Forging an 18th Century Pole Axe With Beau Beckett | BLACKSMITH | PIONEER | SELF SUFFICIENT

We've just finished our long trek up from eastern Ontario to Huron County. So we're not too far from Lake Huron at this point and come here to visit a friend and and I'm actually going to do some learning. So in our persona of the mid 1700s where Irish immigrants moved to the frontier, every community had a blacksmith and the fellow I'm going to introduce you to is a blacksmith extraordinaire. Everything you see on this wall and anything you could possibly imagine that's made out of iron this young fellow can build and well I say young he's the same age as our oldest son which is 47 years. That's how how far us and the Beckett family go back. Anyway we're going to go into his shop and today he's actually going to teach me to finally finally teach me how to forge well because I suck at it. I do some banging at steel, I make some knives and such but my forge welding is not pretty and today I think I'm going to learn how. Anyway come on let me introduce you to Bo. There he is. Long time Mr. Beckett. Yeah nice to see you Peter. Good to see you. Good to see you. Yeah. Yeah by golly we go back a long way but it's been a long time. Yeah it sure has. Yeah crazy. Anyway I'd like to introduce Bo Beckett to you. Bo's a pretty avid living historian himself. He attends reenactments and when he's at the reenactments you pretty much set up a 18th century, 19th century I guess shop right? As best as I can with the equipment that we've got yeah. Bellows and such instead of hand bellows and basic forge and anvil setup so. So today we're in Bo's shop and you know I'd say I'd say I've got shop envy but they say envy is a sin so I'm going to say I've got shop admiration. How does that sound? This is the best organized blacksmith shop I've ever been in and I don't know how many anvils are there seems like dozens around here and hammers, boar, anyway you're going to be teaching me something today I hope. Yeah we're going to be making a small axe and doing some forge welding, welding in the bit. Perfect, perfect. Yeah so we'll go through the steps to to do it, all the specialty tools and things like that that are required to do this axe. Perfect looking forward to it. So your business Bo Beckett's Blacksmithing. Can you tell us a little bit about that? How it started? What do you do? I've been blacksmithing since I was 13. I ran a small pioneer village style blacksmith shop for quite a long time. Then I took a break from it for a few decades and then got back into it just not too too long ago and now I do this full-time doing a lot of traditional type work, railings and that sort of thing. I prefer the smaller type stuff especially the historical stuff is probably my preference. Cool well I'm sure looking forward to seeing what we can build today. Yeah I've wanted this pole axe for a long time. I built a couple myself where I forged them out of ball-peen hammers. Oh yeah. As a base but we're going to be making one right from scratch and it's going to be pretty historically accurate in terms of shape. Well starting with ball-peen hammer is a big head start because you don't have to deal with that eye. The eye is one of the trickier parts on this axe that we're going to be doing. It will be a punched and drifted eye rather than a forged welded folded blade but they would have done either back then depending on what they were looking for. Good looking forward to that and then we're going to come back for a second visit. Don't know exactly when but we're going to be doing some forged welding and building some trivets and stuff. Okay sounds good. Perfect. If you can tolerate me it doesn't matter. Yeah. Okay next up I'll get rid of this. Okay so today we're going to start with a one and an eighth by one and an eighth square bar. This is mild steel and we'll be making the axe out of this. This is about a pound and a half of steel to start with. We can weigh it at the end and see what we end up with. That's actually going to be the perfect weight bow because this is going to be a belt axe. Yeah. So I'm carrying on my sash behind me like they typically did. So it's going to have enough weight to have some good impact for splitting of the pole for hammering. So that's about what I'm looking for. Okay great. And to make things a little simpler for us today we're going to weld a rod onto here just so we don't have to deal with tongs. It really wouldn't have done that but for us we're just going to going to do that to make things a little simpler for us today. Speed it up a little bit. Yeah. Then we're done. You're explaining to me earlier this is the part we're going to forge weld into the cutting edge right. So what we've got here is some higher carbon steel right that will be once we form that that cutting edge this is going to get welded into it. And I made the decision to make a handle out of some nice curly maple I had at home. We'll be using some aqua fortis to finish this off and I was hoping it was going to be big enough and it is. So I've got some some meat I can still take off of this. Yeah I should fit that pretty well. Perfect. I think when I'm all done I'm going to try my hand at pewter pouring. I'm going to yeah do some fancy stuff on the handle. This is this is going to be just a tool. This is going to be a tool I'm going to treasure and this experience with you today. So shall we bang some steel? Yeah let's get started. So first step we're going to punch a slotted hole in this in this block. This is about a one inch slotted hole. This is a punch that I made. It's got sharp edges and it will cut through that piece and not really waste very much material. It'll only be a little slug that pops out in the end and the rest of that material will be saved and just pushed to the sides. Perfect and I think our piece is just about up to temp. Okay great. Put it over top of the hole the other way and I'll see if I can bang that. So now that we got the hole punched I'm going to use this drift to open it up more. This is a hammer eye drift so that's the size of a hammerhead hole and we're going to use this to just open up that hole and get started. And then it gets expanded after this again. After this we will use another tool to make that eye shape. Perfect. Yep. Go from the other side. Okay I'm all the way through. See if I can get this out and go the other way. I lost a lot of the heat there. How to get this thing out. Do this. Okay the next step is the axe eye drift. So this is set up to be the size and shape of an axe head. So rather than the hammer head this is set up for the axe. So if you look over here first we use the slotted