Axe work at the chopping block: roughing out a spoon safely

Cut 01 of 04

The block, the height and where my feet go

My chopping block is the round of poplar in the yard, about forty-five centimetres across and cut so that its top sits a little below my knee. That height took a summer to get right. On a taller block I found myself chopping with my arms raised and the axe travelling towards my body at the end of each stroke; on a lower one I bent over and my back complained after twenty minutes. With the top at knee height I can hold the blank upright on the block, arm slightly bent, and the axe finishes its stroke into the wood of the block rather than anywhere near my legs.

The rule I keep is that the blank is always held so that the part being chopped is below the hand holding it, and that the axe strikes the blank where it is supported by the block beneath. If I am cutting the handle, the bowl end sits on the block and my hand holds the blank near the top of the handle. If I am shaping the bowl, I turn it over. I never chop anything held out in the air, and I never chop towards the hand. It sounds obvious written down, but I have caught myself doing both when tired and trying to take one more chip.

My feet stand apart, left foot a little back, so that if the axe glances off a knot it swings past the outside of my leg instead of into the shin. In winter the yard is icy and I wear old boots with good grip and clear a circle of snow first. When the children from the building come to watch, they stand behind the bench line I draw with my heel, and I stop chopping when anyone steps over it.

Cut 02 of 04

A small axe, held short

The axe I use has a head of around six hundred grams and a handle not much longer than my forearm, with a flat bevel on one side and a slight curve along the cutting edge. It is a carving axe rather than a camping hatchet; the difference is mostly in the grind, which is thin and flat enough to plane wood rather than wedge it apart. I bought it second-hand from a flea market stall and spent two evenings flattening the bevel on stones before it would take a controlled cut.

For heavy removal I hold the handle about halfway along and let the weight of the head do the work, dropping it through the stroke rather than swinging hard. For finer work, shaping the curve of the handle or the underside of the bowl, I slide my hand right up under the head, with my thumb on the back of the blade and my fingers around the top of the handle. In that grip the axe is almost a large knife, and I can take chips the thickness of a coin with it. Most of my improvement over the second year came from spending more time in this choked-up grip and less time swinging.

Cut 03 of 04

Stop cuts at the neck and the order of removal

Before the axe does anything else I draw the spoon on the split face in pencil: the outline seen from above, with the bowl, the neck and the handle, and a line down the side showing the crank, the gentle bend between bowl and handle that makes a spoon sit properly in the hand and in the pot. Then I saw two stop cuts, one on each side of the neck, down to the pencil line. I use a small folding saw for this, and it is the only sawing in the whole process. Those two cuts are what stop a chop along the side of the bowl from running on into the neck and taking half the spoon with it.

The order matters because each stage depends on the wood left from the stage before. I shape the side profile first, with the crank, because it is easiest to do while the blank is still a solid rectangle that sits flat on the block. Then I take off the bark side to set the thickness of the bowl back, then the waste on either side of the handle down to the stop cuts, and finally I rough the curve of the bowl's outside from the neck towards the tip.

Cut 04 of 04

Where the axe work still goes wrong

The commonest mistake I still make is going too thin with the axe because it is going well. An axe can take a bowl wall down to eight millimetres in a few strokes, and it feels efficient, but at that thickness any small wander in the grain or a bounce off a knot leaves a hole or a flat where I cannot recover the shape with the knife. I now stop the axe work while the blank still looks clumsy, about twice the final thickness everywhere, and let the knives do the last part.

The second mistake is chopping into a knot as if it were ordinary wood. The axe either stops dead, which jars the wrist, or skates off sideways. I work around knots with lighter strokes from both directions, or leave them for the knife. The third is fatigue. After forty minutes at the block my strokes get longer and less accurate, and every close call I have had came after that point. I set a kitchen timer in my coat pocket, and when it rings I bag the blank and go inside.

In the hardest weeks of winter, when the temperature in the yard drops well below minus ten, frozen wood behaves differently too. It splits more readily and the chips fly off brittle and sharp, and once a whole side of a bowl sheared away in a single piece. I now let frozen blanks warm up indoors for an hour before chopping, even if the rest of the job has to wait for the weekend.