Archive for the ‘Axes & Straight Blades’ Category

From Oystein’s smithy I made my way by train and bus back north in Norway to the small town of Trysil on the border with Sweden.  The next blacksmith of my Scandinavian axe journey, Mattias Helje, picked me up there and took me to his home and smithy in western Sweden in the town of Lima.  Lima is in Dalarna county, which is steeped in tradition and has a long history of iron smelting and blacksmithing.  With plentiful, clean charcoal fuel and pure iron ore, Sweden has long been famous for the quality of its steel.  This steel was highly sought after in Europe for tool making for centuries – I recall it being specifically mentioned as the most prized material for anvil faces at the Refflinghaus anvil smithy in Germany in the 1980’s when I researched anvil forging tradition there.  As I had hoped, Mattias forged a socketed axe for me of a type that is widespread in Sweden.  He referred to it as a “carpenters axe” and told me that it hailed from central and northern Sweden.  It was developed in the late 19th or early 20th century and was used through the 20th century. The particular axe that he reproduced for me was originally forged by Nygårds Martin Olsson (1859-1925).  The unique, socketed eye is beautiful in form and, in Norway, is called a “Swedish Eye”.

After I left Hjerleid Craft School in Dovre I traveled to the coastal town of Sandefjord south of Oslo.  Here I met and spent a few days with Øystein Myhre.  Øystein forges axes and other traditional Norwegian tools in the very cool smithy which he built on his property. Based on his own collection of historical tools and tools brought to him by handworkers and museums, Øystein forges accurate, high quality replicas. Many of the axes and other tools he forges are put directly to use by timber builders for the construction and restoration of old buildings – some as old as the middle ages. On the first day of my visit Øystein forged a large ryarbile, which is an axe used to hew logs for house-building. Øystein explained that there is an enormous variety of axes which have been forged over the centuries in different parts of Norway. The Ryarbile axe was developed in the 1700’s and was particularly common in eastern Norway. Starting about 1860 it was produced on an industrial scale by the Mustad factory and sold all over Norway. It has an edge length of 5″ and weighs a bit over 4 pounds (1900 grams). In use it will be fitted with a straight haft of birch about 22″ long.

The day after I landed in Oslo I took a 3-1/2 hour train trip north to the Hjerleid Craft School in the town of Dovre. I spent the next 10 days there teaching a class on forging Viking age axes. There were 12 students in the 1-year class, which is run by Benjamin Kjellman-Chapin – head of the blacksmithing department.  The enthusiasm of Benjamin and the students was awesome and each student finished an axe.  Although I’d had some second thoughts just before I left about my commitment to teach a relatively difficult subject to so many students so far away, the class was  a great success and a huge amount of fun as well!  I miss them all and hope to return.

In early April I traveled to Norway and Sweden for a month-long trip to study traditional axe forging.  Axes are still used there to hew and join logs for the construction and maintenance of beautiful, traditional houses.  Below are a few pictures from my first day in Oslo.  Both the weather and the scenery were amazing.  Follow-up posts on this trip will show a class that I taught in Norway on Viking-style axe forging and my visits with several blacksmiths who taught me forging techniques for axes that date back to the Medieval era.

Last year I came across a couple of images on the internet which showed tools recovered from the graves of Viking blacksmiths. In both cases there were hammers of a particular, one-sided design which nowadays is associated with blade smithing. When I saw the first picture, which Matt Stagmer posted to Facebook from the book “The Vikings”, I was immediately struck by the similarity of the hammer eyes to axe eyes formed by wrapping and forge welding. Owen Bush posted his own picture from Norway of the same set of tools (second picture). In this case there was even an axe with the same eye. Another picture of a recent find of Viking blacksmithing tools from a grave showed similar hammers, albeit with simpler, rectangular eyes (third picture):

Following a hunch I decided to see if I could devise a method of forging these styles of hammers using welding procedures borrowed from early axe construction. My criteria were that I should get similar hammer forms which showed no traces of the forge welding used to stick them together. They would have soft iron bodies and faces of high-carbon steel. In brief here is what I came up with:

It took about 4 tries to end up with a hammer which showed no seams. The essential point was to weld at a sizzling hot temperature (almost to the point of burning the iron) and reduce the body down quite a bit to the final cross section (I reduced it by a factor of 2). From the standpoint of a Viking blacksmith using bloomery iron, a hammer forged this way would have been refined in both the eye and body sections due to drawing down their cross sections -thus giving a better orientation of the slag inclusions. This would not necessarily have been the case for a hammer with a punched eye.