punch to make the hole then the hammerhead drift to bring it out to that size and then the axe eye drift to actually make it the shape and size that you want. So that's the three stages. And you make all the tools too. Yeah if you need a bigger hammer head or hammer eye hole you just make a larger version of this or you can have a larger axe. Like this is for smaller axes but if I wanted to do a full-size axe I would need a much larger axe eye drift than that. Flip it over. So what I'm doing now is I'm trying to fuller this to bring these these ears out a bit more. The handle will come up in this direction and then these ears will give it more support. Okay flip it flat so we can do in this heat. Okay hold that flat. Almost lost all our heat. So right now we've got the ears mostly done. This edge is straight. The next step is to widen this portion out to have the axe head. So that's what we're going to do next. We're going to do a double hammer on it. Once this is hot again we'll pound away for a while. Okay let me go first. Yeah don't miss. Okay I'll stop there. I should flip it over. We should do a match on the other side. Okay so we've we've got the basic shape done. Next we have to clean up some of these hammer marks. We're going to use the the flatter tool to smooth it out a little bit before we work on the bit. That's pretty good. I can do the rest by hand. Fix that a little bit. So we've got this all prepped and ground so that we can make a slit here for welding in the bit. So we're at that stage right now. We're going to heat it up then we're going to open that up. So here's the bit. This is just a piece of spring steel that I've formed into a wedge shape and that will fit right in there. So I'll cut this off a little long and then we'll weld it into there. Okay that should be seated in there pretty well. Okay let me take that. I will scrub it up and then put some flux on there. So here's the flux. This is just regular borax and what it does is that it puts kind of a glassy coating on it that prevents the prevents the steel from oxidizing. Keeps that scale from forming. I want to get it in there so that it's all soaked in. That's kind of a lot. That's good. This is where we want really hot. Let me do some cranking and watching because this is kind of delicate here. Okay so when we're getting to welding heat we want to see that steel almost the same color as the bright coals in the bottom. And when it comes up to welding heat you'll start to see little sparkles. Just a couple. If you have too many it means your steel is burning in there so just when they start to form is the right temperature for for forge welding in there. I'll probably put a bit more flux on there. You want to apply the flux Peter. I'll heat it up hold it and then you can kind of sprinkle some on and I'll stick it back in. There you go. The next time we do the heat I should be able to hammer that together. I might need to turn it over probably close. I'm going to flip it. Oh I saw one down there. They're like really really faint. Okay so stand back have you get a good hold on this. So we'll do that about three times and that'll be all. So that's set in there pretty good. Yeah you can grab that just sprinkle some right. Let me get the scale off on that side there. Okay I'll get that back in. We'll do another heat clean. That's nice and hot. Okay so next time I come out I'm going to I'm going to continue the weld. So here's where we watch for the sparkles. It's it burning. It's the carbon burning. It's sort of at the melt point right? Yeah. You can see a couple. It's probably not quite there. Closing up a bit more on the other side. Yeah a little bit more. Okay so we're pretty good. You can hardly you can see a little bit there but I'll I'll hammer that down a bit. This side you can still kind of see a little bit but I'll hammer that down. I haven't done any hammering on this side yet and then we'll trim this up at the end. So I'm not going to bother with with ford or welding heat this time. I'm just going to get nice and red and then do the finishing on the edge and draw it out a little bit. Good? Yeah. So my mom used to have the same bow. She used to when she really liked something she'd say I'm tickled pink and I'm really pleased with that. Oh great. So when we started bow weighed the piece of metal we're using and it weighed exactly a pound and a half and we've just re-weighed it now so we're down to the final profile of it and it weighs a pound and a quarter. So we lost a quarter of a pound. Some in the filings some in in driving our our punch through but I really like the profile. The weights you know it's got enough heft that it's going to be a working tool. It's not just some ornament. We've actually recreated a working tool from the 18th century. So the last thing we did last the last step we did was anneal it and we just used wood ash for that but Bo's going to walk us through the actual hardening process now and the colors we're going to look for etc. So okay so the last step we do is we'll heat this once again. We'll heat it this section here to be about a cherry red and at that temperature the steel becomes non-magnetic so you can test to see when it's the correct temperature. So we'll heat that to red. We'll bring it over to the oil and we'll dip it in about that far and quench it so that will harden this Then I'll pull it out. I'll shine it up so that I can see the bare steel and we'll watch that heat bleed into the edge and we want to keep this about a golden bronze color at the at the edge. That means this will all be soft down to here and this will just be a hardened edge at the front there. Once it reaches that proper color we'll just dip the whole thing in oil which will give it a nice finish and then it'll stop that process. It'll stop the heat from creeping farther towards the blade and at that point we'll just sharpen it. And Beau says he's not doing he's not going to do anything with the handle. He says that's up to me. Got the handle roughed out so we're going to have a working tool by a day or so from now. Perfect. Shall we get at it? Yeah let's get started. Get out of your way. So Beau, you invited me up here. He says come on up in the spring the weather will be a little warmer. What were you thinking? What were you thinking? Spring in Canada right here I'll tell you. Come on into the blacksmith shop and warm up Beau said. I want this to be this end to be hot too so that when we throw it in the oil it it actually will blacken this stuff. Okay. So you can see the colors here there's the kind of the purple the blue and then the bronze is kind of straw color at the edge there which is what we wanted.