Forging a Traditional Swedish Hewing Axe: Recreating the 1700's Craft 

Thanks man!

It sure was! Thanks

Thank you!

Thank you!

Thanks!

Double. Single bevel hewing axes are not very common in Sweden.

The light hammering is to set the weld so the pieces won't move around. If you hit loose pieces that haven't started to weld hard they will shift and things won't line up properly. Also it isn't really that two different steels are easier to weld than two of the same, it is that some steels accept welds easier than others. Mild steel is cheap and available in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, and absorbs shock quite well, so it was often used historically for the body of axes (it is still cheaper today, but the price difference between higher carbon steel suitable for an edge and mild steel has come down enough that the labor savings of making an axe in one piece is worth the extra material cost and bit of shock resistance for mass production), but mild steel doesn't weld easily. Higher carbon steels useful for edge steel will weld more easily, so inserting a sliver between the two sides of a folded axe with a mild steel body will make that weld easier than mild steel on mild steel, but if you make a folded axe entirely out of high carbon steel (or at least the simple ones that weld easy) there is no benefit to putting the shim of a different steel in between the sides of the folded piece as far as welding difficulty is concerned (you also don't need a separate piece of edge steel, because it is all suitable for an edge).

@@coopercummings8370 wow, excellent explanation thankyou. It all makes sense now.

If you mean the wedging the edge of the blade into a cut into the body of the blade connected to the head it was actually extremely common albeit usually utilizing thinner broader joining surfaces for the best weld

In most cases you would want to split one piece or the other with a hot cut to form a V shaped groove and forge the other one into a taper that slots into it to double the surface area of the weld, but that wouldn't really work for this particular type of specialized axe. A hewing axe is a specialized type of axe used for squaring up logs so that they can be stacked more easily and with smaller gaps, in order to do that as effectively as possible hewing axes usually have an offset eye so that the edge can closely hug the flat surface you leave behind where you are working. Hewing axes in general also often have a single bevel (like most wood chisels, rather than a double bevel like you would see on most knives and axes) for the same reason, although this particular style of hewing axe typically doesn't.@@beans1557