Gentle Galoots,

Wondering what your esteemed opinions are on hewing hatchet helves.

I’m using hatchets more and more do the second step dimensioning of green oak
for furniture. (Much faster than a scrub plane and not as hard on my hands.) I
hung my first hewing hatchet on a straight helve, and it works well for that
purpose.

In a moment of weakness I picked up another hewing hatchet on eBay. It had a
crack just where the poll meets the bit, so even at 10 cents I’d have been
overpaying, and I paid a lot more than 10 cents. But it became an opportunity to
teach my younger sons about welding, so I’m not annoyed.

Given I had to unhang and de-patinate it to weld it, for this one I wanted to
experiment with a bent helve. I boiled half of a very old old single bit hickory
axe handle for 6 hours and used an old staircase newel and a pipe clamp to put a
good side-bend in it.

Here are the questions:

1. Given I boiled this for 6 hours, how long should I let it wait before I hang
the head on it, to avoid shrinkage?
2. When bending wood sideways against the grain, have I weakened it? (It won’t
change anything about this hatchet, because it’s a slicing tool, but wondering
for knowledge’s sake)
3. Bending sideways was fairly easy; I’m wondering if bending against the
thicker dimension is any different (I can see how increasing the angle between
the bit and the helve would make slicing cuts easier)
4. Does anyone have experience using both a straight and a bent hewing, and
which use cases each fits better? I can see how the bend would definitely work a
lot better with a full sized hewing axe, for logs on the ground. I can see how
it might work better for a rough log bucked on my low horses. But the straight
seems like it will definitely work better when holding a piece of stock upright
on my chopping bench….

I’ll have a play and finish off my experiment  . . . wouldn’t be the first time
where I learned the hard way . . . but I wanted to avail myself of the group’s
collective wisdom.

Thanks in advance,

MPf.