Who else uses a scythe?

Well I guess I can post pics now, I made it through all 47 pages. :)

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A few others, closer up...

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My son holding it resting on the ground, he's 3" shorter than I am, so in my hands at this setting, the blade is lifted even more.

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Here's some quality VA hay, second year cutover, complete w/ stumps, pine, oak, Tuliptree, Sweet Gum, Eastern Red Cedar, blackberry, raspberry, and 6' broomstraw.

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I'm expanding my orchard, and reclaiming some woodland.

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Need some of those barefoot gals in skirts to come show me how it's done. ;)
 
Looks to be a Seymour SN-1 or SN-2 snath (if there are 3 holes it's a No.1 and if there are 4 holes it's a No.2) and the blade is definitely a TrueTemper Briar Edge bush blade. Those blades tended to be a little roughly forged, but were very good steel and moderately thin in the web (they could be thinner, but they're thin for bush blades.) The heat treatment on them is nice and hard, and they take a screaming sharp edge with ease. For the blade type the lay isn't bad but if you want to convert it to "mulch blade" usage (which those blades are quite nice for) then you can adjust the pitch of the tang a little to bring it closer to level. Your collar looks like it's cracked, though, and that's going to need to be fixed. A local garage or machine shop should be able to weld that up no problem--doesn't have to be pretty to get it back in working order!

If you can get the nibs to adjust I'd rotate that lower one closer to between the 8-10 o'clock position. :)
 
I kind of like the lay for what I'm doing right now, I target the individual saplings and lop them at about 2" off the ground with an upward slice. And there's a bunch more to go.

I wondered about that crack, I've got a little wire feed welder here, (and can do 'not pretty'!), would that be suitable?

My first job back in the '80's was with a forester, cruising timber and clearing lines with a machete. It's nice not to have to bend over to do scrubby clearing... kind of like having a machete on a stick! :D
 
Should work fine! Just obviously remove the collar before doing the welding. You'll possibly need to squeeze that crack closed in a vise, as the gap may be widened from strain under use.

I understand what you mean by the "machete on a stick" comment, but I'd gently urge you to avoid using the term since it would inspire folks to "golf club" their strokes and try chopping or hacking with the tool instead of the shearing slice that should still be used with a bush blade. I like to outright tell folks that a good scythe makes a poor machete! It's chops and hacks that probably cracked the collar in the first place! :D
 
FortyTwoBlades said:
Should work fine! Just obviously remove the collar before doing the welding. You'll possibly need to squeeze that crack closed in a vise, as the gap may be widened from strain under use.

I understand what you mean by the "machete on a stick" comment, but I'd gently urge you to avoid using the term since it would inspire folks to "golf club" their strokes and try chopping or hacking with the tool instead of the shearing slice that should still be used with a bush blade. I like to outright tell folks that a good scythe makes a poor machete! It's chops and hacks that probably cracked the collar in the first place! :D
Click to expand...

I inherited my Grandpas old Scythe and it had the same crack as in your pictures Cub Creek Forge. I took it to a local welding repair shop back in '95 and the repair is still holding. Since then I've used it to clear brush, long grass and even blackberries. I did a brief stint as a landscaper in college and the scythe went along to bring overgrown lawns down to a size where a regular mower could handle it. I'd ditto the above comment on the hacking. The tool really isn't designed for saplings. If you'd care to acquire a good brush hook though you'll be able to take down everything that's too small for an axe but too big for your scythe with one swipe.
 
With a suitably stout blade and snath I'd say I'm able to take out green saplings as thick as my thumb, but definitely anything either thicker than that or dead standing stuff in that size range than a brush axe is definitely the way to go. :)
 
Good stuff, guys - understood.

Have the brush hook already, just have never found it a pleasure to use. I personally would rather go in with the machete. But for this smaller stuff, repeated upper cuts with a machete are a pain. As 42 has said in the thread, the blade will tell you what it will and won't do. And that's what I meant when I said targeted, the cutting edge is applied in a thoughtful manner. I appreciate the clarification, I often think one thing and write down something entirely different... :culpability:
 
Yeah brush axes are tools with fairly limited scope to them. They swing a lot like a pendulum, cutting mostly with the bill and the rest of the edge is merely designed to aid in completing the cut. It's really very much like a gravity-driven golf swing with those. A good bush blade on a stout snath is far more pleasant to use, for sure!
 
I've brushed many a mile of line with a swedish (Sandvik) brush axe. They are good tools, but a good machete, properly sharpened, will do the same work with less effort.

It hadn't occurred to me that a scythe would be this pleasant to use in field work. Now I'm looking for a good grass blade...


See what you've done?!!! :D
 
I don't really consider the Swedish style brush axes to be true brush axes and agree that a machete works much better than they do. When I say brush axe I mean one of these puppies:

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A bit of a different animal. :)
 
An interesting film from 1921 shows the old-school manufacturing of scythe blades. With details of the water-powered hammers, manual cutting of bar stock, forging while smoking a pipe, ...

[video=youtube_share;xbQjHj-6mcM]http://youtu.be/xbQjHj-6mcM[/video]
 
Always loved that video. I want a swinging chair like the guy with the pipe has. At the 7 minute mark it looks like they're tempering the blades post-quench by spooning hot sand onto the blades?
 
Very cool! Any idea what the hardness on those blades is like? Sounded on the harder side to my ear.
 
I wonder why he bothered to quench, if he was going to run all the colors off any way?

Could you recognize the bar stock he started with?

Did you notice the camera cut away after he hit that rock? Probably a string of profanity followed that... :D
 
I do wonder about the way he just burned all the colors off it, unless we were shown steps out of order or something.
 
Raymond1000 said:
I don’t know if this has surfaced here. It’s about introducing scythes to Nepal. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kgblvM26DM#t=33

I’d read about scythe cradles. Turns out what I had imagined was entirely wrong. The real thing works better than what I had pictured.
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Here's an embedded link to that video. It's shorter than the previous videos about the Scythe Project, and it has narration.:

[video=youtube_share;6kgblvM26DM]http://youtu.be/6kgblvM26DM[/video]
 
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