Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire A good hatchet

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Spend all the money you like on fancy Marbles hatchets and schit, but those Estwings are hard to beat for any amount of money. I have the shorter version of this one with the leather handle - 35 yrs old and still good.

A couple Buds use the Gransfors Bruks neck knives too, very cool little stickers.

Gunner

I spent a few hours yesterday splitting a load of Pecan wood to take to my dad, and the smaller stuff to keep for my smoker.






I need a good hatchet for general camping and hunting use, but also for when I split wood. Scott F is going to set me straight on that. I go through a bunch of wood year round using my large offset smoker. I have a good maul and a good ax. Sometimes when you bust a piece, the two split pieces will be stuck together by one smaller strand like a set of nun-chucks. A smaller hatchet would be very handy to break them apart rather than using the longer handled maul or ax.

Anyone use the Husky stuff? I have a hankering now to try out their maul.

Several years ago I bought a cheap no name Maul with a Fibreglass handle, and it worked fine for a while, in fact until the cold weather set in..then one frosty morning the handle shattered near the head..obviously it had gone brittle with the cold..

After that, I bought a fibreglass handled Bancho maul..It was about three times the price, but its worked great regardless of the temperature and I have since split a lot of wood with it...

I have a fiberglass handled maul that works well, its a generic one I got from Lowes. However I am moving more traditional in my hand tools.

Scott is going to set me up good for a small hatchet. Figure I'll end up with either a Gransfors or Wetterlings 20" model and then a longer maul, 30-32".


This has been an awesome thread, learned some stuff and got to see a bunch of very cool tools.

Those Estwings are pretty soft steel, and that shaft can and will bend. I ain't never seen a piece of hickory bend and deform. Estwing hammers suck and blow.

spoken like a man who has actually used them.....

If by Maul you mean sledge on one side taper to sharp-ish on other then we call them a Canadian splitter, and they are useless for our hard woods but absolutely marvellous when taking a piece out of the cement guttering to lay stormwater pipe to the road, they cut through the cement just like a axe going through hardwood.

split stone purty fair, too....

Already had a picture so I thought I'd post
Keen Kutter trap tool I have used 30 years
Gransfors small axe
Jigged the handles

JSTUART;
Top of the morning to you sir - er or whatever time of day this finds you in - I trust this finds you and yours acceptably well.

Your leather work looks "skookum" as we'd say up here - I like it and the hatchets you've chosen.

When we were kids my elder brother had a Norlund Hudson Bay hatchet that in my memory looked sort of like the top one you've got - but my memory could be wrong on that detail I can't say for sure.

Some day I plan to drag all the axes, mauls and hatchets together for a photo like Don - huntsman22 - did.

We've got an eclectic mix that I've mostly picked up at flea markets really - a late '70's Granfors Bruks which is before they went into boutique axes, a couple Hultafors Bruks, a Frost of Sweden and then a mix of old/very old US made axes too. Oh, my main wood splitters, "Canadian splitters" I believe you'd call them are Chinese, an 8lb and a 6lb.

Some years back I decided to make up a lightweight hunting hatchet of tomahawk weight and began to buy up all the old sheet rock and roofing hammers I could.

The bottom four in the photo are ones that I've reshaped by cold grinding.


The next one up is an old US made light ax head that I reshaped and then the blue one is the Frost of Sweden.

The top construction hatchet is a bit of a mystery to me, but I've been told it was a grain elevator construction hammer. Grain elevators here in Canada contained a pile of lumber, so perhaps that's true but I can't say for sure.

Anyway sir, thanks for twigging the memory from my youth and for sharing your handiwork with us, it looks very serviceable indeed.

All the best to you and yours in the upcoming week JSTUART.

Regards,
Dwayne

BS,,,,, they're great for pulling nails out of concrete forms and digging trenches with the claws.

Can't imagine actually driving nails with one though.

Rick, any chance you could post some more pictures of the trap tool...I have not seen one before as we don't use the heavy traps.

Thank you.

James.

Hello Dwayne, we have a few of those around this locale but I believe they were used as a boxing hatchet for repair when everything came in wooden boxes...I see you (like myself) are a sucker for old tools as well.

This is one of my favorite threads in quite some time. I've been looking for a nice axe head on ebay off and on, but they get expensive there. Maybe sometime I'll get lucky at a flea market or garage sale.

Thanks to everyone who's posted pictures and reviews. More, please!

That is how I bent the shaft on an Estwing hammer. I finally learned to just go to the truck for a cats' paw and a crowbar to pull nails. Far fewer ortho visits required with that approach.

Nice job on those covers JS!

I like my little leather handled Estwing for camping and lite duty stuff but my fav is this old Plumb Cruiser I found in an old shed on a piece of property I bought.
She was pretty beat up but with a little TLC and a new handle it now cuts better than any axe I've laid hands on.


Not a purdy as yours but I even made a horse-hide cover for it so's I could take it camping with out chopping up the rest of my gear on the way there.

nice work, Cholly

LOVE my GB small forest axe. Buy once...

Old tools are habit forming, aren't they.