Can anyone identify this?

Kind of looks like one of the many fantasy cast Pakistani heads I've seen all over Etsy in recent years.
 
not2sharp said:
It looks machined rather than cast to me.

N2s
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The target shape may have been machined into it by someone, but could have been machined on the pattern and then cleaned up by hand with a rotary burr. In addition to castings these days sometimes being much finer than in times past, finish grinding can remove most signs of it entirely. The whole head itself was probably not machined, but rather cast or forged. The bit-to-eye transition resembles what I'm used to seeing on Cold Steel 'hawks...do you have a photo of the other side and a top-down view? I wonder if someone with access to machine tools and a welder heavily customized a stock 'hawk.
 
Not exactly what I meant--top down would be squarely looking down at it from above. Seeing the other side in profile would be much more useful than in forced perspective. But so far I'm thinking it's likely that it's a modified Cold Steel of some kind.
 
It would take a lot of work to make a Cold Steel look like this. I believe this to be a performers ( circus thrower/juggler’s?) show prop and not a recently made item.

I don’t have the hawk in front of me so I can’t get additional photos for us.

N2s
 
The red electrical tape and the HVAC tape doesn't really seem to fit with the amount of effort that would have been put into modifying an existing hawk head this extensively, but sometimes people do things that just don't make sense.
 
Handles are wear items that would be frequently replace. Although the handle on this appears to have been there for a while, it may be only the latest of a long series of replacements.

N2s
 
The greatest amount of work would be machining the design on it. The rest is just welding/cutting/grinding and could be done with fairly inexpensive equipment and chipping away at the project over time. If you had a buddy who owned a CNC or a milling machine the design isn't even all that complicated to produce more than the cost of the work, but I've seen all sorts of crazy stuff people with equipment made for friends just for kicks. Indeed, it's probably just one of many many handles it's been through. One of the reasons I think it's a modified factory piece is the bit to cheek transition. It not only looks like the factory geometry you find on the Cold Steel stuff, but the reason for them being as thick behind the edge as they are is because of the constraints of drop forging. Drop forging can only be done so thin, or else you clash the dies together and it damages the dies and the machine itself. That's why so many hardware store axes are so dang thick right where they should be nearly their thinnest The time it would take to finish grind them properly thin is in excess of the target price point, so it's left to the end user to put in the work if they want it. Between that, the shape of the eye, and the distinctive shape of the bit/eye transition it all looks very Cold Steel to me. It's very possible I'm completely wrong, but those telltale signs point me towards thinking it likely. If the owner were somehow able to get the head off the handle and could look inside the eye they might find evidence of the threaded set screw hole having been filled in since less finishing work would likely have been to that side to remove the evidence, if that's what was indeed done.
 
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