Making a Hatchet with ALEC STEELE - Forging with a Sledge Hammer!

Description

I head back to Alec Steele's workshop to forge my own custom Hatchet. Alec taught me how to forge with a sledge hammer as well as how to put a handle on an axe.

SUBSCRIBE TO ALEC'S CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/alecsteele

Learning to forge with Alec has been a fantastic experience! We used 1055 steel for the axe head, and ash for the handle. Forging with strikers is something I have never done before, and getting to use the Sledge Hammer to hit red hot steel is just awesome! Alec showed me the whole process on heat treating the axe head, grinding the bevel with various grits on the belt grinder. For the handle he used the band saw to carve out a rough shape. Then Alec went old school and used a draw knife to shape the edges. He finished it up on the belt grinder. To finish it off we oiled it with linseed oil. Stay tuned on my channel as I head out into the woods soon to put the hatchet to the test and practice some Bushcraft & Survival skills using the tool!

Watch me forge a knife with Alec: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQkBDvQIpcc&t=1014s

Watch me forge a flint striker with Alec: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDdJCkW6z0k

WATCH ALEC COME TO THE BUSHCRAFT CAMP IN THE WOODS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccC0f4rEbxM

Follow me on Instagram for Behind the Scenes Pics: https://www.instagram.com/taoutdoorofficial/

My Facebook Page:

https://www.facebook.com/totallyawesomeoutdoors

If you wish to send me stuff:

Mike Pullen

PO Box 7466

HOOK

RG27 7NA

Subscribe to our other Fishing YouTube Channel "TAFishing" here: https://www.youtube.com/tafishing

Music:

http://www.epidemicsound.com/

Tags: making,hatchet,alec steele,forging,sledge hammer,sledgehammer,workshop,forge,axe,how to forge,steel,strikers,axe handle,heat treating,grinding,belt grinder,band saw,bandsaw,draw knife,oil,bushcraft,survival,camping,wilderness,survival axe,tool,tool making,tools,how to make an axe,how to make a hatchet,survival tool,ta outdoors,damascus,anvil,engineering,weld,woodworking,diy,mill,craft,forged in fire

Video Transcription

[Music]

[Music]

[Music]

[Music]

this is a hammer I punch so this punch driven into the material pushing it either side means that we can get a hole in that with an extremely small amount of material loss you're gonna see in a second we punch out this little plug but the thing is Matt down in the depths of that hot material this heats up and it can deform if it's hot so we're cooling it down in in beeswax which smells really nice you have a smell of that nice an infinite love this smell of beeswax and there's actually also some graphite in the beeswax to help lubricate it I mean as we drive it down it's not getting stuck and we can take it out keep the tool cool it'll get a good hole in the material there we go you can see that the plug has some air around it this is the beauty of forging we're pushing most of the material to the sides we get very minimal material loss one more below should release it that is all we lose in making that hole the whole way through a tiny little piece of material pull the plug

right

[Music]

so this will just take a spot stop pulling those cheeks out I stop [Music]

[Music]

[Music]

right ready

nice hot

[Music]

I'm starting to get a angle of the whole axe blade in there right that's also pinching that I am very nicely because that little pouch that that we could have breakdown by coming right in nice not again I think we're gonna come in this side here with our axe trip come in like that stop opening up that hole in the desired cross-section

actually though it's a little twisted and so because it's a little twisted we can start at the top side that'll guide us down

okay go start this way [Music]

[Music]

[Music]

[Music]

[Music]

[Music]

[Music]

[Music]

mike has done a great job swinging the sledgehammer

now just spatter the camera ha ha ha mike has done a great job swinging the sledgehammer why thank you done a great job it's all a fun - it's very it's so satisfying so you know there aren't a lot of occasions in life where you get to take a sledge and just metal yeah so right now we've got the forge turned down load cuz after forging we put a lot of stresses into it and the stresses are unequal along the whole thing in addition to that the grain structure of the material is very large and with those large crystals you end up with a much weaker steel so what we do is we normalize the stresses shrink down the grain size so that when it comes to hardening it we get a strong edge it's gonna hold its edge and be hopefully a little less likely to break so it's in the Forge at a much lower temperature you see the yellow licks of flame of course you have a yellow flame when is a carburizing flame as opposed to an oxidizing flame or a neutral flame we let it more more air we get a hotter flame because of the extra oxygen as we close that off you drop the temperature the Forge that means that you don't overheat the piece and we can begin our cycles of heating it letting it cool in air number of times and that's our mobilising cycles welcome to TA those who enjoyed that start again

