaft hole started to be produced, usually by folding a rectangular piece of iron around an oval bar to form the hole (or eye). The ends of the billet were then forged together, and hammered to create a cutting edge (or bit ).
Bronze, iron, steel
By 1000 CE, Vikings were using a double-bit broad axe that weighed about 3 pounds (1.4 kg), with a hardened or tempered cutting edge laid onto the axe s head. There was also another, narrower, Viking axe design, which was sometimes used as a weapon but more often as a felling and trimming axe. This design was used all thr