best tomahawk

C

chabla

Joined
Nov 22, 2007
Messages
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hey guys whats your pick on the best hawk at or under $35 that is the most useful for the outdoors, im thinking a lot of you will say the CS trail hawk but are there any other alternatives?

Thanks
 
I don't know where you can find a good one under $35.

These are 3 of mine, but I am not happy with the Lagana price and performance over the Cold Steel's version.
I like our RS6 Custom Hawk.
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Not a hawk but for $35, you could buy a fiskars hatchet and a decent folding saw.

Sorry, I'm not a hawk guy so I had to offer an alternative.
 
Spookypistolero or anyone else who has owned a trail hawk, how does it compare to a wetterlings wildlife hatchet or fiskars 14"? I prefer the traditional hawk look but it seems like the lump around the shaft will prevent the head from going all the way into a peice of wood when splitting it. Is looks nice and light for a multipurpose hatchet.
 
In the woods a quality hatchet will whoop a tomahawk hands down in chooping. My experience is that tomohawks bind while chopping due to their edge geometry. The hawk is much lighter though.

My feeling is that the hawk is a better mixture of weapon and tool.

The hatchet is a pure working tool.

Probably others will disagree I have never been much for hawks.
 
3wolves said:
Spookypistolero or anyone else who has owned a trail hawk, how does it compare to a wetterlings wildlife hatchet or fiskars 14"? I prefer the traditional hawk look but it seems like the lump around the shaft will prevent the head from going all the way into a peice of wood when splitting it. Is looks nice and light for a multipurpose hatchet.
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I've got the Fiskars as well, but no Wetterlings. The Fiskars is my 'gold standard' for choppers.

The trail hawk is a great chopper, in that the extremely thin blade profile allows it to bite very deeply. It doesn't hurt that I reprofiled the crap out of it. The trade off is that it will also bind in the wood a bit, so your cutting is not more efficient overall. It is not, however, a splitter. It just doesn't have the design for it (you want that 'wedge' shape, of course).

The trail hawk is not lighter than the Fiskars, and if anything it's likely the other way around. I've never weighed them side-by-side.

The Fiskars is great in the woods, pretty simply put. It's a great tool, and quite lightweight. It can make pretty powerful chops but is very comfortable to choke up on for finer work, too.

I got the hawk because I liked the 'style', wanted a project, and wanted to compare it to other steel for woods use. I don't really buy any knives that I don't intend to use in the woods. The hawk is a fun project and did fairly respectably in the woods.

But the bottom line is if you're looking for the most functional tool for the job, the Fiskars is it.
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Will it still split wood though? I didn't think it would be as easy as using a fiskars but will it still work okay? It would probably be easy to make a shaft in the field if this one should break.
 
SpookyPistolero said:
The trail hawk is a great chopper, in that the extremely thin blade profile allows it to bite very deeply. It doesn't hurt that I reprofiled the crap out of it. The trade off is that it will also bind in the wood a bit, so your cutting is not more efficient overall. It is not, however, a splitter. It just doesn't have the design for it (you want that 'wedge' shape, of course).
Click to expand...

If you mean the Trail Hawk, no, it's not good at splitting. The Fiskars is as good as any hatchet for splitting (which is to say better than most things, but not nearly as good as a full axe). The hawk (or a GB or a Wetterlings) will have wooden handles so you could fashion a haft in the woods if necessary. I don't have any concerns about my Fiskars breaking, I've beaten the crap out of mine (but I believe another person around here did have theirs break on them).
 
SpookyPistolero said:
If you mean the Trail Hawk, no, it's not good at splitting. The Fiskars is as good as any hatchet for splitting (which is to say better than most things, but not nearly as good as a full axe). The hawk (or a GB or a Wetterlings) will have wooden handles so you could fashion a haft in the woods if necessary. I don't have any concerns about my Fiskars breaking, I've beaten the crap out of mine (but I believe another person around here did have theirs break on them).
Click to expand...

Gotcha, I am not scared of the fiskars breaking, I just prefer more traditional gear. I think that the broken fiskars was a factory defect.
 
I'd go for the Wetterlings then, in that price range. Great hatchets my most all accounts, though they might require a little work with a file at the beginning. The handles are wood and more traditionally shaped, though of course will not be as easy to reproduce in the wild as a straight hawk haft.
 
Cold steel hawks are a fun project, and great value. I have a modded frontier hawk that looks alot like spookys trail hawk. For spliting an axe wins hands down, but the hawks chop well, and are a good project!

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The classic hawk, viewed from the top, is a circle with a blade sticking out the side. In attempting to spilt, the tool will (at best) bury as far as where the blade ends and the more-or-less pipelike part starts - the "cheek" of the hawk. At that point, you are trying to split wood with a pipe.

In contrast, the hatchet viewed from the top is a wedge. It is designed to split.

The "hawks" made of a flat sheet of steel do not have the problem of the classic hawk, but they do not split as well as the hatchet because they too are not wedge-shaped. But at least they are relatively heavy to carry around. :D
 
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