Hewing White Pine - 2019 Axe Cordwood Challenge

For the 2019 Axe Cordwood Challenge, Ben Scott has added several new “challenges” in addition to the firewood chopping challenge that has always been the primary focus. One of these new additional challenges was to do some hewing. Since hewing is one of my favorite activities to do with an axe, I was eager to do some.

At some point in the last year a double-stemmed white pine fell across the creek at the northwest corner of our property. It seemed like the perfect candidate for the hewing challenge. The tree was quite straight, and it would basically be salvaging a deadfall. I was able to get two 8x7" timbers from the lower end of the double stem portion, both timbers ended up 13 feet long. The first face hewn, wasn't square to the layout, and I had to re-hew the face a second time. I also ended up having difficulty as I decided to leave the timbers in the creek bottom, due to their awkwardness and weight and the icy conditions. I failed to level my cribbing, and so I was unable to handle the logs properly. This made proper layout difficult, and I didn't make the absolute best use of these logs, better timbers could have been made had my layout been more careful.

This year for the challenge I have decided to use one axe for essentially the entire challenge, so all of the hewing done in this video was done with the same 3.5# felling axe I used to chop my wood for the rest of the Axe Cordwood Challenge. I use a style of hewing in this video that I call “tie-hacker style” which is just hewing with a long-handled, double bevel axe with the log cribbed quite low to the ground. It matches the style of hewing used in the late 19th and early 20th century by woodsman in the southern US who produced oak railroad ties on a massive scale. It is a style that is readily accessible to anyone with an axe. I do love the use of broadaxes as well, but I wanted very specifically to demonstrate that all sorts of work can be done with just one tool. Its OK to own lots of axes, but you can get by with just one if you need to.

A mention of thanks here at the end for Steven Edholm and Ben Scott for creating and managing the Axe Cordwood Challenge and for furthering the goal of keeping working axes alive.