If you're interested in old tools and old ways of doing things, you may have tried them out and been amazed at how badly they perform. Whether it's a plane or a pick or an axe, if you buy one and put it to work it seems to accomplish almost nothing. After a day or two of fighting the tool most people move on to machinery, thinking that there's some secret the older generations knew that we don't. That sort of mystery always bothers me.

I might not have learned the secret of the axe if not for an older neighbor of mine who was the only one in the county who still used an axe professionally. He cut cedar for a living, using a chainsaw for the felling and an axe for everything else. To see him trim the end of a six inch diameter cedar fencepost to a perfectly faceted tapered point with nothing more than a few strokes of a double-bit axe was a truly impressive thing. I'd go home and try to do that myself and get nowhere. I bought load after load of posts from him over the years until one day I finally broke down and asked him how the heck he did that.

According to him, nearly all axes today are sharpened wrong. Buy one at the hardware store and you'll get a good axe with a bit that's beveled too thick to work well. On top of that, many manufacturers add a second bevel to the edge of the bit. The edge may be razor sharp but the width of that bevel stops it from slicing. Instead of an axe you get a sharp hammer. My neighbor reworked an axe with a flat file, tapering the bevel to an edge you'd find on fine cutlery. Once he got it right all it needed was a touching up now and then.

I reworked one of mine in that same way, expecting the edge to fail because it was so thin, and although I did overdo it the first time, when I got it to that perfect taper it worked like an entirely different tool. Like my neighbor, I could do the rough cutting with a chainsaw and the rest of the job quietly without the smoke and the gasoline. That turned miserable days in the woods into pleasant ones.

Eventually I acquired an old sandstone grindstone and built a treadle for it, taking another backward technological step. Modern bench grinders with eight inch stones could cut the right angle on an axe bit, but they leave a deep hollow grind that weakens the edge. Back when people used axes constantly the grinding took place on wheels two feet in diameter. A stone that big cuts a bevel that's nearly flat.

Somewhere along the way, axe manufacturers set aside the important finishing touches. Maybe almost no one cared any more, so they could cut corners and get away with it. Most hand tools are like that -- all the basics are intact but that last important detail is one you have to find for yourself. That's what makes them work.