Hatchet Shape for Stock Removal

The following is excerpted from Peter Follansbee’s “Joiner’s Work.”

Forget what you think about 17th-century New England furniture. It’s neither dark nor boring. Instead, it’s a riot of geometric carvings and bright colors – all built upon simple constructions that use rabbets, nails and mortise-and-tenon joints.

Peter Follansbee has spent his adult life researching this beguiling time period to understand the simple tools and straightforward processes used to build the historical pieces featured in this book. “Joiner’s Work” represents the culmination of decades of serious research and shop experimentation. But it’s no dry treatise. Follansbee’s wit – honed by 20 years of demonstrating at Plimoth Plantation – suffuses every page. It’s a fascinating trip to the early days of joinery on the North American continent that’s filled with lessons for woodworkers of all persuasions.

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Don’t be put off by the scarcity of single-bevel hewing hatchets; you can perform this work with double-bevel hatchets, too. Larger hatchets take some getting used to, but in the end they are quite efficient at stock removal. I keep a large Swedish hatchet around for times when there’s a lot of stock to remove, then I switch to a finer hatchet for more accurate hewing. My largest hatchet has a double-bevel and weighs more than 4 lbs. Its cutting edge is more than 7″ long. Regardless of the head size, I use fairly short handles on my hatchets, about 14″.

While you can make either a single-bevel or double-bevel hatchet work in dressing stock for joinery, the single-bevel hatchet is ideally suited for hewing stock prior to planing it. Moxon’s “Mechanick Exercises” describes its use and shape to some degree:

“Its use is to Hew the Irregularities off such pieces of Stuff which maybe sooner Hewn than Sawn. When the Edge is downwards, and the Handle towards you, the right side of its Edge must be Ground to a Bevil…”

If you’re scouring old tools or want a smith to make one, here’s some of what I recommend you look for. My favorite hatchet is a single-bevel hewing hatchet made in Germany in the early 1930s by a firm called J. F. R. Fuchs. It weighs about 3-1/2 lbs., and has a cutting edge around 6-1/2″ long. In describing these hatchets, it’s easy to think of them as having a flat back, but that’s not exactly the case. The bevel is on the right-hand face for a right-handed joiner, as Moxon describes. But the “back” is not truly flat; it has a very shallow sweep to its cutting edge.

Think of it as a very large and shallow, incannel gouge. The benefit of this shape is readily apparent when you try to use one that is not shaped like this. A hatchet with a flat back digs into the wood; a proper one scoops the chips out. Additionally, there is a slight sweep from the eye socket toward the cutting edge. Some of this is the shape of the tool, some is exacerbated by honing.

I have another hatchet by the same maker, with an excellent refinement of its shape. The eye is cranked over, to keep your knuckles safe when hewing. This leans the handle away from the plane of action without having to make a bent handle. I use this hatchet particularly when hewing wide panels.
These German hatchets are not readily found. One type of hatchet you will, however, find regularly in the U.K. and U.S. is the so-called Kent pattern hatchets.

There are several nice things about the Kent hatchets. Not only are they fairly common, they aren’t expensive. They can work, and – unlike many other hewing hatchets – they are reversible for lefties. Their symmetrically shaped head means you can knock the handle out and put one in from the other end. But often, the cutting edge is straight; I prefer a curve to the cutting edge. The shape of the back should be the same as those shown above.

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