Reply With QuoteA mattock has two sides to the head - usually a blade like yours and a pointy spike.
You have an adze there, usually used for shaping wood or small horticultural tasks
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adze
What's this thing dug up in my back garden?
I had the landscape gardeners in recently & they dug up this ironwork. It looks old & is certainly hand crafted by a blacksmith.
My property backs on to what used to be an old Bath stone quarry in the 18th & 19th centuries.
The contractor chucked it back in the hole he'd dug after showing me but I retrieved it & cleaned it up & reshafted it using traditional techniques gleaned from YouTube.
Then took it to my dental practice & carved my name in it using my dental drills.
Then French polished the shaft.
Anyway, is it a Mattock, an Adze, or an Axe...or something else???
A mattock has two sides to the head - usually a blade like yours and a pointy spike.
You have an adze there, usually used for shaping wood or small horticultural tasks
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adze
It could also be an old hoe I think
'Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain' - Schiller.
No idea BUT I'd like to see more of what it's leaning on
Good use of dental drills
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Haha, yeah better than the usual!Originally Posted by xxnick1975
Good use of dental drills
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Ah, that's a good question. Here you go then....
You're looking at a coral reef scene carved out of one piece of wood, a whole Teak tree root. The cut edge, aka the stump, is facing away from you & you're therefore looking at the root from the underside.
I appreciate the vision that the wood carver must have had.
9 month's work from a guy named Subiyono in Central Java, Indonesia.
Last edited by trident-7; 10th June 2023 at 21:34.
Wow , I really like that and some skill to produce
I can’t be the only person hoping you were about to say that you put the dental drills to work on that too haha!!Ah, that's a good question. Here you go then....
You're looking at a coral reef scene carved out of one piece of wood, a whole Teak tree root. The cut edge, aka the stump, is facing away from you & you're therefore looking at the root from the underside.
I appreciate the vision that the wood carver must have had.
9 month's work from a guy named Subiyono in Central Java, Indonesia.
Really cool carving!
This is what he did for me when I mentioned that it was a shame that he hadn't signed his work of art. It's about 55cm x 50cm, he doesn't do things by halves....
I'd probably have needed a million 541's to do that!
https://www.henryschein.co.uk/gb-en/...g-25pk/1202397
Adze, as above.
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Could a hoe. Could be an adze. Is the edge tapered? Even old. The edge should have a tapered blade. Flat end. Hoe
Never mind the adze (nice work BTW). Worth posting just to show this off. What a wonderful thing. Incredible God tier carving.
...
On the "thing", I think it's a Dutch Hoe. My ex-wife's family had lots of those in Africa. She was miffed at the Hoes we have in this country so I found one for her.
Thanks for the helpful comments chaps. I'm thinking it's an Adze.
It looks very old, not mass produced....the work of a blacksmith at his forge....it's not symmetrical.
It was extremely rusty with no trace of a shaft & the edge had fractured which might have led to it being discarded.
Do the following images make a definitive identification any easier?
I agree. I don't think it's meant to be sharp like an adze, where the blade is thicker
Edit: Based on the photos that appeared while I was writing the post, I'll change tack: it's unnecessarily sturdy for an hoe, so probably adze.
Last edited by Saint-Just; 11th June 2023 at 11:13.
'Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain' - Schiller.
I have some Mousey Thompson furniture which has an adzed finish to the table tops. I can see how this implement would be able to achieve this effect if it was sharp enough.
Although usually used on wood, an adze could have been used for basic block-shaping in the nearby quarry - most Jurassic limestones are remarkably soft when 'green' - i.e. first quarried, and an adze would be good to quickly square-off ashlar blocks before final dressing by someone more skilled.
I needed some blocks of Clipsham stone for refurb work on our barn - collected them straight from the quarry and did the final shaping and 'aging'-to-match with an old Stanley 'Surform'!
That would make sense. We back on to what used to be a Bath Stone Quarry with most activity between circa 1750-1900. The stone is an oolitic limestone & relatively soft….but maybe not so soft that it couldn’t cause fracture of an edge from the tool?
I know the stone well - been down a number of the old disused mines in your area (mines, not quarries, that's how valuable that stone was), Great Oolite formation, so slightly younger than the Inferior Oolite ("inferior" in the archaic sense of older or lower, not poorer) I was talking about, but mechanically very similar. It wouldn't normally damage such a tool, just gradually abrade its edge, but quarrymen - even skilled ones - were abysmally poorly paid, and so would keep their tools in use until they fell to bits - and even then most-likely have a blacksmith repair it. A fracture comes from work-hardening over a long period of time, or from mis-use, so may have happened after the tool was no longer needed and some inexpert individual got hold of it and broke it. It certainly tells an interesting story, and I love what you've done with it.
Yeah, the back story is everything....a bit like a military watch. Fascinating thing is history.
You might have been down the mines in Combe Down then?
FNAR FNAR
So, it was most likely a quarry tool.
I as hoping it was something to do with slow worms when I saw the title of the thread.
Hi Rob
An Adze (for woodworking) and a dutch hoe are essentially the same tool, but the former goes on a shorter shaft and the latter a much longer one, as it is intended to hit the ground near vertical (digging into the ground), whereas the adze is intended to hit the wood almost parallel to the surface (flaking off a shallow scallop of wood).
The only discernible difference between the ironwork on the two of them is that the grind for the leading edge of a Dutch hoe is usually quite short and steep, ans the adze is often longer and shallower, to avoid being forced deeper into the wood than intended.
It is also true that most woodworking adzes are significantly smaller than dutch hoes. Adze max width 3" or so, dutch hoe minimum 4", usually more.
And often (but not always) adzes are "cupped", cutting out a flake that is tapered side to side as well as end to end. As far as I know, all dutch hoes are flat across the blade. All the ones I have seen are.
In the UK there isn't really a recent historic culture of shaping wood with adzes, other than in boatbuilding, unlike in Japan where "chouna" finishing (like your table) is very highly regarded.
So looking at it, I reckon it is a dutch hoe, which would be a very useful tool if you were manually removing the topsoil if extending a quarry edge. One guy loosens everything, cutting lumps with the dutch hoe, and the guy behind him follows on removing the loosened spoil.
Nearest I've been are Brown's Folly and Box; the main Combe Down site was off-limits when I was working in that area. Also been in a couple of the sites near Cheltenham - Whittington (nearly as scary as some of the Chalk mines I've been down), and Cleeve Hill. Who says geology is boring!
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