welcome to the a outdoors are you were done yeah yeah okay good stuff that's Alex steel by the way you might wanna go check out his youtube channel link in the description below today we've been forging together a hatchet working on a small kind of camp hatchet this is where we got to so far 1055 steel and it's it is kind of got that grants with brooks shape to it which is sort of what I wanted that traditional kind of Scandinavian look to it I'm looking forward to this this project this is gonna be really good really enjoyable I did make a mistake though so when you forged steel naturally the hawk the high high high temperatures and gum being a goon I know the high temperatures means that it oxidizes at a very fast rate it rusts and you know when things rust material flakes off when things oxidize when you're blacksmithing material flakes off a scale iron oxide so you lose material mass that way we wanted a pound and a half I cut off 2.2 pounds we ended off with a fairly small head we ended up a 1.3 pounds

yeah we lost a lot of material I mean the reason for it is obviously it took us a long time to forge it but it's it's it's like it's usable you know it's it's something that I've already got axes that are a lot bigger I've got hatchets they're a lot of bigger so for me it's nice to have something that's much more small smaller pack size to get in the backpack and you know at the end of the day a hatchet is not for chopping down trees it is for those smaller tasks like kindling and things like that split smaller pieces put yeah cutting off fingers so that's where we've got to you so far this is day one I took a while to get here I took about four hours to get here they've got our m25 but day to tomorrow we're gonna be a handle always we are indeed some grinding needs some final heat treating so you'll hold this edge and what-have-you but yeah I think we can make some make some good progress and ask Alex beautiful one is done pretty place of it [Music]

so we're gonna start with the 36 grit this all has to hold off a lot of material it's also a great way to lose some lose some fingers skin so try not to touch it when it's spinning so we've just come out the grinding room we have put on the the bevel so now we are going to harden it so that we get an edge that's gonna be strong keep its shape but it's also gonna make it rather brittle so once we do hardness we're gonna temper it to bring back some toughness into the material [Music]

what is what happens is with it hot yeah that oil is vaporizing and it's the vapors that will catch fire petrol yeah exactly it's you know the getting the oil lit is more difficult than the vapors [Music]

so the file is obviously very hard sure and the whole point of the file is you have a hard file to cut soft or normal steel if that hard file isn't making a cut it means that this is the same kind of hardness is the file content so if that just slips off like that yeah doesn't bite means that the steel is hard yeah which means that it's gonna be able to be tempered back so that we make it less brittle getting temper it back get it to the perfect perfect level of hardness the balance between hardness and toughness is in a nice nice place for the particular tool for the geometry tool so we're now going to temper this we're going to temper it from the eye out using The Drifter that we use to format the drift is hot we're gonna put it in that heats gonna conduct out it's gonna temper both are hardened Pole but you'll be able to use is a hammer it's also gonna temper that edge hopefully we can control that to get a nice deep draw our here at the edge so it's not liable to break instead worse comes to worse you know you Bend an edge as opposed to chip an edge so as this is heating up it's likely not gonna eat up evenly so he use a little spray bottle to control it you can use a spray bottle cool up certain there is just a new control our tempo we don't want a temperature too much because then it mean it's too soft and doesn't hold it

so the drift has conducted the heat through and if you have a look up on top where it was ground we give it a little buff you see we have that dark that light blue right here that goes into a purple into a dark straw on the faces it goes into a dark straw - a light straw here at the edge the nice thing is is that we've got a nice consistent temper color the whole way across the edge there's nowhere that is overheated and we can just let that sit some more that heats gonna conduct out get that edge to be able to stay at that temperature it is sustained a manner for just a little while as the last little bit so the heat of the drift come through

