Spud

Many tools have gained peculiar names over years of use, evolution and passing between cultures.

The Twybyl, is a corruption of “two bill” meaning two blades (one axe like and the other adze like.)  Anvils have a Bick (not horns…) from Beak- but I cannot say what the root of the “Spud” is.

What the tool is, however, is a bark- scraper for de-barking a felled tree prior to hewing, riving or other process.  It consists of a single bevelled blade with a sturdy socket at an angle or “cant”. A long handle, helve or haft is driven in to the socket by ways of carving a closely matched taper and the tool is pushed along the log with the single bevel naturally biting in-between the harder timber and the bark, prying it away in great lengths.

Tools like this have also been used where the bark itself is the product.

When I was first asked to make a “Spud” by a friend and correspondent in the Netherlands, I did at first think of a potato.

 Misleading and slightly silly the name may be, but I think it is important to keeps the old names alive. It’s the facets of an object that intrigue and excite me- by using the correct terms for traditional tools, we are not pedants but instead allow a thing to sit in our culture, heritage and language with its own distinct character.  It also makes me smile.

So a spud it shall remain!

The customer wanted the blade to be a laminate, with a closed socket. The blade also had to have a spur forge welded on- this aids turning the log.

The first part to be made was the socket; this was cut from 4mm mild steel sheet and formed into a tapering tube with the aid of my big fly press before being forge weld over a tapering hexagonal mandrill I had forged.

 

This picture is taken out of chronological order, but it shows the material cross-section once the welding was completed.

 

 

 

One of the reasons there has been no blogging from me for a few weeks is that I have been very busy! This is also the reason why I haven’t been as thorough as I used to with photography, so there are unfortunately no pictures of the welding on this project. But I must ask- how many images of hot metal does the internet really need…?

Apologies all the same.

Back in the order of process, two pieces of steel were forged to the same sizes, one of 0.6 carbon steel and the other of mild. These were forge welded together and a protrusion was forged at the back, to be inserted into the socket.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once the two parts were suitably fitted, I heated the blade and inserted it into the cold socket, with the whole arrangement in the vice the “tang” was spread inside the socket, essentially “riveting” the structure together.  This fix was preliminary to the forge welding phase that firmly bonded the pieces together.









The spur was split away from the body but also re-enforced with additional carbon steel, forge welded all together and drawn out to a sharp point.







After the piece was finished it was wire brushed and thoroughly waxed to protect it.

Gogmagog (The Giant)

I have a friend and now repeated customer who lives in the heart of rural wales. He keeps coming back to me with proposals for interesting projects. Most recently he asked me to make a really big felling axe, around 7 lbs.

 Most modern axes used for forestry are between 1.5 and 3 lbs, with the large Gransfors “American felling axe” coming in at 3 lbs- so 7lbs is quite a lump.

I should add that a 7lbs axe is not a “fantasy” axe. There were many manufacturers from before the age of the chainsaw who made felling axes of 7 or 8lbs- I’m sure there are examples out there of even bigger axes made for serious work.

I’m always excited by projects that are outside of my current experience.  Attempting something dramatically different to what you have done before forces you to work in a different way. With an axe this large every aspect was more difficult with factors like the radiant heat setting fire to my hammers and top sets, the large weight held in tongs making moving the work more tiring and awkward, the large surface area being forge-welded needing particular care to avoid inclusions and again the size of the piece being larger than the flatter on my power hammer.



I have over the past few months been working exclusively with welded eye (as opposed to punched eye) techniques for producing my axes, mostly using variations on the “bowtie” or symmetric wrapped method where thick starting stock is divided either side of the centre (which becomes the poll) the two thinner projections from either side are folded forward and welded together to form the eye.  Because of the size of this axe, I decided that the wrapped method was not the way to go, instead I wanted to use a method I had read about in Jim Kauffman’s “American Axes” which described forging two separate halves in symmetry then welding them together with the edge steel as a third piece. The benefit of this method would be the good access to the interior of the eye, allowing it to be carefully formed.

