you so many of you guys that follow the channel have taken on the project of restoring either family heirloom axes or hatchets or you found some old quality steel heads that you've refurbished on eBay or Craigslist at garage sales and one thing that I a a sense a lot of exasperation and frustration from a lot of you guys is when it comes to trying to restore the edges most of these that you find you're going to have as you can see this one here I've been working on it but some pretty severely chips and Nick's out of here and hand filing this is an option and it's something that people have done for a long time however if you haven't done that or have the ability the skill to do it it can be really frustrating and and your results can be not so good it's hard to get this symmetrical it's hard to know and to hold and maintain the angles and so today's video I'm going to share with you a way to put a precision edge on here and how to determine what the proper radius should be so I'm going to go over just a couple a little bit of nomenclature on on how what the different point portions of the axe of a hatchet head are called this back section right here is considered to be the pole or the butt and this cut on the front cutting edge right here the upper section is called the toe of the bit in this lower section is called the heel of the bit so when you hear me using those those terms you'll understand toe heel and the pole so first thing we need to do is to find the pivot point of the axe of the hatchet head so how we do that is what we're going to need is a basically a compass and this is a do you think I could find a compass I wanted to do the video I couldn't find anywhere so I made one up here and so copy this if you like a regular compass would be much better so what we're going to do is that right here on the upper toe of the bit we're going to put our compass point not not the pencil point right there and when we set our compass we want you we want this pencil to come in contact 1/8 of an inch back from the pole so we'll hold this on here with our finger and we're going to draw once we determine that 8-inch back from the pole we're going to draw an arc make sure you press hard enough there where you can see it after we've got that we're going to come down here to the heel and placing the point of the compass right on the corner we're going to do the same thing I'm going to do this on both sides all right if you look right here you'll see where those two lines intersect that right there is our pivot point so from there maintaining the settings on our compass we're going to put the compass point right where those two lines intersect and this is going to be what the radius should be and a lot of times you know you guys are going to get axes axe heads or hatchet heads that have been ground improperly and a lot of times they're going to be ground improperly from the manufacturer themselves so you can see right there you can see how far off I was and I'm pretty experienced at doing this but the natural groove of that head you can see is way off to what it should be can follow the pencil line right there so we'll go ahead and do the exact same thing on the other side all right you can see right here where our two pencil lines intersected we're going to do is we're going to take a center punch and we're going to very carefully put that Center punch right at the crossroads of those lines now do this on the back of your vise or on a chunk of railroad tie or an anvil like this and we'll give it a good whack you can see right there that we've got that divot there right at the intersection of the lines so now we've got our center punch marked on both sides the next thing we're going to do is either using a drill press or a drill or whatever you have I got a cordless drill here with a little champ chamfer bit is we're going to drill that out just a little bit more that's perfect right there you see that I've already got the other side drilled out so all morning long I was trying to think you know trying to think of a way how can a guy get a precision edge on these axes you know using some standard tools a belt sander grinder is never a good idea because if you overheat it in the middle turns blue you ruin the edge nice thing about a belt sander is that it doesn't get hot enough to destroy the temper on this so looking around what do I have what do I have and I came up with a way I think that it's just ingenious very simple very precise and pretty inexpensive so right here this belt sander you can see this was my dad gave this to me for my birthday from Harbor Freight it's not the best quality but it's a very handy item and it's pretty inexpensive I think I looked online I think you can get them on sale for about $75 and I believe you can get sign up for their newsletter and get their 20% off coupon and maybe apply that and even get it for Less but it's almost just the perfect tool for doing these edges so I get to looking at this and what I found what I came up with is right here this little guide for the belt sander here had a little point on it you can see right there was just a little point indicator that was pointed at the different angles for turning this was held on with the screws so I took this off and it had a little bend in it and I just took it on the back of the anvil and just pounded that flat what you have here then I've got a small bolt and lock washer here and then you can see this guide right here on the back a stop what I did is I drilled a hole in here so bring the camera over and show you how I put this together so with this little hole what I came up with is you put the screw through this point and then through the hole and use a lock washer some Loctite on there once you get it all set up because it's going to vibrate you don't want this come loose alright so and point this orient this little point straight up and down just like that well tighten that up just make sure we're up and downs not super critical this is straight up and down as you can now when I got to check and you know ideally I want my axe heads I want the angle of the blade the sharpening to be around I kind of like around 25 24 degrees somewhere in there and by placing this on here when I started to check the angles this came out to about 23 degrees which is just fine it's just the way I like it but what you get here is you see now that we have the the divots here is that we can put this divot right in the point and rest it in there and once when when we turn this on now we have a perfect hinge point where right at the pole at the base of the pole of the axe there where we can rotate this back and forth and maintain that radius maintain that edge that we drew with our pencil so at first I laid it right here on this guide and it wasn't very precise because I have the the ax head moving back and forth a little bit which is inadvertently changing the angle and then as I rotate it up I was just not getting consistency but the fact that this is fixed on this point right here and we've determined the proper radius for the cutting edge now it's it's perfect it cannot help but to grind