Axe heads heated for deep cold weather

R

Robley

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I have been listening to the audiobook version of a series by Ralph Moody. In "The Fields Of Home" Ralph and his grandfather are going out to fell some blight damaged chestnut trees for a barn. When they arrive grandfather tells Ralph to start a fire because the axe heads need to be heated if they are not to bounce right off the trees in this cold. Is this a real thing? What explains it?

Thanks,

Robley
 
Robley said:
I have been listening to the audiobook version of a series by Ralph Moody. In "The Fields Of Home" Ralph and his grandfather are going out to fell some blight damaged chestnut trees for a barn. When they arrive grandfather tells Ralph to start a fire because the axe heads need to be heated if they are not to bounce right off the trees in this cold. Is this a real thing? What explains it?

Thanks,

Robley
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I've never heard of this, but fire is a good way to ruin the temper of the steel.
I don't even know why you would need heat anyways.
 
Yes, warm your axe when it is cold out.

Warming%20your%20axe.png

Chipped_Pulaski.jpg
 
The finer and sharper the blade is, the more vulnerable it is to breaking when chopping in cold weather. 40+ years ago a buddy of mine (and his new bride) tried living in a wood-heated uninsulated summer cottage (near Ottawa, Ontario) for a year and he and I chopped a lot of firewood during that time. Dutch Elm Disease had passed through a few years earlier and 1000s of standing-dead trees were 'free for the taking' throughout the countryside. We dropped and bucked trees with a chainsaw and skidded the rounds out on a toboggan (and later on via a car hood behind a SkiDoo) to his pickup truck every weekend. We accidentally discovered that elm was much easier to split when the temperatures were below 0 F (-20 C). We stopped using sharp thin-bladed axes to do this because they'd thoroughly stick before the round split, and the blades readily dulled or chipped. A heavy thick-taper already-dulled ax turned out to be 'just the ticket' for productivity and it was us that wound up routinely 'warming up' in front of the fire instead.
 
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I imagine fire might ruin the temper of an axe if you actually put the axe in the fire...
That isn't what is suggested, at least I don't think it is.
Next to it would probably just warm it one would think?

Here is another mention of the practice.
Agent_H said:
I've read through his site quite a bit and missed it then I realized that it was created December 12, 2016. That is a really well put together site.

His scanned book page a little way down has some Finnish text on it that was interesting:

MTO_18.jpg


https://northernwildernesskills.blo...howComment=1481757867425#c4884596261083006500

"The axe is not to be thrown in the workplace. Nor is it to be used as a wedge or wedge shot. If temperature is below freezing the blade is heated up before starting work, either by rubbing or the glow of the fire, not the fire itself, or it will break. A broken arm (varsi - handle) is immediately replaced. When the axe is not used, it must be kept in a warm room well greased"

Google also translated "varsi" as "grandfather" which made me smile.
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Ernest DuBois said:
I stick the bit up under my arm-pit and hold it there a minute of two. Then again it won't be getting that cold in my area any more.
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You won't want to do that around here at -30 C. In order to do this outdoors you have to expose yourself through opening-up layers of coats, sweaters and shirts and then wind up having the steel stick to your armpit like a wet tongue on a steel railing. Consequences of frost burn and heat burn are (and feel) almost the same. Stuffing an axe under a coat for a short period (well away from exposed skin) may be a 'feel good' proposition for the user but does very little to warm up an ax.
It's true though; doing 'something' is always better than doing 'nothing'.
 
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This makes sense now, I wonder how you'd do it without risking the heads temper ?
Rest th head on a pile of heated rocks for a few minutes ?
 
Just heat until warm to the touch. You can apply a propane torch to the cheeks and let the heat spread out to the bit. So long as you can touch the bit there's no chance of harming the temper. I've taken a cigarette lighter to the bit for a minute or two. On cold days it may take 2 minutes before you feel any appreciabale heat in the bit from a cigarette lighter. But that's enough to prevent chipping.
 
Maybe....

On the scale of temperatures used for hardening and tempering steel, I'm pretty skeptical that this would be a problem. On the other hand, I have certainly seen stranger things well documented so I wouldn't rule it out.

I typically only believe such things once I've either experienced the cause, effect, and cure myself, or have seen some credible engineering or scientific study of the question. As it so rarely gets much below 10 Fahrenheit (that's -12 C) here, I doubt I'll have a chance to experience this myself, so if I want to know the answer I'll have to look for some engineering on it.
 
Many common low-alloy carbon steels are known for being rendered brittle by cold.
 
Yes, it is plausible, just as it is plausible that an edge will be ever so slightly softer at 100 F. The question is one of scale and effect.

But as the old saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data.
 
What we're talking about is called the ductile-brittle-transistion temperature (dbtt). It varies by steel type and alloying elements. In general increased carbon content raises the dbtt of a steel - i.e., high carbon steels become brittle at higher temperatures than low carbon steels.

It's been difficult to find really good specific data on the types of steel we might find in axes. However the pdf below is relevant. It is for 1045 C steel (both hot rolled and cold rolled), something we might find in a common axe. See the graph on page 16. What the graph indicates is that this steel begins imbrittlement at about 50°F. Toughness is in a freefall from 32°F to 0°F and then flattens out around -50°F.

https://www.uakron.edu/dotAsset/2116623.pdf

Cold 1045 steel.png
 
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I just kinda cringe at "steel with frost in it." Steel simply does not hold any moisture in it; if it did you could put it in a press and squeeze it like a sponge.
 
That is a lot better, though that plot does have way too much spread to which to fit a curve with much confidence - the max and min at some temperatures are of the same scale as the curve itself! That tells me there are flaws in the set up she used (probably was not all that frictionless), but the basic premise does support what you're saying (so thanks for digging it up so quickly).

I was thinking about this more while working today - even granting the increased embrittlement over the range of freezing to deeply cold (say -30F) - how long will a warmed ax head stay warm enough to keep from chipping? How often do you warm it up?
 
If you read the pdf you'll see how they deal statistically with the outliers and find another corrected graph with that data. Basically that 2nd graph shows that cold rolled steel drops off the cliff later than hot rolled and much more drastically.
 
Well, I didn't want to harp on it, but I did read enough to be less than impressed. Those statistical methods she's using are appropriate for experiments with hundreds if not thousands of data points, but not for a study as small as this one appears to be. I say appears because I have not found a discussion of sample size - admittedly I'm skipping around a bit. If the sample size is actually quite large, then the problems indicated by the spread in the "shelf" areas would be vastly more serious.

As science goes, this paper is pretty deeply flawed*, but it is still useful to illustrate the phenomenon, and to get some ballpark numbers on the temperature ranges. So even though I'm criticizing this paper, it did serve your needs well - to illustrate that there is something to this question of warming an ax head to prevent chipping.

*The biggest flaw -one does not remove outliers when they suggest a physically improbable condition - all her words, not mine. One professor I worked for would crucify students for that sort of data massaging.
 
S serotina -- the info is out there if you feel interested enough to just Google it. :) A key term is "ductile to brittle transition" and, as previously mentioned, it's a well-documented and -researched phenomenon to the point of there being steels formulated specifically for industrial uses in low-temperature applications. In axes, this is mostly important if the axe has been allowed to sit in extreme cold for an extended period, as friction from chopping will quickly warm up the bit.
 
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