Oxfordshire Woodland Group

Gransfors Bruks axes cost a pretty penny and so when I came across the Wetterlings long handled hewing axe on sale from Knives and Tools in the Netherlands I thought that I would buy myself a belated Christmas present.

I paid £114 including shipping charges to the UK which seemed like a good deal however I was somewhat taken aback to discover a few weeks later that this same axe is now listed with a sale price of £164.

Wetterlings is now owned by the same person who owns Gransfors Bruks and I have corresponded with him discovering that a number of the Gransfors Bruks staff are now resident at Wetterlings charged with repairing, overhauling and updating the production facilities at Wetterlings. They intend producing new axe designs shortly based on older traditional Swedish axe designs.

The axe arrived in perfect order in a box with the blade protected with a thick leather cover.

The cutting edge was very sharp and so a few finishing strokes with very fine carborundum paper brought this to a scary sharp edge.

These axes are knife edged i.e. "V" shaped and hence not flat faced on one side and so a slightly different technique is required to use same. When used to hew down the log the finish produced is very fine almost of the same quality as that produced by using a plane.

I have found when hewing with the long handled chisel edged Kent pattern hewing axe

that this can prove difficult especially when hewing around knots and when spiral grain wood is encountered resulting in fibre tearout.

The Wetterlings hewing axe is ideally suited to sever spiral grain especially along the top surface (as shown above) of a log before removing fleshings and juggles with the much thicker heavy duty long handled Kent pattern hewing axe. It can also be used to produce a fine surface finish removing local blemishes

When deciding to buy a hewing axe it is important to recognise that a hewer needs to have to hand and be able to select from a number of different axes in order to be able to deal effectively with the variations in grain found in logs and especially around knots and when spiral grain is present.

Chilterns