[Music]

as a board of Ashes two and a quarter inches thick it's got a beautiful grain to it you know it it's it's often very difficult when you're buying material in plank form for a handle to get the right bit what you need is you ideally want that grain that was going lengthwise and I did I didn't get this right way back when you know I didn't really think that it mattered too much and slowly my opinion on that evolved you know as this is sawn out of the tree you only get a certain amount of it that has that straight grain that's gonna work well sure so it means there's a lot of wastage with make handles well that's fine because it's about what makes a good handle and you know speaking which this is ash obviously as I said that is Hickory though yeah Matt it's nice for the ones I have actually are Hickory absolutely and without a doubt in my view certainly I don't i-i've never remade bunch of axes or anything like that my experience is with hammers if I could get Hickory that was my without a doubt my favorite option it's harder so means that you know say if we if you take that handle you know we could take this a little scriber here and you know we just feel how it pokes in it feels much spongier in the ash than it does in the Hickory you can listen to the noise the pitch alone tells you a lot about the properties of the material itself ash is still a great handle material and what I shall be giving you is gonna be giving you a little extra within your handle it's gonna be giving a little extra spring you know it feels it can feel a little easier in the hand than a Hickory handle will where you're gonna get a slightly sharper reverberation but really you know it's it's it's it's a taste thing certainly with hammer handles I prefer the Hickory we've got ash for this hatchet handle I think it'll work just fine you know you getting the benefit of the whip and it's a small but axe head isn't it so I'm still head turner so we should be just fine with that we need to rip this up I need to change the blade on the bouncer and all that we need to rip this up and get this squared away for us to build a handle from it how often you have to change this play aha more than I'd like handle materials for a lot of the knives that I make oh really terrible for the band blades and they they tear them up they wear them out really really fast especially G 10 G 10 is like this plastic they use that on the survival knives yeah yeah but the thing is is that it's why it's actually it's not really a plastic it's like a resin and fiberglass it so it's almost like fiberglass yeah but it's obviously slightly different and it has a proprietary name g10 and stuff like that but obviously because it's got that glass fiber in it it just yes oh so alec has just polished up the head of the hatchet and it's looking very very good now it's looking pretty sharp as well I've done a test for Alex video already on my arm as you can see there's pretty much no hair left but if I show you guys quickly there's a little bit that's come down here a bit just to show you how sharp this is right now because it really is hair shaving the shop doesn't now another patch on my arm that's not got anything left and now we're going to get on to doing the handle [Music]

[Music]

Wow yeah I don't know when you don't know why I need me back so we've now got to the stage where the we've handled the ax or hatchet sorry here it is sitting in the Vice it's all pretty much done I've now sanded it down as well but I said to Alec I wanted to get it similar the handle to his hammer here cuz every time I come here always always a my this hammer of yours and you were telling me you burnt it in by the blowtorch absolutely because the trouble is is they're trying to just finish the outside of the wood but what we're not trying to do is actually cook the thing and damage the wood right yeah absolutely so the blowtorch is so hot that we just quickly quickly I mean it take like five seconds quickly burns awesome then we can oil it and it ends up it ends up this really nice tough beautiful soft satin finish as you use it get some beautiful color in it this one's Hickory but it it ends up pretty similar with the ash [Music]

[Music]

[Applause]

[Music]

well guys thanks so much for watching this is the end product if you can see that in the light it's looking fantastic as Alec would say as I would say it's awesome it's got the the sort of forged look there and we've obviously burnt in the handle there as well and this is smaller than my small hatchet I use which alec is now getting as you can see it's a little bit smaller not by to much but it means it's much easier to fit in the backpack or slide down the slot the side pouch on the backpack it's just a little bit more it's just a little bit more convenient it's just a little bit more compact and easier to take with you on those long-distance backpacking trips thanks so much for having me here watching an incredible pleasure thank you for coming Mike thank you bring along all your all your wonderful fans and viewers it's been an adventure another adventure I have made a night with Alec as well if you want to check that out there's a link in the video description below or somewhere up here in the corner don't forget head on over to Alex channel if you enjoyed this type of blacksmithing stuff he's putting out like five videos a week at the moment of awesome projects swords knives almost everything you can think of lots of sparks lots of craftsmanship lots of fun lots of failure - exactly a lot on this channel on my channel and you will you will you will learn something you will definitely learn something so please head on over to Alex channel say hi from me go and subscribe and also if you're not on Instagram follow Alec on Instagram at Alex steel and also follow me on instagram at Ta outdoor official and I will see you guys in the next video

[Music]