Are you tired of watching hewing videos on YouTube and want to get your own blisters? This course is your chance to tune your body to the swing of an axe as it thwacks ever closer to the line. Four days of timber conversion-speak, hewing, and pit-sawing, will leave you little choice but to completely focus on your body and your task. Through persistence and an honest amount of pain, you will witness how quickly your body adapts to the age-old task of swinging a sharp edge at the end of a stick. Through a surprisingly short amount of discovery and repetition, you’ll appreciate the axe as a nuanced instrument of production that you’ll be reluctant to set aside. Some of the smaller timbers, like rafters and braces, are ripped into smaller cross-sections using a pit saw. Rather than dig an actual pit, we will lift the timbers onto trestles to allow for one sawyer on top of the beam and one below. This process is a little bit like riding a bike, driving a bus, and playing on a seesaw—all at the same time!

Required Tools

• Carpenter's pencil
• X-acto knife
• Clothing appropriate to work outdoors