Axe Work

E

Ernest DuBois

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Mar 2, 2013
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Having recently spent some of that good old quality time with many experienced and excellent carpenters out in Germany I gained new appreciation for the work of notching, over technique, a means of improved efficiency, and the added value of doing it with care and precision, the notching process takes on a new prominence in relation to the whole. The wood, uncooperative Douglas Fir, (all the more need for a well done notch) and the staging far to high for the likes of someone like myself, (still admittedly easy-going on the back) but surprising how a few simple insights can ease the work load and lead to those more positive results.
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control for the top and bottoms
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Good notch
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Bad notch
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WE notch in the German way with two, feet solidly planted on the ground facing the work. As the rhythm builds the work speeds along with minimal expending of effort and to include great accuracy.
 
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Nice pictures. I notice the pitsaw in the background, I've fooled with one of those a couple times. It's all a lot of work, but amazing what manpower can do with the right techniques.
 
Yes, more pit saws than axes showing up up there, but the saws were equally employed and even more so since each beam had at least two sawn surfaces and some broken down even further than that with the saws. The saws were brand new, out of Wuppertal I think, my own simple cross-cut coming from that same factory, made for the occasion by copying an hundred year-old example found there in the area.
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Some time got devoted to getting them to saw equally good in both the Douglas Fir and the Quercus robur and after tuning up they sawed really well, no technical difficulties as I had imagined prior to doing it, in that it was easy to keep them sawing precisely to a line, top and bottom. Also they are faster than what I had imagined. I'm afraid the bulk of the work is self imposed between the team of sawers because when you can work well together and the one does not end up outpacing the other or some other imbalance occurring, the work is not too bad. I say that even though I intentionally avoided sawing duties when possible after my initiatory go at it. Interesting for the experience but it's work that never really calls to me, unlike it does to others so I was happy to leave it to them. I think there were 17 new saws put to use out there.
 
First, thanks for that information about Douglas Fir in Europe Square-peg. I'm afraid though that the growing conditions, in the places where it has commonly been planted here, do the trees - at least in terms of timber use - no good. They simply grow to fast resulting in that spongy wood with far too few yearly growth rings in 9 of ten of the cases and an excess of big knots. Further it seems, from the glut of it on the market these days, to have displaced the far more suitable pines and larch and so in my opinion is nothing short of a (entirely predictable, (in hindsight of course)) disaster and I avoid Douglas Fir of European origin whenever the suggestion for possible use comes up. Thinking back on my recent romping in the Bitteroots of Montana, the DF here and the DF there seem wildly different from each other.
The carpenters running this project being quite entrepreneurial were quick to monetize the wood waste separating the bigger pieces and bagging the finer wood-chips for selling at the market, the sawdust having no commercial potential got left on the ground for humus. Still, your point about making sure the dimensions of the stems are just big enough to get the timbers wanted is an important element of doing the work this way and in my experience when those two are not in alignment it is a reflection of lost knowledge and the shameful inefficiencies of modern techniques and the contradictions of wood harvesting and use in a system of high specialization where the parts are separate and distinct activities. In the end it is just another indication of the reality that the slow, labor intensive work is in fact, considering the whole picture, very competitive in relation to the industrialized capital intensive version. An example is when we would shift the timbers from the hewing spots up onto the saw trestles. With 20 or 15 lifting the stem of 10 meters it was no stress or strain and we were much faster and agile than the big stinking loader.
 
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Besides notching, there comes surfacing, an important consideration. And in this regard the preferred staging made all technique employed on this occasion,less important or relevant to me personally because I am not convinced the heights shown are the right ones,inducing a necessary perpendicular surfacing action when I like the looks of one that is oblique, but there you have the nature of subjectivity in your nut's shells.
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The Northern Europeans leaving their marks too, well, they're entitled. These ones looking very Baltic.
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Sure. It's all incomplete, me being that poor at picture-taking and busy with other matters, for that matter, to make enough pictures. I'll lay out what I meant conveying in the ones above. The above pictures above show the unmistakable traces from the standard broadaxe in the broad sense of that word. The last shot is not like the others in terms of the traces left by the tools. I'll tell you right now with no equivocation that a Gränsfors Bruk, so-called hewing axe with double bevel made those marks and I know it not because I watched it happen but because I know the axes present and can read the indications. It is also clear to me who did it having watched the different ones at work with those axes.
 
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These days, hot as it is during the heat-wave, I've got some squaring up work to do for my own purposes, repair work on an odd sized beam. For this work I have a larch stem set up at the hewing station. I can make a comparison to the Douglas Fir. This Larch is similar to the worst of the DF stems from the session shown in pictures above, twisted growth, fairly wide annual rings and many knots some even big ones, and yet with all that and more the Larch - and believe me I had low expectations going in for this particular one - as far from a good quality stem as it is, works far better than the best of the DF from the recent axe working scene in Germany.
 
