
With the somewhat contentious and clickbait-y title and attention-grabbing video out of the way, let's discuss this in more detail and in good faith. I've heard all sorts of misinformation and just plain BS come up in this forum and others every time axes are mentioned. Samples include: 

"Axes don't need to be/shouldn’t be sharp"

"Axes shouldn't be sharpened like knives"

"Hair shaving edges are bad because they are weak and will chip or roll right over as soon as you use it"

Every time I encounter these views, it's almost always coming from a person who has little to no experience sharpening or using axes. Not surprising, seeing as axe use and maintenance is kind of a dying art. Most peoples’ only experience with axes these days is within the context of their once-a-year car camping trip, splitting small kindling with the cheap hardware store hatchet that they bought spoon-dull. So firstly, let's get this out of the way and state clearly and unequivocally that yes, axes should be sharp. As a general rule, it's pretty safe to assume that any bladed implement should be kept sharp in order to work safely and efficiently. Axes are not an exception to this. There's some nuance to suss out for sure, though. Different axes are used for different things. Does a splitting maul need to be kept as sharp as a carving axe? No, but even a splitting maul benefits from semi-routine edge maintenance and a sharper edge. And that carving axe absolutely needs to be hair shaving sharp. Sharpness is of course relative, but at minimum an axe needs to be kept sharp enough to be safe and efficient at what it needs to do. And let's be honest: if your axe is not at least shaving hair fresh off of a sharpening session, you simply did not sharpen it to its full potential or did not care to. It may still be usable for its purpose in that state, but if you know what you’re doing and do it well, damn near anything that you apex and de-burr should be able to shave hair and will perform better for longer the sharper it is. 

Let's move on to the subject of durability. I think part of the problem here is that people tend to make the mistake of conflating sharpness with lower angles/apex geometry. On some level there is a correlation, but if we are simply talking about hair shaving sharpness, it's not really tied to lower edge angles at all. Even a 25-30° edge can shave hair with ease. Remember that overall sharpness can be thought of as a function of geometry + apex keenness. Two separate things working together to create an easier, more efficient cutting experience. In the case of shaving hair, it’s really just the apex keenness doing that and an apex can be keen at any larger, more durable angle. There are also people who insist that axes don't need to be sharp because "it's the geometry that does the work." By this they mean that the primary geometry is what cuts and the apex keenness is of little importance. Well, yes but mostly still no. Bit geometry is just as important in axes as primary bevel geometry is in knives or any other cutting implement. You can have the keenest apex in the world that will silently laser through a held hair, but if your behind the edge thickness is too beefy for the intended use-case, that blade will still offer a lot of resistance and cut badly. Meanwhile, if your behind the edge thickness is where it should be, your blade will perform better for longer, even long after that apex keenness has dulled considerably. So there’s a kernel of truth here, but what I’d say is that although the bit geometry behind the edge is *more* important, it isn’t any sort of excuse to ignore the state of the edge. With axes in particular, a sharp edge by way of apex keenness is important to maintain to a decent level as it will allow the axe to bite rather than glance. Aside from glances being potentially very dangerous, if your edge is not properly maintained, you will start to overcompensate by chopping into the wood at steeper angles that don’t displace wood and throw chips as efficiently. It all loops back to what I mentioned at the start of the paragraph: sharpness is a function of apex keenness + geometry. The two work in tandem and you shouldn’t be ignoring either one. This is a general truism that is the same for knives or any other bladed implement. Nobody ever goes around saying “knives don’t need to be sharp” because that’s a blatantly ridiculous thing to say. It sounds equally stupid to anyone who knows what they’re talking about when someone says “axes don’t need to be sharp,” even if they’re just trying to make a point about the importance of the overall geometry.

Lastly, let’s talk about the sharpening process here, because in reality I sharpened this axe exactly like I would a knife, from a conceptual standpoint at least. If you go to Walmart and buy the cheapest kitchen knife they have and want to get it to perform its best, what would you do? You’d take it to your coarse stone and thin it out behind the edge, then add the microbevel or secondary bevel of your choice. Same here. I fired up the belts and thinned out the bit geometry, then added a microbevel by hand with a stone. After some use I did notice some very minor edge rolling, so I went back and made the microbevel a bit more pronounced. No issues after that. It lasers through branches in the 3 inch diameter range often in one chop, and even anything pushing up to about the 6 in range is still relatively short work. By the way, the bit geometry on this hatchet was set at a 17.5° *inclusive* convex as measured by a bevel gauge. Then the microbevel was made somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-25°. This is right about the ideal for a hatchet that will mainly be doing smaller work and avoiding heavy knots and such. It wasn’t even unheard of for the lumberjacks of old to take their bevels down to 15° inclusive on their dedicated felling axes and then microbevel to a more stout 25-30° or so, and modern day timbersports racing axes still get taken down to very thin bevels in the mid to low teens. You’d be surprised how well a relatively thin but smartly set axe bevel will hold up to the work in the hands of someone with a degree of skill and knowledge. Most people have never experienced a truly efficient axe, as anything you’re liable to find in a hardware store is stupidly chunky and designed to be idiot-proof. The inefficiency is ridiculous and the work will get tiring and very unproductive quickly in that state. Even most of the more reputable modern axe brands tend to need work out of the box.

 Anyway, I’ve said my piece and gotten it all out of my system. I wouldn’t even consider myself an expert, but since the general knowledge pool out there on axes is so demonstrably shallow, it felt like it was high time to address all this directly. This is a forum dedicated to sharpening after all, so let’s set the record straight once and for all. From here on out, any time I see “axes don’t need to be sharp” or any other such related comment, I’ll just be responding with a link right back to this. For anyone interested who wants to explore further reading, the US Forest Service’s manual “One Moving Part” is available as a free PDF download and is a treasure trove of good info. Dudley Cook had a lot of this laid out in specifics in his book “The Ax Book,” too. 


One for the "AxEs DoN't NeEd To Be ShArP" crowd.