The Axe Work That Drops a Small Tree Where You Want It

An axe will fell anything up to about eight inches through without much drama. Past ten inches you're not being rugged, you're being slow, and slow is how people get hurt. A 3.5-pound head on a 31-inch handle is the standard felling setup. A 2.25-pound boy's axe on a 28-inch handle is easier to control and plenty for a six-inch sapling, and control is worth more than mass on a tree this size.

Everything below assumes a tree you can reach around, standing clear of buildings, fences, roads and anything carrying electricity. If the tree is leaning into another tree, hung up, dead and hollow, or within two tree lengths of a power line, that's a call to somebody with a bucket truck and insurance. No shame in it. Hung-up trees kill experienced loggers.

Sharpen it first, and look hard at the handle

A dull axe glances. It skids off the wood instead of biting, and where it goes next is nobody's plan. You want an edge that will shave the hair off your forearm at the very center of the bit, with the bevel convex and the corners slightly duller than the middle.

Then check the haft. Grip the handle just under the head and flex it. Look for a hairline crack running back from the eye, which is what an overstrike leaves behind. Look for a head that rotates or clicks when you twist it. A loose head on a downswing is a projectile.

Run your thumb along the grain on the end of the handle. The growth rings should run more or less parallel to the bit, not across it. Handles with rings running the wrong way snap sooner.

Gear, in the order you'll want it

Eye protection first. Chips come off fast and they come off at eye height. Safety glasses, not sunglasses.

Boots with a hard toe and real tread. Leather gloves that fit snug, though there's a real argument for bare hands here: you feel the handle rolling in your grip before you lose it, and blisters tell you your technique is off. I wear gloves in the cold and go without in summer.

A hard hat if the tree has any dead wood in the crown. Dead limbs come down when you start chopping, and they come down silently.

Nobody within two tree lengths. That's the actual rule, and it includes the guy who wants to film it.

Read the tree before the first swing

Stand back thirty feet and look at it from two sides at ninety degrees to each other. You're looking for three things: which way the trunk leans, where the crown weight actually sits, and which way the wind is pushing.

A tree falls where its weight wants to go. You can steer a small one maybe fifteen or twenty degrees off its natural lean with a good notch and hinge. You can't make it fall uphill against a heavy lean, and trying is how a trunk comes back over the stump at you.

Pick your fall line. Now look up the fall line for anything it will bounce off, and look at the ground for what it'll land on.

Clear the ground and cut two escape routes

Take five minutes on this. It's the part everybody skips.

Clear brush, saplings and loose branches from a circle about six feet around the trunk. Anything that can catch your ankle while you're moving away has to go. Check overhead too, and behind you at full arm-and-axe extension, because a swing that clips a branch on the backstroke goes somewhere unpredictable.

Then cut two escape paths, each running back at roughly 45 degrees from the fall line, on opposite sides. Clear them for twenty feet. Walk each one once, at speed, before you start cutting. You're not going to be looking at your feet later.

Never stand directly behind the tree along the fall line. That's where the butt kicks.

The swing that never reaches your legs

Feet about shoulder width, square to the trunk, standing to the side of the tree rather than facing your own shins. Your top hand slides down the handle to meet the bottom hand as the axe comes through. That's the whole technique. Chopping with your hands apart the entire swing is slow and inaccurate.

Aim so a miss goes into the trunk or into empty air, never across the line of your legs. Let the axe do the work. Guys who muscle it get tired in six minutes and sloppy in seven.

And aim for the far edge of what you're hitting, not the near edge. Overstrikes, where the handle hits the wood instead of the head, are what breaks handles and they almost always come from aiming short.

Cut the notch as wide as the tree is thick

This is where axe work differs from saw work. Your face notch goes on the side you want the tree to fall. It needs to be a third of the trunk's diameter deep, and the mouth of it has to be roughly as tall as the trunk is thick. On a seven-inch trunk, that's a notch seven inches from top lip to bottom lip.

Cut it too narrow and the chips won't clear. You'll be standing there pounding a slot and getting nowhere.

Work it in two angles. Chop down into the wood at about 45 degrees, then chop in flat to meet it, and pop the chip out. Repeat. The notch opens as a clean V with a flat floor at the back. Keep the back of the notch level and square to your fall line, because that line is what the tree will follow.

The back cut and the hinge

Move to the opposite side. Your back cut starts one to two inches above the floor of the notch, never below it, and it comes in horizontally.

Stop before you meet the notch. What's left between the two cuts is the hinge, and on a small tree you want about an inch of it, running the full width of the trunk and even in thickness. The hinge is the only thing steering the fall. Cut through it and the tree is free to go anywhere, including backward over your stump.

Watch the back cut as it narrows. When it starts to widen on its own, the tree is going.

When it moves, walk

Not run. Running trips people. A fast, deliberate walk down one of your escape routes, twenty feet minimum, eyes up on the crown the whole way. Don't watch the stump. Everything that hurts you is coming from above: broken limbs, whipping tops, branches knocked out of neighboring trees.

Stay put until everything stops moving, including the stuff overhead that got shaken loose and hasn't decided yet.

Limbing, butt to tip

Start at the stump end and work toward the top. Always keep the trunk between you and the axe head. Stand on one side, cut the limbs on the other side.

Strike each limb from underneath, at a shallow angle, swinging in the direction the branch grows. You're cutting with the grain, and a limb that would take four chops against the grain takes one with it. Cutting downward into the top of a branch drives the axe toward the trunk and toward your feet. Don't.

Never straddle the log. Never chop between your legs, no matter how convenient the branch looks.

Save the limbs holding the trunk off the ground for last, and know that they're loaded. Cut one and the trunk drops and rolls. Stand on the uphill side, take the tension limbs partway from the compression side, and step back and let it settle before you finish the cut. Bent-over saplings pinned under the trunk are worse, they release like a whip.

Stop before you're tired

Honest accounting: felling and limbing a small tree by hand is fifteen or twenty minutes of real work, and most bad swings come after minute twenty-five. When your accuracy drifts an inch, sit down. Drink something. The tree isn't going anywhere.

Sheath the axe when you're done, or sink it in the stump where everybody can see it. An axe lying in the leaves is a trap with a schedule.

That tree took thirty years to grow and eleven minutes to drop. Spend two of those minutes standing somewhere it can't reach you.