adz

 

tool similar in purpose and use to an axe but with the cutting edge at right angles to the handle rather than aligned with it. The details of construction of a particular adze will depend on its intended application. Some types have a single cutting edge with the rear side of the head formed into a hammer or a picklike tool. Other types have a head with two identical cutting edges back to back. The principal use of the adze is in dressing and squaring large timbers. However, since these two processes are now usually performed by machine tools in factories, the adze is no longer commonly used.

The tool known as the adze (pronounced ădz) serves for smoothing rough-cut wood in hand woodworking. Generally, the user stands astride a board or log and swings the adze downwards towards their feet, clipping, chipping, and or cutting off a piece of wood, and walking backwards as they go, leaving a relatively smooth surface behind. However, in general usage, the adze can be used for other cutting operations, such as tree cutting.

The head of the adze is oriented to the shaft like a hoe, or plane, and not like an axe, whose cutting blade would be perpendicular to the blade of an adze.

History

Europe

In central Europe, adzes made by knapping flint are known from the late Mesolithic onwards ("Scheibenbeile"). Polished adzes and axes made of ground stone, like amphibolite, basalt or Jadeite are typical for the Neolithic period. Shoe-last adzes or celts, named for their typical shape, are found in the Linearbandkeramic and Rössen cultures of the early Neolithic. Adzes were also made and used by prehistoric southeast Asian cultures, especially in the Mekong River basin.

Egypt

The adze is shown in Egypt from the Old Kingdom onward.^[1] Originally the adze blades were made of stone, but already in the Predynastic Period copper adzes had all but replaced those made of flint.^[2] While stone blades were fastened to the wooden handle by tying, metal blades had sockets into which the handle was fitted. Examples of Egyptian adzes can be found in museums and on the Petrie Museum website.

A depiction of an adze was also used as a hieroglyph with the phonetic value of stp (vulg. setep), and from the 19th Dynasty onward "Setep" was used in the names of various pharaohs.

The ahnetjer, Manuel de Codage transliteration: aH-nTr, depicted as an adze-like instrument,^[3] was used in the Opening of the Mouth ceremony, intended to convey power over their senses to statues and mummies. It was apparently the foreleg of a freshly sacrificed bull or cow with which the mouth was touched.^[4][5]

New Zealand

Prehistoric Māori adzes from New Zealand, used for wood carving, were made from nephrite, also known as jade. At the same time on Henderson Island, a small atoll in Polynesia lacking any rock other than limestone, natives fashioned giant clamshells into adzes.

Modern adzes

Modern adzes are made from steel with wooden handles, and some people still use them extensively: occasionally those in semi-industrial areas, but particularly 'revivalists' such as those at the Colonial Williamsburg cultural center in Virginia, USA. However, the traditional adze has largely been replaced by the sawmill and the powered-plane, at least in industrialized cultures. It remains in use for some specialist crafts, for example by coopers. Adzes are also in current use by artists such as American and Canadian Indian sculptors doing large pole work.

"Adze" is freqently mentioned by William F. Buckley as one of the most obscure words in the English language.

Types

• Carpenter's adze - A heavy adze, often with very steep curves, and a very heavy, blunt poll. The weight of this adze makes it unsuitable for sustained overhead adzing.
  • Railroad adze - A carpenter's adze which had its bit extended in an effort to limit the breaking of handles when shaping railroad ties. Early examples in New England began showing up approximately in the 1940s - 1950s. The initial prototypes clearly showed a weld where the extension was attached.
• Shipwright's adze - A lighter, and more versatile adze than the carpenter's adze. This was designed to be used in a variety of positions, including overhead, as well as in front on waist and chest level.
  • Lipped shipwright's adze - A variation of the shipwright's adze. It features a wider than normal bit, whose outside edges are sharply turned up, so that when gazing directly down the adze, from bit to eye, the cutting edge resembles an extremely wide and often very flat U. This adze was mainly used for shaping cross grain, such as for joining planks.
• There are also a number of specialist adzes once used for barrel stave shaping, chair seat forming and bowl and trough making. Many of these have shorter handles for control and more curve in the head to allow better clearance for shorter cuts.
• Another group of adzes can be differentiated by the handles, the D handled adzes have a handle where the hand can be wrapped around the D, close to the bit. These adzes, follow closely traditional forms in that the bit or tooth is not wrapped around the handle as a head.
• The head of an ice axe typically possesses an adze for chopping rough steps in ice.

Sources

• The section about types of adzes is based on a Quicksilver Wiki article at A Glossary of Terms For Traditional Timber Framing (Timberbee) under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, last accessible 25th July 2006.

Footnotes and references

1. ^ A statue of the third dynasty boat builder Ankhwah is showing him holding an adze (Michael Rice, Who's Who in Ancient Egypt, Routledge 2001, ISBN 0415154480, p.25)
2. ^ Katheryn A. Bard, Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt, Routledge 1999, ISBN0415185890, p.458
3. ^ Ermann & Grapow, Wörterbuch der ägyptischen Sprache, 1926, vol. 1, 214.24
4. ^ Andrew Hunt Gordon, Calvin W. Schwabe, The Quick and the Dead: Biomedical Theory in Ancient Egypt, Brill 2004, ISBN 9004123911, p.76
5. ^ Christopher J Eyre, The Cannibal Hymn: A Cultural and Literary Study, Liverpool University Press 2002, ISBN 0853237069, p.54

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