...My interest in everyones thoughts on spike hawks was simply that at one time, I was issued a "Vietnam" tomahawk and spent some time training to use it. I didn't think much of it at the time but sheared the head from the handle during the first hard use. I didn't think anything about it after that as I went back to my Ontario machete, military version Western Bowie, Gerber, etc, etc. When my kids all decided that they needed to be part of the current unpleasantness I was asked by both Army soldiers and Marines to produce tools capable of keeping them alive. I was an Infantry officer and used to taking care of soldiers. The sheer responsibility for equipping my kids and their friends with tools that might have to keep them alive was overwhelming. I began to test the spike theory in earnest. I hung a lot of roasts on a rope and hit them with a wide variety of spikes and polled hawks. Every one of the spiked hawks was slow to recover, with the pyramidal spikes being the best of the bunch. From my experience, slow means dead. I finally settled on a square polled hawk that had a slightly elongated poll as the best of the bunch. It is the only thing I have made for the soldiers.
I guess you can make a hawk from anything. We use 5160, O-1 and 4140 for the most part. We use 1095 when it is available (which is not much recently as the sizes we need are all going overseas to you know where). These are very practical steels and are well suited to this purpose. With reasonable care any of these steels would stand up to generations of hard use...
