Did You Use Your Axe For Something Good Today? Or What Was That One Called, I Forget.

E

Ernest DuBois

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Mar 2, 2013
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Roughed out these cogged half-laps in 10cm x 10cm posts of green oak with a kreuxaxt and parred them back to the lines after with other tools.

E.DB.
 
My ignorance is showing: I have no idea what you just said or what those are. Gotta get out my google-fu.
 
Irongun324 said:
My ignorance is showing: I have no idea what you just said or what those are. Gotta get out my google-fu.
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I do have that problem I'm afraid, not a matter of your ignorance at all though maybe sometimes a matter of a limited concept of what axes are good for and what they can do and the forms they can come in. I use, "The Axe" far more in building than in going to the woods.
These posts will be linked together by a double row of rails interconnecting at the joints at intervals of close to 2 meters and then the whole construction covered with regularly spaced vertical lath and painted red after being set a meter deep in the ground to make what can also be called a fence out front of the house.
M3mphis said:
You mean this one?

http://www.bladeforums.com/forums/showthread.php/930803-Lets-use-those-axes-for-what-they-were-ment-for

Nice work. Looks like you had a good time. Do you have any close up pictures of that "kreuxaxt?" Looks very interesting!
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That is the one I mean. I just didn't want to look.
And this is the kreuzaxt used in the work.

Another one I got recently for 1/4 the price needing a handle still, because it was passed off as a pick, not the forge welded, laminated double-bit axe it is. Ha ha ha.

E.DB.
 
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These posts will be linked together by a double row of rails interconnecting at the joints at intervals of close to 2 meters and then the whole construction covered with regularly spaced vertical lath and painted red after being set a meter deep in the ground to make what can also be called a fence out front of the house
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Sounds like a fence to me lol. Ernest- what would be the life expectancy of such a fence in your climate using green oak?
 
Green oak? I think he meant 'unseasoned'.
My experience with the 'red' oaks (the n. American ones with pointy leaf lobes) in, on, or near the ground is dismal; they rot away in about 5 years. White oaks (round lobes on the leaves) are a different story. Used traditionally as marine timber and exterior boat decking it is supposed to be long lasting in moist and wet situations.
Black & Decker Workmates have been made with particle board decks for the past 30 years, which swell up and disintegrate outdoors, and I have retrieved some from neighbours houses on garbage days. With white oak decks fitted to them they last a long time outdoors. My first retrofitted one (from 1996) is still fully serviceable and has been out and in the rain and cold all that time.
 
Green oak, wet oak, fresh oak, unseasoned oak, ok I can go for that last one, though in such dimensions that could mean anything from just cut down yesterday to standing around a year or two. It won't be seasoned for eight years yet. Ever heard of "green woodworking? It's not something to do on St Patrick day you know, Three Double Ott. Here is my Red Oak story; It happened like this, it was the third year of furniture making school and the group was down in the basement where the wood was stored for an instruction in oak, the instructor took out a small piece of imported out of North America red oak and lights his cigarette, put the end of the stick in his mouth and blew smoke out through the pores of that wood. I never used red oak since and that north American White Oak suffers from a deadly lack of character.

I hesitated making a reference to a fence because the English and maybe North Americans in general do associate this tool with a twybil that is likely used to make sheep hurdles and light weight fences. Well I can only go so far as to say there is some confusion as I see it in exactly what a twybil is, not for me because it doesn't concern me at all. This is a timber framing tool, largely fallen out of use now but once it was the symbol of many of the guilds of carpenters in Germany. As an alternative to the German word I just stick to a straight across the board translation and say cross axe. Probably there was never any widespread use in a similar way in the work of the Anglos, American or English.
It is a miserably wet climate here but the oak is a strong and durable wood and in these dimensions I am reckoning on more than 20 years, less than a hundred. In the ground it will go on indefinitely and above the ground hundreds of years, the problem is right at ground level. I'll have to keep the grass down there.

E.DB
 
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Thanks for the responses- I understood what you meant by "green" oak. The experiences with differences in the oaks is interesting.
 
Square_peg said:
Nice work. That tool is what we would call a twibil. I've never tried one.
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Though it's at odds with the current notion, in which a twybil is as I describe down there, I think you are right to associate this tool with the word twybil SP. Here is a 16th century reference to a twybil as a carpentry tool and not a craft tool. I have heard an explanation of the word twybil like this. The word comes to the English out of the German where zwei (2) is spoken out as tsvi, close to our twy in this case, and in German the word for axe is beil, possibly our bil in the translation, for a combination of Zwei and Beil = two axe or double axe.

E.DB
 
There is some confusion here about what the tool is called.

From 'A Museum of Early American Tools' by Eric Sloane.

Twibil%203.jpg
 
Excellent, haven't seen a twybil in a bit. I rived some white oak for chisel handles over the weekend. Does that count? Recreating the pics I didn't take would be way too much work.
 
It's why the best course is to avoid the word until it all gets straightened back out. In his sketch he shows an incorrect bevel at the mortising end. If he is suggesting it's struck with a maul, he and his sources are wrong in perpetuating the idea because that would only be done in ignorance. On the other hand, you can pare with either bit fairly well from above with a grip around the socket. It seems a wild speculation that the common double bitted axe has its roots in the kreuzaxt, but who am I to say, other than that his beginning point is all screwed up? I don't know what to think of this Sloane character other than that he is popular.

E.DB.
 
I was struck by how closely Sloane's Adze-hatchet resembles the later undercutter axe. The thing is that people made and used whatever tools they thought would help them do the job. Those tools may not always fit into modern categories - but they suited the users just fine. That's one of the beauties of historic tools.
 
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