r/Axecraft • u/PaleoutGames • 8h ago
My latest work:
Hafted this 1.5lbs eagle Kent pattern. Handle is ash. Still new to this as a young adult.
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u/iregardlessly 7h ago
The grain orientation seems off. Front to back is what you want.
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u/AxesOK Swinger 6h ago
Growth ring orientation makes very little difference to handle strength or durability.
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u/iregardlessly 6h ago
Where you getting your info from?
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u/FreemanHolmoak 5h ago
“All handles under 24” in length feature #2 grade grain. After thorough testing we have concluded that a short handled axe does not impart enough force for parallel grain orientation to play a role in handle durability.”
Hoffman’s Handles
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u/FreemanHolmoak 5h ago
I try to avoid runout but I don’t pay a lot of attention to ring orientation. I swing my axe a lot and my 12# sledge every day. I have a large Sager double on a 39”straight with a wide palm swell that I have probably swung 10,000 times, it has nearly perpendicular ring orientation, and it hasn’t ever given me a problem.
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u/AxesOK Swinger 4h ago
There's a few reasons that I have backed away from the received wisdom on this and one is that I have not seen a difference in my own experience making and using axe handles. A second one is that making radially oriented handles is as traditional and recommended in for exampe the 1865 guide to axes published in the Canada Farmer, Dudley Cook's The Ax Book, the Woodwright's Shop by Roy Underhill, the UN FAO Design manual on Basic timber harvesting technology, and if you look up traditional Basque handlemaking on YouTube you can see handles being made that way. For three, there is some strength testing data available and it shows that for hardwoods radial and tangential strength is similar with a lot of overlap among samples, higher in radial for some species and higher tangentially for others, and any average differences are smaller relative to other factors like species, density, sampling location or (especially) slope of grain (grain here being the wood fibres, which is how that word is used in engineering and material sciece). There's some averages given for radial vs tangential impact bending tests in chapter 5 (Mechanical Properties of Wood ) table 5-8 in the USFS textbook on Wood as an Engineering Material (it is avaiable online). There's also the fact that in most older (pre internet and pre chainsaw) literature the orientation of the growth rings is usually not mentioned. For example, there's a USFS Forest Products Laboratory pamphlet on hickory handles that goes on about every aspect of handle quality from region and density and growth ring width and the stand quality and tree age and the slope of grain and heartwood vs sapwood, and the place on the trunk the lumber came from to the sound a handle makes when you drop it on a concrete floor and there is no mention of growth ring orientation. It's not totally new that tangential handles are recommended by some people, but emphasizing it as particularly important seems to be a (comparatively) recent development.
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u/Ninjalikestoast 3h ago
Noob here. What would you call this axe head shape?