What I like so much about my cant hook is the handle can be slid down to the bottom of the stem while the hook grips the top and I can then turn the stem in place. In other words, it's super versatile. Neat huh.
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This wood is just great for hewing.
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First, thank you for sharing your work here Ernest. Is your log turner a large hook with that ring through it? I have seen similar many times here locally but never pictured an intended use. The branch you choose to use can come from where ever you end up working on something? Versatile in several ways then.
 
Ernest DuBois said:
What I like so much about my cant hook is the handle can be slid down to the bottom of the stem while the hook grips the top and I can then turn the stem in place. In other words, it's super versatile. Neat huh.
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This wood is just great for hewing.
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A loose can't dog on a ring like that was called a 'swing-dingle'. The inefficiency of that tool on a river log drive inspired Joseph Peavey to make his famous tool. On the river sudden actions in awkward positions are the norm. In the controlled conditions of the hewing yard a swing-dingle is a perfectly useful tool. It's flexibility might make it an even better choice that a Peavey or can't hook.

Edit: forgot the link.....

https://www.ruralheritage.com/logging_camp/peavey.htm
 
Also your swing dingle can often end up at the bottom of that river. You Americans do excel at giving each variation its own distinct name. Here the names generally just reflect a function and all the variations fit that name, for example it's just called "katelhaak" generally speaking. It can lead to confusion at times.

Funny you mentioning the log river drive Square-peg. Here we just had last week a commemoration of the old timber trading routes from Norway all the way to the sawmills in Friesland, something they were doing since the middle-ages. Surprising for me to learn that very little knowledge exists here in the Netherlands about this specific activity of transporting the wood to the destinations after it had arrived at the sea harbors from abroad, just one more example of the working man's erasure from the history book.
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Ernest DuBois said:
Funny you mentioning the log river drive Square-peg. Here we just had last week a commemoration of the old timber trading routes from Norway all the way to the sawmills in Friesland, something they were doing since the middle-ages. Surprising for me to learn that very little knowledge exists here in the Netherlands about this specific activity of transporting the wood to the destinations after it had arrived at the sea harbors from abroad, just one more example of the working man's erasure from the history book.
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It's funny, the whole idea of rafting logs upstream seems foreign to me. Coming from an area where logs are only exported I just never thought about this. But it makes sense, especially in the low countries and places where slow moving rivers make upstream hauling practical.

I think log rafts are finally gone from Washington. They haven't been on Lake Washington since the closure of the Barbee Mill, now an EPA superfund site because of chemicals used to treat wood. But I remember seeing logs on Lake WA. Puget Sound doesn't seem to have any log rafts anymore but it still did maybe 15-20 years ago. It wouldn't surprise me if Longview Fibre or Weyerhauser's Longview mills still see an occasional raft on the Columbia.

But the place in the NW where log rafts are still the norm is the Frasier River upstream from Vancouver BC. Here they are still common.

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I had better at least show the axes involved, it's the axe forum after all.
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I moved to the small edge, notching then from on top and juggling from up there too with this two-bitted.
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It's fine to keep these on hand at the final step to keep an eye on the progress and be sure things don't get out of hand to much.
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These should not be forgotten. For sharpening and keeping it that way.
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The dogs the Germans use are, lets be honest and say it, simply to long. Even this last one pictured here is longer than needed even for the big stems. I like it when the dogs bite low down and provide support where its needed to prevent the log turning when cutting the first two critical faces. A tip I did get from the Germans, don't remove the dogs pounding them upwards at the under side in-between the blades. To loosen pound at the out side down the long axis at the bend to minimize damaging the log dog. It works well.
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Now I have to make my plan for saving all that nice wood to the right. Some kind of sawing called for.
 
Quick question about hewing these type beams. LOTS of work goes into doing this procedure so I have wonder why all four sides of the log being hewed? I can see a top and bottom being done as if these are beams, they need to lay flat, and there could also be something laid on top of the beam that needs a flat surface, but the sides of the beams could be round and other than a visual effect, would not influence anything else. So why were all four sides hewn? Thanks. John
 
In principle, in terms of construction it doesn't matter . Any shape or form can be joined, you just have to look at some of the old French carpentry to see that and the Swedish log builders also only flatten two sides. So you really have to look at customary practices, tradition aesthetics etc...to answer the question. Timbers were/are, ( I have seen hewed timbers out of the tropics at the saw mill) squared up at the site of felling for more practical reasons having to do with transportation. Early on, the big ones getting shipped from North America to Europe were squared quickly to lighten the load, save on space and so the logs wouldn't roll around in the hold on the sea. In Germany, from the work above only two sides got axe worked surprisingly out of economy. One flat side was wanted as a reference for joinery and this was sawed. I often see it that two surfaces are hewed, two either band sawed or pit sawed.
 
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