Circular saws are awesome! When you need to chop something into smaller pieces, these machines will slice and dice until the wood is smaller and more manageable to carry out. The only problem with circular saws is they tend to run on electricity, and what if you can’t connect to the local power grid? Now what?
While dissassembling our plywood cabinets in the head, I ran into just this very issue. The solution was to get an axe and chop it up into smaller pieces! This may sound ridiculous and barbaric, but it did work very well. I managed to chop my way through a sheet of 3/4 inch plywood! Now, in a boat is not the place to begin swinging an axe around! No, no. The trick to using an axe safely inside a boat is to set the axe where you want to chop and then strike it with a heavy hammer!
This will ensure that the axe doesn’t smash into something else and cause damage, or miss the mark and begin chopping out small pieces of wood. By placing the axe and then striking it, the blade will simply work its way through the wood in a very controlled manner. There is no wondering swings of an axe in the boat, and no dangers of putting a sharp blade into your interior joinery either! Just a lumbering old sledge hammer to power the axe, and it can be controlled with small and short (but powerful) strokes.
An axe may seem out of place in a yacht refit, but if you need a specific tool and don’t have access to it, then it may be time to get creative with different tools that might meet your needs as well.
