Axe to grind

Attention People Who Make Axe Handles These Days: You Are Not Good At What You Do.

You can see by the faded pink on this fiberglass handle here that the axe has clearly been out in the elements, got UVed, brittle and broke. That chunk missing from the middle is where I got pissed and swung the thing into the wood pile, visualizing heads of people in the fiberglass handle industry. It was cathartic.

As far as me letting this get UVed, an axe isn't something I will ever bring inside out of the weather, swaddle in velvet and prop it's feet up next to the fire. It's an axe. It's supposed to be tough. It belongs outside.

I probably shouldn't get worked up about handles on tools. But new axe and maul handles break at a discouraging rate and I've gone through a passel of them and it pierces me off. You bust a handle, go to get a replacement and the new wood replacement handles I've tried also break, then it's just a couple bucks more for a whole new axe with another crappy handle and there you are again later, swirling around in a predicament nobody cares about but me and it's lonely, so lonely.

In contrast, here's the double-bit axe I got from my grandfather that's, what, probably at least 30 years old at least and still cranking out what it's supposed to do with the original handle.

I burn wood in the house, my office, my hot tub and my shop. Lots of chopping. I like it when people bitch about the cost of heating oil or propane because that's a problem I don't share.

On the bright side, I bought a new handle to have laying around and went and tapped on old head on there after breaking that fiberglass piece of shit -- though I see now I should have kept tapping, as this thing isn't quite seated down right . . . but I like this Norlund head. Cuts so good I just have to hold it up to a piece of firewood and the pieces are intimidated into splitting themselves.

Also check out the closeup on the guy in a canoe. I like it.