Ray Mears - Choosing and using an axe, Bushcraft Survival

These are the three common axes used in woodcraft. The little one here is used around a camp for chopping up firewood, often used by scouts, and is an excellent size of axe for someone to start out learning with because it's light in the hand and your hand doesn't get tired so quickly and you can do beautiful carving with it. But for anything larger, cutting serious firewood as we do in the northern forests, it's way too small. This is the middle size of axe here and this is the axe I favour over all of the others because it's both usable easily with one hand, yet it's long enough that we can do heavy work with it if we have to, albeit a bit of a compromise. Most importantly of all, it's not so large that we can't easily carry it with us. So if it's going in a backpack, this is going to be the one for me. This axe here is somewhat longer and a little bit heavier and believe it or not, with experience you can use this axe also with one hand. And this is a very good size for the northern forest when we go up into the boreal forest because it gives us longer reach, enables us to cut bigger pieces of dead spruce for our fire, which is important to keep us warm in winter conditions. Even then though, I sometimes will leave this behind and take the small axe by preference. In the world of axe swinging, it's a truth that the longer the axe the safer the axe and the reason for that is that if for any reason you missed what you were chopping, the axe will reach the ground. All of the axes that we carry in woodcraft or bushcraft are portable and they tend to be a little bit short. That means that there's a risk if we use them standing of hitting ourselves, something we must be aware of. The answer to deal with that is to kneel down when we use them and try to use a fallen log as a block. Should I miss the work, the axe will bury itself into the ground and not into me. Also we never use our axe after dark or when we're tired. Now what I'm going to show you is a way of splitting a small piece of wood for firewood and the way we're going to do this is to place our axe onto the wood like so and bring both axe and wood down onto the block simultaneously like so. There we have it. This is a very safe way to use an axe for chopping firewood. Not only is it safe, it's very accurate and I use this a lot. Using a block is a very safe way to split wood. Using the small forest axe, my favourite axe, I use a block which is just a little bit shorter than the length of the axe held and I'm also kneeling but now in a more upright manner. When we place a piece of wood to be split on the block, we place it on the far side of the block and the reason for that is should I miss the piece of wood, I still have the block between myself and the axe. If the wood was here and I missed, the axe is coming towards me. So always split on the far side of the block. When I split, I'm going to bring the axe down onto the wood but I'm not going to drive the axe straight through into the block. What I'm going to do is, as I hit the wood, I'm going to throw the top of the axe off to one side to give a wedging splitting action. The reason for doing that is that because the axe doesn't strike the block, it doesn't get blunt. I've split this piece of wood to show you how you go about splitting down a baton of wood and if I take it apart you can see you can split it in half. You can then split the half into quarters. The quarter can be split into an eighth. When it comes to the eighth, we now make a different cut. We turn it around and we cut it this way into sixteenths. Now we take the sixteenth, we split that in half in the conventional way and that gives us 30 seconds. The 32nd can be split into 64ths and the 64th can be split into 128ths and you could split it further if you wanted to be obsessive about it.