Reproducing an Antique Draw Shave Part 1

Description

http://www.thepathfinderstore.com

Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

morning guys I'm Dave Canterbury with the Pathfinder school and I have a woodworking tool here I picked up at an antique store on a trip recently to North Carolina and what this is is a draw shave a very early predecessor to the spoke shave and some people call this Foshay but it's truly called a draw shave it's not very adjustable like a spokeshave is for moving the blade for different depths of cuts this is pretty much dictated by the way the tool is built what death that's going to cut out and it's nothing more than a piece of hard wood handle with a recess here and a triangular blade here that's been forged and pounded up through the handle you can see where it's cracked right here from age and it's been pounded up through the handle here recessed here and recessed on the back side behind the blade at an angle so that the shavings can come out this is a beautiful piece and it's a beautiful antique I could probably use this with no judgement to the tool whatsoever I've already sharpened it up a little bit I would really need to take this blade completely out to sharpen it up the way it needs to be sharpened to be used well but what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to duplicate this tool today and so this will be kind of big blacksmithing and green woodworking video I'll put it in the green woodworking playlist and the blacksmithing playlist because it really falls into both categories but recreating a dream working tool is a very good skill to have now I have it just so happened that when I cut the piece of black walnut for our mall I cut a piece of it off that had split out as it was drying and when it split out it split out almost exactly like the handle of this tool look at that I've cut it off the length but it is almost a perfect match for the curvature of this tool so we're going to use this for our handle material and we're going to forge our blade let me show you real quick how this tool are meant to be used I'm just going to block the handle of our big mallet that I haven't finished yet in this vise real quick and we'll pull a few shades off this thing you'll be able to see what this tool is meant to do so it's meant to be held at an angle and pull towards you like this you can see it's doing a pretty good job you get some pretty fine curls when you get against a grain it's gonna be difficult like anything else but you can see it's pulling some really nice white shavings just like a spokeshave off of this handler look at that the thing works great and all I did was dress up the back of the blade a little bit on a stone on this flat side and then I just ran the burr off of it basically on a buffer like we used for our knives in this tool well absolutely don't work to this day without it down look at sit like you'd probably use this tool for a long time and never heard it but if I can recreate it I don't have to take that chance and learning to recreate a tool like this because it's so simplistic in its nature should be a good thing to learn for self-reliance okay so to carve out our basic handle shape on this tool which you can see it's a pretty close match it's just a matter of material reduction then cutting a few notches to do the main bulk of this work we're going to use a carving acts on hacking stock here in front of us and there are lots of choices for carving axes on the market today lots of them are very very good I've got four different axes that I'm going to use during this video and we'll talk a little bit about each one of them how we're going through this handle we have the Holtz Brooks carpenter's axe we have a Craig roost modified carving axe it's made from a plumb roofing handle lots of lots of advantages for this tool that we'll talk we have the Liam Hoffman prototype carving axe that he made for me and then I also have the grants first Brooks carbon axe

so we're going to use all four of these tools off and on with it and discuss some of the advantages and maybe disadvantages as well as just discuss the generalities of use because depending on what you're gonna do with the axe may make a large determination on which type of axe or which axe you choose to buy the axe is on this table that I'm using today range in price from $100 plus so they're not well we consider a common man carving axe we've talked about the common man carving axe mean that Kent pattern double bevel hatchet that was used in the first couple videos and we showed some fine carving and what that axe would do so if you're after a common man solution scrap yards of state sales flea markets are your place to go just brief fabricate a little axe if you want to buy a new axe or when it's someone else's refurbished or hand forced these axes may be for you stay with so looking at our piece of wood here again it's almost a perfect match as far as the curve goes we don't have to worry about steam bending the wood or anything nature did the work for us the wood is a problem then we have a knot down here on this end and we may have to contend with that as well but reducing the width of this piece is our first concern you can't manipulate any axe to make that work pretty well pretty fast one advantage of a carpenter style acts like this holds brooks is that it has a straight edge it's made for making shear type cuts so if I want to come down here and basically queue this thing down I can just come up through here break the fibers up the piece just like this then come down with the axe and shear cut straight down those breaks and you that off now this piece of wood has been drying for lease the company will leaves without the bark on so it is fairly dry now which is gonna make me tougher to work then it would have been when it was green but it's going to have less deformation now in the piece it's done bending and checking and all of the things that it was gonna do it's pretty much done by now now we want to keep this portion as straight as possible we don't want any angle there yet I'm just trying to cut out a square block basically on the two sides to work with say that's straight blade gives you really good healing abilities as far as I drop it straight down shear cuts there's no curvature to the blade whatsoever and it does a nice job when stuff like that okay I better stop over here that's not so slippery and moving it has a concave in it from a fired-up start on top of it class and that kind of keeps you would a little better under control now there's that not what we're talking about before we're done here and have it on one side only now we're much thicker down here than we are here so we now have to watch what we're doing here and take more off of this side which is not a big deal alright let's trade axes out here for me now this is Liam Hoffman axe is got a fairly long space in here got an scroll on it in the silly stone it has a long space here in what some people would call a toy with a choke point which for me that's good because if it's a wintertime project and I've got gloves on I might need that extra space right there if you're a fair-weather bushcrafter and you only do this stuff in the summer time you might want to shorten that up a little bit lucky grants for your Brooks but I like that wider area what I really like about the carving axe versus a carpenter's knife is that you can manipulate and control the blade in different areas very easily that heel of the blade gives you a really good fight when you're trying to down from the other side yeah if we start the bottom and break the fibers we can then come down and shoot those chunks out I salute him Hoffman axe is just a little over two pounds so it's a bit heavier a bit heavier than the grass dirt Brooks about the same weight as the Hulk's Brooks carpenter's axe Thank You certainly have yer than the rooster modified axe so if you're looking for something that's got a little more weight to it a little more deep to it so you can do a little heavier stuff with it this axe might be for you but it does awful fine work as well again now this act is very very light in comparison to the Liam Hoffman so you may not be able to do us heavy work with it that because it's lighter it's gonna give you a little better control or some of your finer carving tasks and right now all I'm really trying to do is just even everything up here get to work I've got the same amount of material on both sides of the pet that were the same as our handle here and you can see that this axe works about the same way as the Hoffman use that deal and dig yourself in just come down with the blade and you're moving further and further into the blade there you go