I had tried this method once before with a nano 2oz  axe and it worked well. So, I was keen to get on it- it also meant that fifty percent of the axe was being heated whilst the other was being worked, this makes sense with large pieces of steel as it takes much longer to work and you can only work so much before it is too cool.

The starting stock was two pieces of plate, 20x 120x 75mm. These were marked at the centre then an area 30mm across was marked out off-centre, this division is what would become the eye, if it was marked out centrally, then you would have an even amount of mass either side of the eye, meaning that the point of balance of the as yet un-steeled axe would also be in the exact middle of the stock. This would be ineffective as the stock will be forged out, redistributing the weight, causing a hafted axe to droop in the hand as it would be “bit heavy”. To compensate for this and also to move the point of balance (hereafter referred to as POB) forward to the first quartile of the eye, the stock was divided thusly.

Because the material was too wide for my power-hammer ( I currently only have the one block which is divided into a fuller and a flatter.) we had to work the metal traditionally, with striking and the use of “top-sets”- firstly fullering to divide the stock then set hammers and flatters, all interspersed with direct hammer work, manoeuvring all about the anvil. It is a pleasure to work like this with my father, it is too noisy and too quick to talk between blows, so cat calls, shouts and yelps signal stop-an-go, heavier, faster, slower- I wish that there was enough work for us to forge like this often, which is why I so enjoyed this chance to have at it.

Heres a quick video which is, as usual, very noisy!

 

 

Once both sides were fully worked, they were offered up and found to match together well. Here they are shown with my Gransfors for scale. We begin to get the impression for the scale.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The internal faces were ground clean to give the welding the best start, they were brought together with the steel inserted. The piece was then brought up to heat and welded under the hammer.

Loudness abounds, man.


After the welds were set, it was a case of pulling the steel into the right shape.

 

 

 

 

Here it shows the point of balance being the front of the eye, as anticipated.


Here’s hardening.

And here’s finished.

The customer was really keen to haft it himself so he felled an ash tree and cut a piece a few weeks before the axe was ready and dried next to the stove, weighing it each day. When he received the head and the haft was ready he put it together and sent me these pictures. The haft is 44 inches long and weighs a few pounds itself.

I think the axe finished up beautifully, it has great character and presence and cuts beautifully too. I’m proud of this piece but also grateful to have been given the chance to work in a new way .  

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Gogmagog

Gogmagog is a giant from British mythology, given the size grandeur of this axe and its Celtic Locale, I started calling it ‘magog from an early stage in its life.

It seemed to suit.

Stock Knife

 

 

Last August, at the National forest wood fair at Beacon Hill, I met a traditional Windsor chair maker.

A few months later he visited the workshop and we discussed our shared interest in old tools and how interconnected our two crafts used to be.

 

We also chatted about Stock Knives.

“What is a stock knife?” – is the first question many people ask.

A stock knife is a distinctive, long woodworking tool that has a strong handle, a blade of one kind or another and crucially a hook and eye bolt that secure the tool to a sturdy bench. It is a hand tool with a machine like action that uses leverage to maximum effect. A stock knife, when used well, produces unique cuts in green timber- you try doing a continuous curve over several inches with any other tool. What makes the device special is the union of power and control the user has as the blade is always in contact with the work; it never chops like a swung axe. Instead, it is applied to the timber and the pushed through it, past it. The blade is fixed at one end through an eye bolt allowing tremendous force to be exerted without the tool moving out of the plane.

 

 

 

 

I love them. I think they are very clever and wonderfully sculptural.

Here is someone who really knows the tool, Jeremy Atkinson.

 

 

I should say that there is some variety in types. There are smaller pegging knives which have a similar appearance to the massive clogging knives but there are also the fascinating French Paroir that use the same principles but take a different form. 

 

Here is the tool I produced for the chairmaker.

The handle, blade and hook were all forged from separate pieces and forge-welded together.

