On carving an axe-handle

Wölfchen in action

I have a little axe that I love, assembled by a friend of mine and gifted to me on my birthday a few years ago. I take care of it, called it 'Wölfchen' (little wolf) and decided to personalize it a bit to carve a wolf into it's handle. Now Wölfchen has been carved for quite a while and I've observed something interesting: even people who can be careless with other tools always treat Wölfchen well. And I don't even threaten them. I think it's because the carving has made tangible the effort that has gone into this tool and people more quickly develop a relationship to this item because it's more 'humanized'.

Now I was talking about this to a friend - as equipment sometimes gets lost and we were thinking in general about how things could be personalized or marked such that people would treat them with more care. And she said 'I wanted to give my son his first axe for his upcoming birthday. I love the idea to make it a more-valued item by adding some carving to the handle. Would you be able to carve a bat. He loves bats!'

So here we are.

I rarely carve things and am definitely no expert, but this is my procedure:

1.  look at the item and figure out where it's supposed to go and what it's supposed to look like (I have added an image that's already carved, so you can see the overall placing - also advertising Wood Tools who created the axe and who I personally think make great tools)

2. rough out the surfaces, first starting with the profile. Next rough out the surfaces pointing head on. This is not about defining the details or the three-dimensional placement. This is only about transferring the outest-most outlines and taking away the material that is even futher out than that.


3. add in the three dimensional shape and start adding in details.

4. go through and deepen important details, add in the smaller details and finally try to balance out the design.

5. polish if needed, oil

Formalities:

• Material: wood that you want to carve out of, wood oil
• Tools: carving knife, sand paper in different grits, cloth
• Time: ~5hrs, however I always have to stop after 1-2 hrs because the ball of my left thumb swells up from using it to carefully and controlledly apply pressure to the back of the carving knife.