One of my longest standing goals as a professional blacksmith has been to forge socketed wood working axes in the traditions of northern European examples.  In my opinion these axes are quite possibly the most beautiful tools in the world.  The forge welding in these axes is complex and requires a strategy, tool-set and control of form which showcases the extraordinary skills possessed by many traditional blacksmiths.  After tackling asymmetrically welded eyes on traditional Viking axe forms over the last 4 years (by no means a finished topic for me) I have recently turned my attention to the techniques needed to produce socketed axes.  I have researched various techniques and followed the work of wonderful blacksmiths in Scandinavia, Europe and the US to see how I might approach this.  The pictures below show the progress I’ve made by my 3rd trial socket.  It is produced by free-hand forging on a power hammer and was made without a mandrel.  I learned a lot on this piece and in the work leading up to it.  I hope to travel this year to meet some of the smiths I admire so that I can learn much more about this process from them and about specific axes produced for timber framing and carving over the last several centuries.

A new pair of axes which will soon ship to a good customer.

This pair of axes is ready to go to a good customer in the South East.  He asked for a somewhat “matched” set to mount together so I picked out 2 pieces of similar size and heft which complimented each other from a small batch of axes I was working on.  He wanted a finish with a bit of patina so I used the heat treating stage to reveal the  steel bit with an “etch” from the furnace.  The asymmetric joint is also subtly accented this way.  To give a bit of color to the eye of the axe I used a finely filed surface to retain a bit of temper color.  The overall effect is very nice.

At long last the DVD Tutorial entitled “Forging a Viking-Age Broad Axe / Traditional Asymmetric Wrap” is finished and ready to ship!  A joint project with film maker Anna Geyer, this DVD has been over a year in the making.  It is 62 minutes long, professionally produced, and covers in great detail the process of forging a broad axe by the asymmetric wrap technique which was the standard method of the Viking age.  The process is carried out completely by hand with standard blacksmithing tools (plus a few special-purpose tools I developed) and the help of a striker.  The cost of this DVD is $35 (the same as for my first DVD:  “Forging a Bearded Viking Axe’).   As a special offer to the first 40 customers who purchase this DVD I will offer free shipping.  After that a $5 shipping fee will apply.

A friend brought me an adze forged from wrought iron that had surfaced on the agricultural land that his family has owned since 1845. He asked me to re-steel it so, …after overcoming my reluctance to risk a historical artifact on my first attempt at re-steeling, I set a piece of 1075 onto it. I did this in the same fire that I used to weld the bits into two axes. Though they will all be edge-ground and heat treated, I am very pleased that the axe on the left is solely forged to shape without any grinding at this stage.

One of my goals as a blacksmith is to forge my own version of a beautiful bickhorn that resides in the smithy in Bavaria where I did my apprenticeship. To accomplish this will take a lot of practice and planning. Last weekend I took a step in that direction by forging a 13 pound anvil made up of a block of mild steel and a forge welded face of W1. The goal was simply to step up the size of forge welding that I do to see what it feels like to handle a larger mass of hot metal. Another goal was to see how I might build furnaces to bring larger chunks of metal to welding heat. The furnace I used for the 13 pound anvil had been made by Jeff Pringle to do crucible smelts of magnetite sand and worked very well. The burner came from my small forge welding forge and proved quite adequate to the task. In fact the same-set up could probably be used to weld block anvils up to about 50 pounds. However, handling a 50 pound block of metal at forge welding heat would be a different matter altogether. Custom tongs would be required to manipulate it safely, and more safety gear would probably be necessary to protect from radiant heat and slag. This was a fun project and will definitely spur me on to larger attempts.