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A vintage axe head, a hand-cut handle, and firewood rounds that never stood a chance.

Buckin’ Billy Ray Smith has spent decades dropping timber in British Columbia, and his YouTube channel is where he shows off the tools that make that work possible. In “WOW!, Is this an axe, or a laser beam,,”, he pulls out an axe head he’s held onto for years, hung it on a handle he shaped himself, and puts it through its paces on a pile of firewood rounds. The results are clean enough that Smith compares the splitting action to a laser beam slicing straight through the grain.

• Smith hangs a vintage axe head — one he says he’s kept in storage for years waiting for the right project — on a custom wooden handle before testing it.
• The demonstration focuses on edge geometry and balance, with Smith splitting firewood rounds in single strokes to show how cleanly the bit tracks through the wood.
• Smith frames the video around the difference between axe heads built for splitting versus those ground for chopping, and what makes a salvaged head worth re-hanging.

Head Design Surpasses Handle Utility

Any timber faller will tell you the handle gets the credit, but the head does the work. Smith’s approach in the video is built around a profile he’s trusted for years — a bit ground with the right convex shape to wedge wood rounds apart rather than just biting in and sticking. A chopping axe is thinner behind the edge, meant to slice fibers across the grain on a standing tree. A splitting axe needs mass behind a wider cheek, so the wood pops apart on impact instead of pinching the blade.

That distinction is the whole reason Smith held onto this particular head instead of scrapping it. He describes knowing, just from handling it, that the geometry was right for splitting rounds rather than felling — and once he got it hung, the firewood proved him right.

Hanging the Handle by Hand

Rehabbing an old axe head isn’t just bolting on a store-bought handle. Smith shapes his own, fitting the eye of the head to the wood so the balance point sits exactly where he wants it for full-force swings. A handle that’s off by even a little changes how the bit lands — twist it wrong and a clean split turns into a glancing blow that barely dents the round.

Getting that fit right is the difference between an axe that feels like an extension of your arm and one that fights you on every swing. Smith’s version of it — patient, hand-hung, built around a head he’d banked for years — is the kind of low-tech craftsmanship that longtime bushcraft and off-grid builders lean on constantly, the same instinct you see in projects like an off-grid woodworking workshop built log by log in the forest.

The Laser-Beam Splits

The moment that gives the video its title is simple: Smith sets a round, swings, and the axe passes straight through in one motion, the two halves falling apart in a line so clean it looks machined rather than chopped. That’s the effect of a properly ground splitting bit paired with a handle that’s putting the full swing weight exactly where it needs to be — no wobble, no redirect, no second hit required.

Is this an axe, or a laser beam?

It’s a demonstration built for anyone who’s ever fought a stubborn round with a dull maul — proof that the right head, hung right, does the job an underpowered tool can’t. The kind of hand-tool patience on display here runs parallel to other backcountry skill-building content, like the slow, deliberate process behind building a basket from pine needles start to finish.

Splitting Versus Chopping, Settled

Smith’s demonstration doubles as a quiet argument for knowing your tools before you swing them. A lot of firewood-season frustration comes down to people using a chopping-profile axe to split rounds, wondering why it keeps sticking instead of popping the wood apart. His video makes the fix obvious: match the head’s grind to the job, hang it with care, and the wood does most of the work for you.

For a guy who’s built a following showing off the practical side of falling timber, this one’s a simple flex — an axe he saved for years finally getting the handle it deserved, and firewood rounds splitting clean enough to earn a laser-beam comparison from a man who’s swung plenty of them.