Novgorod Hook Knife

 

 

A short while ago I was asked to produce a replica of this artefact (bottom of image), found at the famous excavations at Novgorod, Russia.  The digs there have brought a huge wealth of objects forward detailing ordinary life, wealth and belief in the city between 10^th and 15^th centuries.

http://users.stlcc.edu/mfuller/NovgorodMetalp.html

 

These finds are so important, as we tend to focus on marshal aspects of society when we look back at those times. Shiny things, gold items, swords and crowns usually capture the eye, but to me these humble objects are of equal value.

 It’s also fascinating to me how little these ordinary objects are unchanged by time. A successful design was realised early on and remained as such until the 20^th century where many regions of Europe still made wooden table ware commonly.

 

All I had to work from was the image shown and by best judgment and understanding of materials and methods of the time.

Until the modern era, hardenable edge steel was a metal of value approaching that of silver and as such was used sparingly.  The reason for its value was the amount of labour involved in its manufacture, with many ^hours^ between quarrying the ore, smelting, carburisation and refinement. All of which was undertaken, of course, by hand. All fuelled by charcoal which its self was felled, coaled and transported etc. So we can see that in the same way as modern commerce, trade and commodity were costly endeavours and this was reflected in the final product.

To make the steel “go further”, blacksmiths, weapon makers and tool smiths would use cunning methods of forgewelding steel onto simpler, cheaper “wrought iron” like materials.   

With these pressures on the historic blacksmith in mind, I forged this blade with the same ethos using some “shear steel” ( wrought iron that has been worked and re worked to expel excess amounts of silica but also held at high temperature for sustained periods in a container packed tightly with a carbon rich material such as charcoal or hoof. At these high temperatures, the carbon diffuses in to the iron, allowing it eventually to be hardened when quenched.) And wrought iron (the ubiquitous blacksmith material, until the mid 20^th century.  Wrought contains low amounts of carbon, sulphur, silica and some other alloying elements all of which enter the metal when it is smelted with coal. It has been called a crude material for it tendency to split when worked at lower temperatures, but I find it very evocative to work with as its low carbon content makes it incredibly smooth and soft to forge. It also has a distinctive smell. At high temperatures, the silica liquefies and is expelled with each hammer stroke but it also has interesting values as a fluxing agent, assisting with forgewelding.).

 

Both of these pieces of material are themselves considerably old. The shear steel was found by a friend when metal detecting on his land and is an old file- when files ceased being made from shear, I cant tell you but I know they were commonly made from “cast steel” (an early, homogenised low silica carbon steel) from the mid 19^th c, so its my assumption that the file predates that era, by how much, I couldn’t say. The piece of wrought is salvage from a derelict railing, also 19^th century.

Interesting point for all you metal smiths out there, wrought iron that is round stock was generally of much higher refinement than square stock from the same time. This was because lower quality iron would have been ripped apart when passed through the rollers. So, if you have a choice between round and square, use the square for your etched, gnarly blades and the round for fine forging on restoration jobs.

 

The first job was to “knock down” the pieces to a similar size so that they could be joined together, I also had to fold and weld the shear steel to itself.

 

 

The billet of shear was crimped over at the end to allow the wrought to be inserted and welded together. I’ve seen this kind of weld prep illustrated in how they used to “steel” chisels.  It was satisfying to use no other joining methods than this.

 

Iron inside, wrapped in shear steel.

 

 

 

 

Once the steel was fully welded, the “tang” was drawn down and folded over to cover the first weld seam and welded again. This drew the steel into the core of the tang adding an amount of spring and resilience once the blade was hardened.

 

The steeled “blade” is in the tongs, the tang being welded.

 

Once the piece was forged out, a first grind was done to establish the bevel, exposing the steel on the edge but leaving the Iron on the “top” of the blade. After the grind, the blade was shaped over the anvil a little more grinding and finally hardened.

 

You can see the steel edge revealed here.

 

The shear steel took a good hardness, so I sharpened the tool and gave it a light etch to reveal the construction in the blade.

 

I should also mention that the tool is left handed.

 

This was an interesting project and so enjoyable to use the ancient materials.