collector :
[blade vs a saw]
After the wood has been sawed it still needs to be cut, whether it's to be chopped for fire wood, ends shaped for what ever your building, etc.
Bucking to length was the first primary use for a saw and for such it easily out classes an axe easily in terms of speed, ease of use and inherent safety plus handling sawed lengths is much nicer than pointed bucked ones (stacking, splitting, construction etc.). Decent size wood of course requires a decent size saw, but for shelter building and such a small pruning saw is fine.
Shaping is near useless with a saw, but usually much easier with a proper long blade than an axe, though in most cases even better with a small knife. A hatchet is pretty much a direct replacement for the long blade though for this type of wood working and usually slightly superior. The size of the axe needed of course depends on the size of the wood, pointing a 6x6 is easier with an axe than a long blade, but that is mall ninja fantasy thinking, shelters are built out of much smaller woods.
I think when considering the combined weight of the large blade and saw, and the combined cost of those two items the GB small axe is the better value and better performance.
The blade and saw will be lighter than the axe, or at most not significantly heavier, but the cost usually a lot more as there are not a lot of decent production blades of that type. The custom blade I am carrying now is several times as expensive than one of the smaller GB axes. Though there are a few exceptions. A Valiant Golok, or one of the specials from HI can give a decent khukuri for <100$. A decent saw weighs next to nothing and is very cheap.
It's also nice to have a hammer handy and the small axe does that better than any heavy pommeled knife I ever owned.
Yes, axes generally split much better as well.
I spent the weekend cutting wood using an Iltis Felling axe, custom long blade, and Felco pruning saw. Did a lot of cleanup, but got about a cord of wood stacking in any case. The saw got used on all the small woods and medium wood that was poorly rooted and thus impossible to chop. On those sticks it is much more efficient than any axe, and it can easily cut much cleaned to the ground which is very nice in heavily ingrown areas. On medium class sticks (up to about six inches or so) thick the long blade :
http://www.physics.mun.ca/~sstamp/images/parrell_parang_side.jpg
does the limbing far easier than an axe. The much greater edge length allows a much fuller sweep of the branches for far faster limbing. Plus this size of wood is easily manipulated with one hand and the blade a lot easier to use with the other hand than an axe due to balance. A large pruning saw is faster if you were cutting clear limbs, but working in crowded trees the axe or blade wins readily due to the ability to clear multiple branches on a single pass.
On the larger wood the blade has limbing problems, especially on Black Spruce as the limbs can approach half the size of the trunk, eight inches sticks have four inches branches, and thus a decicated limbing axe comes into its own on even moderately sized woods. That size axe is also excellent for bucking that class of wood to length. To be really efficient I should take the Trailblazer saw (folding buck saw with swede saw blade), but I don't mind the extra bucking time, I use it for long blade evaluations on thick wood usually.
The main reason I would pick a long blade over a smaller axe is the uselessness of the axe for brush work and precision cutting in general. Try brush clearing for example with both. The above recommendation was not a list of tools you would take for dedicated wood cutting, but more as general purpose camp tools, for shelter building, path clearing, fire building etc. .
-Cliff
