Basque Axe

[John A. Larsen]

On You Tube I watched a fairly long video "Reconstruction of a Roof with 7,000 handcrafted slats obtained from the forest in 2021". It was in the Basque area and they were using the axes without a poll, and a fawn shaped tip of the axe handle. After cutting down a beech tree and sawing it into the appropriate lengths of the slats (shingles) they made all the slats only using a metal wedge for the first split an after that only the axe hitting it with a club made of wood. They did not use a froe as I have seen in almost all the other videos from Slovenia to Japan. They used the axe not only to split the slats, but also to adjust the thickness of the slats, trim the edges and remove the bark. After forming the slats, they stacked them like a chimney, so hollow in the center and left them outside over the Winter to season and then put them on the building the next Summer. Very skillful use of the axes. John
PS: Forgot to mention English sub-titles are available, until about the last few minutes when for some reason it switches to Basque/Spanish.

 

[old Lefty]

^
Most interesting. Thank you for shraing!

 

[raindog308]

On You Tube I watched a fairly long video "Reconstruction of a Roof with 7,000 handcrafted slats obtained from the forest in 2021".

Cool vid - thanks for sharing.

switches to Basque/Spanish.

Unrelated trivia: Basque is completely unrelated to Spanish, or to any other language in the world. It is a linguistic isolate. That region is surrounded by Romance languages but Basque is as different from them as Sanskrit or Arabic would be.

 

[John A. Larsen]

raindog308, several years back I passed thru th Salt Lake City airport on the way to work the SHOT Show in Lost Wages. I stopped at the Wolfgang Puck Pizza shop to eat and was listening to the women working there talking. They did not look Hispanic, and my limited Spanish (4 years in HS MANY years ago!) did not recognize what hey were saying. I came to the thought they were Basque, perhaps from the many folks from there that came to handle the sheep herds in the area. John

 

[I'mSoSharp]

Nice video, but I'd still argue even with those workers that that's a bad way to treat an axe, I often find that style of head here in southern Spain with damaged crushed eyes, often if they still have a (slip fit) handle it doesn't fit correctly due to the eye being too wide with the top flattened out, look at the head of the guy singing with the axe over his shoulder (35.40) it's starting to deform.