One of the coarser diamond-type knife sharpeners does wonders for my old axe.

I am very interested in the S & N Hudson Bay axe (mostly because I am a menace to myself and others with a hatchet), but the old one seems to fill the bill well enough that I haven't found it in me to part with the cash for the S & N.

I found the axehead under the back porch of a house I owned a while back. It wasn't much more than a hunk of rust at the time, but I dropped it in a pan of used engine oil that I hadn't gotten around to taking to the dump station yet. After a couple of days, I was able to get all the surface rust off and fit it to a new handle. I spent an hour on the edge with a file and coarse stone, and I've been pretty happy with it ever since. It's a "Michigan" pattern, or close to it, and probably weighed 3 1/2 pounds when new. It's probably a quarter of a pound less now due to repeated sharpenings, so I would guess it was all of 50 years old when I found it. It holds its edge well and the balance is pretty good, or I'm just very used to it.