correctly and we have it on both sides so we'll grind and then flip it over and land at that point and do the same on the next side you will have to kind of keep an eye on it you know periodically look right down there and make sure that you're getting about the same amount of material on each side but I just kind of what I do is I start on one side and I'll work it back and forth let's say six times just get a nice even pattern and then I'll flip over and do the same now one thing you got to be careful of we have the belt is turning towards the blade not away so you don't want to press too hard or get this up at an angle because it's going to catch and it's going to throw the blade so you're really going to have to be careful with that so what I have found here and I'll demonstrate in a minute is just by holding this gently and just the weight of my fingers just maybe half the way to my hand we'll work this back and forth and we'll work these edges you can see here after about three minutes of sharpening on the belt sander as I said I had filed that groundout by hand thinking that I knew what the correct radius was for this particular head but you can see right there the fact that I've got a fixed point here I cannot make an error and you can see it's starting to make the corrections where I had went wrong you see how the grind is coming in here to the back and you can see where it's straightening out and it's correcting the bad grind that I'd started with here on both sides I did not have enough of a radius for this particular head and this here it's coming in it's working it out so we'll put it back on here and put another five minutes on it I think we should have it so it's hard to argue with the results but it's pretty obvious look at the symmetry of that grind it's just perfect both sides it's at the correct angle we've corrected the incorrect radius that we had before and you don't have to spend a lifetime sharpening tools to do this you know we've got the point here we've determined a radius and you just can't argue with the math and it's just the way it's supposed to be and right there this edge is pretty good it's not quite good enough to be sharpened with it we've got a little bit of a burr on it so we'll finish this off by hand I'll show you how to do that real quick but that is a very effective technique and very quick this edge I should have showed you before I started but it had some really deep Nick's in it I would say it had some Nicks that were a sixteenth of an inch deep and just in a matter just a few minutes and just careful carefully working it back and forth all of those have gone we've corrected the radius we've corrected everything and the thing is in probably better condition now than it was when it was first forged and of course you know no axe head or hatchet head is is truly you know ready for cutting ready for use until it's it's hand under hand sharpened and what I found to work the best are just these round stones the round stones are nice because you can hold the stone in your hand and do the work this way which is can be done with the square stone but doesn't work as well so there's two that I really like I've kind of narrowed it down to what this one here is the lansky stone and what I really like about this one is that it's this is what I would consider to be a packed stone something you could take with you because it's so durable the fact that they've put a chamfer on these bevels these edges here makes it really durable and it's not too big if it's in the palm nice and its really good for sharpening however it's a little bit small in some cases in and it's not the ideal shop shop stone for the shop stone I like this big one it's about two three and a half inches or so and this is made by Norton we've got to find and a course on here you guys have seen me use this before but these two stones you can do just about everything so before we start using our stone many of you guys have asked about you do I put oil on a stone or water what do you use you need something on there and I have the best that I found is a kerosene or diesel so I'll put a little kerosene on there and what that does is that just helps carry away all the particles so it doesn't clog up the stone but it hold this in your hand here and what you what you're trying to do what you're trying to achieve is just starting slow is basically just imagine you're trying to slice off sections of that stone and slice off sections so the angle is kind of hard to determine until you get some practice so what I typically do is I'll start I'll start on it and look at the stone and I want to see you itty bitty microscopic shavings of that stone kind of working up on the edge so I'll change the angle itself and you can also see the diesel there see how the diesel is being being pressed onto the blade that's a good indicator that your angles right if you see right there for my angles too shallow I've got no diesel but I'll turn that until that diesel is washing up it's like waves in the ocean on the beach just washing up on that accent and I'm maintaining the stone the orientation I'm just changing the head with my hand back it off until you get that little wave of bezel on there and we'll work just about three times see how that is way the waves on the waves up there the waves crashing on the beach there so just in no time this tap this hatchet head went from really in bad shape all chipped up to just near perfection there perfect symmetry perfectly balanced in line with the pole of the act there hatchet head and razor sharp I don't know where this came from but I'll tell you what after sharpening can tell that the steel on this is really good kind of just has a feel I don't maybe Swedish it's hard to say it's kind of a Scandinavian just kind of what appears to me but sharp you know you can see here razor razor sharp here's a little some sandpaper and it's good idea that sharp sharper than most pocket knives I think being carried around but that really works good I mean yeah you have a little dimple there in your ax head maybe if you're a collector you had something really valuable that that wouldn't be ideal but I'm a user and I want my tools sharp and when they're not sharp they're dangerous and this is a way a foolproof way I showed you if you just set up that belt sander like that that anyone can do it no special skills and a little bit of practice with your Lansky stone and you can have just a really look at that just that's the best edge I've ever put on a blade and with a Harbor Freight belt sander this would be a nice of it there'd be more than one person I'd like to have this one in a giveaway but maybe a custom-made handle straw that out there it'd be a hard time giving this one up it's one of my favorite axe heads but I hope that helped and let me know how your sharpening projects come or if you decide to do it you know any belt sander rope will work you know maybe you can come up with your own way you know just determine where this point is and and come up with a jig or something to hold it you know 25 degree angle or so whatever you like but results of results