I don’t have to tell you what an adze is, do I?

In a recent episode of “The Curse of Oak Island,” a core drilling machine brought up a large piece of wood that team members said looked like it had been shaped by an adze. I was amused to see a little graphic and description of an adze as though the tool isn’t commonly known. Okay, if you were born yesterday or a few days before, you probably haven’t been allowed to use an adze. They are not as common as they were when I was young, so maybe you see “adze” as a handy word or use in a crossword puzzle or a scrabble game.

We had at least one adze, a relatively small one about 1/4 the size as the one in the graphic, in our garage used for scraping wood when the size of the job was much too big for using a plane. The adze in the graphic might be your tool of choice if you were in Scouting and were making a canoe from scratch.

Times change so fast that I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at the tools we used years ago that a lot of people don’t use now or have never heard of. Wikipedia says that “Modern adzes are made from steel with wooden handles, and enjoy limited use: occasionally in semi-industrial areas, but particularly by “revivalists” such as those at the Colonial Williamsburg cultural center in Virginia, United States. However, the traditional adze has largely been replaced by the sawmill and the powered-plane, at least in industrialized cultures.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 Northwest Coast American and Canadian Indigenous sculptors doing pole work, masks, and bowls.”

When my brothers and I were little, my grandfather made things out of wood, so we were used to well-tended tools that could be found on a farm or in any woodworking operation. I’m happy to see that you can still buy an adze at Home Depot even though they are calling it a “forged hoe” though it appears when I search for “Adze.”

I guess you could use it as a hoe, but that would incur my grandfather’s wrath as he shouted, “Go get a maddock.” You know what that is, right? My brothers learned early on to use tools for what they were intended rather than making do with the wrong thing–like using a wrench as a hammer.

I think I need a drink.

–Malcolm