Tips & Tricks for Hanging an Axe, Part 1
Sitting on the passenger’s side floor of my pickup are three broken axes/mauls, all succumbed to the same fate by excited friends and neighbors who had “wooded” and snapped their handles while splitting firewood. As the resident axe guy, I’m often tasked with rehanging these axes, which I return with a fresh haft and a lesson on preventing future axe casualties: stand a foot farther back from the block than you think you need to, and while you’re at it, spread your feet apart so that you don’t put the axe into your shin.
The reason most people give up trying to rehang axes themselves is that they can’t get the broken handle out of the eye of the axe. Throwing the head in the fire will certainly remove the handle; it will also ruin the temper of your axe. Using a drill to carve away at the handle can be difficult, especially if the eye is full of metal wedges (or improvised wedges such as nails and bolts).
Having hung hundreds of axes, I’ve come up with a few simple tools to make the job faster – and less frustrating.
First, you’ll want to remove any wedges that you can from the axe. Quite a few fine chisels and screwdrivers have been ruined trying to pick out old wedges. A better alternative is to use a farrier’s hoof nipper. While designed to trim horse hooves, these are excellent for removing wedges and whatever else people have driven into the eye. If the wedge is slightly proud, you can usually just grab it with the nippers and pivot toward you to free the wedge. (1) If the wedge is countersunk but the handle is slightly proud, you can cut through the remaining handle with the nippers until you reach the wedge.
If the handle is flush with the eye and the wedges are countersunk, removing them might not be practical. Measure the length of both the top and bottom eye. In most cases the eye is either symmetrical or slightly larger at the top. In this case, you’ll want to flip over the head and push out the eye using a hydraulic shop press. (2 & 3)
If you don’t have access to a shop press, you’ll need to make a handle drift. A drift is used to localize a hammer blow. A large bolt is often used for this task; however, the result is that the bolt usually gets stuck between the remaining pieces of the handle. Instead, you need to punch out the entire handle in one piece. I found a large, open-ended wrench in the dollar bin at a flea market that I didn’t mind sacrificing. Using a cutting wheel, I preserved the crescent’s width (which matched the axe eye in shape) and cut the handle down to about 6 inches. I now had a handy drift for knocking out old handles with the aid of a hammer. (4)
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