Introduction

As a little background, I grew up in Slovakia, where, as in most of Europe, ax design has lagged behind America a century or two, both in terms of heads and handle shapes. (Many handles there still do not have a knob, for instance.) That is not to say that Europe lacks good ax-men, but by the time I left (at the age of 18) I certainly wasn’t one of them.

Only since about the early nineteen eighties have I become a serious ax user. This still does not imply that I am, as the old timers around here would put it, “a good man with an ax”. For that I was already too old when I first really fell in love with this wonderful tool. One almost has to “grow up with an ax in hand”, they say, to become a real ax-man (or an ax-woman, I suppose, in these unisex days). What I mean by “serious” is that on our homestead we’ve long used axes (during certain periods of a year almost daily) for many tasks – from felling and limbing trees, hewing logs and notching them, making tool handles and, of course, that still most prevalent use of an ax today – splitting firewood.

In addition, I’ve had an interest (sometimes nearing an obsession) in comparing the utility of various versions/models of the tool that strikes a chord with me, and the ax has been the second (after the scythe) to consume my attention. Consequently, I’ve restored several dozen of (mostly vintage USA and Canada-made) axes from a $2 to $5 garage sale condition to a newly-handled tool, tested out during a variety of  work. All this does NOT make me an ax “expert”, though I believe there is a useful opinion or two I can share with budding ax enthusiasts...