Stone tools 2: Hafted stone celt axe / hatchet 🪨
Channel: Make It Primitive
Date: 2020-05-17

After confirming in a previous video that stone tools made from my local the limestone can in fact hold a useful edge, the next step was to build hafted stone chopping tools. I started with a small stone hatchet and and a few chisels. In this video, I use them to build a mid-size stone axe.

The predecessor to this video:
https://studio.youtube.com/video/azCG_JfsHUI

The rock used is once again from my limestone slab source, in this case a brick-shaped fragment of a thicker layer. I used knapping, pecking and finally a lot of grinding to get the axe head into the desired shape. The handle is made from willow wood. The head weights about 420 grams (15 ounces), the whole axe a bit over a kilogram (37 ounces).

In use, it turned out that the impact force tends to push the axe head too deep into its hole. Reasons for this might be the angle in the head's shape, a slightly too large hole or the elasticity of the willow wood. It's not a big problem, however - I simply used shims made of wood splinters chopped off earlier to make the hole narrower.

The piece of wood that I chopped for the video is about 5 centimeter (2 inches) thick fresh beechwood. The edges of both tools showed very little wear even after several such cuts, exhibiting no chipping and only minimal dulling.

00:00 Intro, using the small stone hatchet made previously
00:38 Making a bigger stone axe
04:17 Testing the new stone axe

#stonetools #primitiveskills