The axe Robin Wood is using for hewing his fence posts was bought for him by Hannes Schnelle during his last trip to Japan setting up the forthcoming Kesurokai event. It is a beautiful tool and gives Robin so much pleasure! Here it is when it arrived, packed in beautiful, wafer-thin wood shavings from a plane...
Robin's Japanese friend and fellow turner Tomio Imaru gave us this rough translation of the text on it:
Maybe the big 2 kanji words on the blade are the smith's name"kajiya-mei". Usually a bladesmith puts his smiths name (which sometimes does not coincide with his real name) on the blade. It looks like 幸英. On the lower side of the blade I see the location of the work shop name 土佐. Tosa is a Japanese prefectural name and is located in Shikoku island. Almost all Japanese axes have 7 stripes; four are on the right side of the blade and three are on the left side. These stripes mean the thanks for wood, safe woodworking, and offer alhohol and crops.
Robin loves axes and has a large collection - I will see if I can get him to photograph a few and write a little about them.
i love axes /adzes and there use .have a small collection of gransfors carving,broad,adzes etc i also like japanese hand tools and would like to purchase some time japanese axes for hewing and woodworking.i appreciate hand crafted tools and wonder what kind of cost these axes have like those you display on this site. i am a landscape gardener with 28yrs exp have used wide range of tools but nothing compares to the purity of hand crafted woodworking tools and use i persue this with a passion,carving chopping away whenever i have spare time.using only salvaged,recycled lumber.good to see others with similar passions keep up good work
Posted by: Pro67 | 20 January 2011 at 07:30 PM