almost like your knife you're doing the same thing with your action getting your heel cup you're moving into that works you're over a well any carving knives now what you can see here with carving axe and what we're doing is we're actually kind of making dimensional lumber here I mean we're squaring up the sides of this and if this were a flat board not curved you know we could make dimensional lumber with just a good carving acts in small arms so there's something to be said for that style of Acts in bushcraft I don't want to get too much thinner on this in it yet you see when we're out here we still got some thickness to go but we're gonna have to take some meat off of it here to get rid of this pith I'm gonna leave as much of that natural curve in there as I can probably on the back side and work off of this side to get this for the most part I'll slide it out in the end a little bit but I want weaving so this width here is ready to work on first and I still got a ways to go okay so now let's talk about the Cregg roost rooster mod here and this is a plumb roofing hatchets what this used to be got the waffle head on here and he has modified this blade into a carving axe and put a new handle a new old-style axe handle on here it's more flat I really like that and the big advantage to this is if you were only gonna take one axe or hatchet into the woods that you were opting for something smaller for like your bedroll or your rucksack this axe has a lot of advantages because it will do the splitting that you need for kindling and also do the carving and because it has a hammer pole that's designed for pounding nails it makes it great for driving metal stakes it makes it great for the trapline it makes it great for building stick furniture which we're going to talk about in future episodes of this series because most of that stick furniture was held together by nails so if you have a hammer and a hatchet then the same tool you have a big advantage if you're using nails quite frequently to do something but that's a big advantage that this hatchet has Craig Roose doesn't make a whole lot of these you can get ahold of him on the action junkies website to find out how to get a hole in one of these but I find myself reaching for this quite often I just need a utilitarian type tool so anyway I'll get off the Craig rooster soapbox for a minute but I think he's a great guy

it's a very light axe so it is not going to do that major carving work but because it's light it's very easy to manipulate

to get fine fine shady these if you want that's far out shopping now when it comes to when it comes to pointing with your house

things like that you can pretty much do that with any good cardigans put as far as shopping chores and getting very very fine shavings and being able to choke up into it it's got a pretty big coil on it too but I like that again I wear gloves in the wintertime sometimes when I'm messing with wood I don't only do this in the summertime so I like that but the weight of this head makes it a very pleasurable axe to use I guess for lack of a better term that's what Ivan said now what I need to do is I need to get rid of some of this just fit that so now I'm gonna have to start carving on the curve a little bit here if I don't want to lose that curve shape so I'm just gonna start taking some fine veneers off at time here starting with the axe chopping and then probably going into more of a push plane mode here just a few minutes we're just trying to get below that pit without losing our curvature of our piece okay so let's take a look see we're out here we're getting a whole lot closer or maintain our shape good I like that the majority of our meat now needs to come out right here so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to take a pencil lay these pieces on top of each other like this you get this belly lined up and the handle lined up I'm just gonna make a mark across here like this that is going to help me figure out where my meat needs to come off because right here there's still a pretty big hunk of meat that has to come off of this alright so I just got this thing locked down on the bench now with a holdfast and I'm just kind of using this acts as a planing tool one curved surface here so we're catching a lot of grain it's okay we have to turn around when that happens come from the other direction but this will allow us to get this thing smoothed out pretty well learn the versatility of the tools that you have to use tools for something that you might consider on your head like using your app this is a chisel you're not gonna hurt it anyhow for sure all right so now I'm just putting one tool up against the other tool and I'm looking at where my cutouts need to be and where my blade studs go through the piece okay so we have marked our area for the notches on our tool don't think I want to go any further with that until I reproduce this blade and make sure that I can get it the exact same dimensions before I mess with this handle in case I'm a little bit off on where the other I want the new blade to match this handle but our handle is almost exactly the same shape a little bit wider which is fine because we have to double it over on the edges in the end anyway it's a little bit naturally bevel on this side well it got a lot more bubbling to do to make this a natural feeling tool so leaving it a little bit wide now is it good money because this is a flat right here which is gonna match the flat on this side and then we've got to cut this bubble here in this angle bevel this direction so let's get the fours and a blade we'll come back to this in part three part 2 will be forcing the blade