Never seen a hatchet like this, axeroon?

Looks like this Collins I found with a quick search, but it was a sold auction listing with no real info.
Obviously it's a half hatchet with the hammer pull modified into a spike at the factory, but I couldn't begin to know anything else about it.
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I found another Collins, but it was being discussed on reddit where some idiots thought it was a pulaski hatchet or knew for a fact that somebody just modified it which is obviously not true because it's clearly a factory item.
 
They're uncommon so may have been made as a custom request for a given industry. What industry, though, I don't know.
 
Gato do mato said:
It looks more like a fireman's axe to me.

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Fire hatchets exist here. They do not look like these. Half hatchets are typically used in various trades as rough carpentry tools, and this being based on one seems to indicate the intended use still being for such despite the substitution of the hammer poll typically present. The spike on these is thinner and pointier than those used on fire hatchets and seems to indicate it was intended to be used in a different context.
 
FortyTwoBlades said:
Fire hatchets exist here. They do not look like these. Half hatchets are typically used in various trades as rough carpentry tools, and this being based on one seems to indicate the intended use still being for such despite the substitution of the hammer poll typically present.
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My first thought was that it just had to be some kind of hatchet with a spike, and that the hammer poll on these made them an easy modification for the factory.

That could still be possible, but they finished the head / bit the same way they did for a standard half hatchet so it's also very likely that this was specifically intended to be a half hatchet with a spike poll.
 
By the period of that Collins mark I'm pretty sure that they would have been making the heads via drop forging, but it's possible that they may have had an additional die made to then draw out the hammer poll into the spike. The faceting and shape is very consistent from example to example so I don't think it was an open-die process.
 
FortyTwoBlades said:
By the period of that Collins mark I'm pretty sure that they would have been making the heads via drop forging, but it's possible that they may have had an additional die made to then draw out the hammer poll into the spike. The faceting and shape is very consistent from example to example so I don't think it was an open-die process.
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that's my thinking as well, but the extent of my knowledge is a few factory tour " how their made " videos from Council tool and Vaughan.
It's definitely an uneducated guess on my part.
 
Hickory n steel said:
that's my thinking as well, but the extent of my knowledge is a few factory tour " how their made " videos from Council tool and Vaughan.
It's definitely an uneducated guess on my part.
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Basically if it were open die work I'd expect more piece-to-piece variation like on, for instance, you see on things like scythe blades even when the era of drop forging was in full swing. Open die forging is the "hand forged" power hammer process and relies on skilled operation, and even the most precise forgings have slight variations from piece to piece, and I'd expect to see some with the curve and shape of the spikes if that were the case. Because there doesn't appear to be any variation, it's likely it was a closed-die process. The hammer poll would be holding heat well after popping out of the usual final die, I reckon, so making it a secondary process to reshape the hammer into a spike seems reasonable as opposed to it necessarily being a series of dies from scratch that made that shape, as the cost of tooling would be massive for that and you'd expect to see more of them if that were the case. Closed-die forging dies are EXPENSIVE to make and typically require mass production to justify using them.
 
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