It might also be a good option if you don’t feel safe swinging an adze.Įxcellent post David, I have three adzes, a west coast Haida lipped adze (Innie), a Gutter adze (Innie) and a Grandsfors Bruk a Swedish adze (Outie) It came sharp yet needed a bit of tweaking to the inside bevel mostly , I’d suggest something like a #7 sweep bent gouge (long bent) 25-35 mm wide. You can hog away wood pretty quickly with a large gouge and a mallet. You’ll still need that gouge after you save enough for a good adze anyway. Better to buy a good gouge than a bad adze. If you can’t afford a good adze, but you want to start bowl carving, consider buying a gouge instead. They provide the carver with the freedom to control the course of the tool and come into, and out of, a hollow.

When used for carving work, gouges have outer bevels. Another way to think about it is like this: an adze is like a carving gouge on a stick. I hope my drawing at the top offers some explanation as to why. For hollowing bowls, you want some degree of outer bevel. There may be some uses for which an adze with an outer bevel is undesirable. I guess you could say it has a tighter turning radius than the HK, but the HK provides a much smoother ride. It took lots of tweaking to get it to work better.Īfter grinding away a lot of steel (carefully avoiding overheating) and adding a new handle, I now have a nice little adze perfect for tight hollows due to a combination of three factors: a tight sweep of the edge, a tight curve along the top of the adze, and a pronounced outer bevel (now). In spite of all that, it will indeed remove wood from the hollow of a bowl I carved some bowls with it. It lacks the concentrated weight of the HK that helps propel the edge through the wood. The handle is poorly designed in relation to the geometry of the head, and there is no outside bevel at all. Their carving gouges are excellent, but they missed the mark on the design of this tool. Before I had any idea what to buy, I purchased this adze made by Pfeil Swiss Made. My other adze is a good example of how much work will be involved if you buy something poorly designed for bowl carving (even if the product description says “perfect for making bowls”). All I have done through many sharpening is to maintain it as it came. The steel holds an edge under heavy blows, and sharpens easily. It enters the wood easily and the weight of the tool propels the edge through. A shorter inner bevel strengthens the edge by making the total edge angle around thirty degrees. It has an outer bevel that is maybe declined eight to ten degrees from the line of the head.

My HK adze arrived sharp and ready to go (except for the lack of a handle, but that was my choice).

They have other adzes there of various sizes made by HK and other good makers. As far as I can tell, it is the same one available from these suppliers based in the U.K.: Woodsmith and Woodland Craft Supplies. Mine was purchased years ago through Drew Langsner’s online Country Workshops store. They are designed well, with much consideration for how they will be used. The Karlsson’s have a small family forge in Sweden that makes excellent tools. The adze head is made by Hans Karlsson in Sweden. I’ll start by showing some photos of the adze I use the majority of the time.

Using an adze