Hello everyone tonight
Great dialogue--I am really enjoying the comraderie and exchange of ideas.
One thing for certain founding peoples in different areas at different periods of history worked in many different styles and with differing tool configurations and weights.
I have examined barns and homes, churches, schools, mills, drivesheds even add ons to existing early structures such as steam engine sheds, summer kitchens, enlargening of cattle barns necessary to keep abreast of new ideas, shops small and large which by the way were very interestingly constructed sometimes
Around here the founding peoples were German, French, Scotch, Irish, and Dutch the founding time 1784 with some areas a bit earlier. Sooo I have been able to see surface finishes vary with the founding peoples, but having said that there seemed to me to not be a great deal of difference in the surface texture for rough surfaces--usually ending up with a surface characterized and showing the finishing scoring marks 3 to 4 inches apart depending on the hardness of the wood being hewn, and everyonce in a while the telltale marks of the rough scoring which usually again varied in width depending on the hardness of the wood, and remaining in the surface if one looks closely nestled in among the finishing scoring marks.
I personally used a 9 inch single bevelled hewing axe, an axe that had a weight that I could manouver and work with easily, and one that I chose from quite number of hewing axes collected in this areas from families that for one reason or another chose to put them in our museum's storage at UCV for safe keeping. I might say that all of them were single bevelled and the widths of the cutting edges varied from 7 inches right up to 12 inches
On the subject of adzing I used mine to smooth down surfaces such as the interior surfaces of upper floor timbers prior to beading the corners. I always kept mine handy when I was timberframing to cut seatings and other chores. Lip adzes I only used for trough adzing or gutter adzing when one had to work with interior curved surfaces
NH
