SgtErv said:
ElNathan,
For the one that's nice but non-functional because it gets loose...Have you tried a metal wedge in the wood that's inside the eye?
I had a poll belt axe that did the same thing. I tried all different kids of wooden shims and wedges. The director asked if it was loose one day. He'd made it over the winter and he said in warmer weather sometimes they loosen.
So he drove a little steel wedge right down the middle of the top of the handle. It expanded the wood to really grip the sides. Ive had zero problems with it loosening since then. I tried to do so with some heavy duty chopping and it held fast.
Okay, I'll see if I can describe the issue. The original problem was that when the smith forged the blade, he apparently got the eye a little too big to fit a commercial handle, and fixed the problem by hammering the ends back in a little to where they fit tightly around the eye drift. The end result was that there was a kind of ridge running around the edges of the eye with the middle of the eye kind of hollowed out, so that the handle only contacted the head consistently around front and back of the eye. In other words, the eye, while looking good from the outside, only contacted the handle all the way around for about 1/16" at the front and 1/16" at the end of the eye. The moment one used the axe, the little ridges would start digging into the handle and the handle very quickly got wallowed out and before long would not fit tightly at all.
I tried to fix the problem by filing the inside of the eye out, leaving an irregular eye but one with a straight taper that would allow me to custom fit a handle that would fit tightly all the way through the eye. I didn't do a particularly good job on getting a perfect fit, but the real problem turned out to be that the taper of the eye was now so great that the handle just slipped off as soon as it was used. I did think about using a wedged handle, but the eye is only about 5/8"-3/4" long IIRC, so the split of the wedge would have to extend well past the eye into the handle to be able to open up sufficiently to be any use. Even driving tiny wedges into the rear of the eye to keep it from moving back did not work.
There is just no fixing this one, short of wrapping everything up in rawhide or something, or (possibly) reforging it. I suppose that if I HAD to use the axe I could drive a nail into the handle right behind the head, but I don't think that even that would get me the tight fit I want, and is kind of a "Bubba" solution anyway.
Not a complete waste, as I have learned a great deal about what I like and don't like in an axe from this one. With a long, 21" handle it has almost perfect balance as a weapon - it corresponds very well to the very close copy of an original 18th century pipe axe I got to handle a year ago - and I like the stout haft I have on it now, as it is much nicer to grasp than the commercial handles available. The form isn't particularly PC (looks like a pipe axe with a squared-off solid bowl rather than an original hammer-pole) and the very short eye is a liability even if it were perfectly formed, though.