T.-A.thanks for showing these,those butteris both look great,what a Lot of work went into those...
The hatchet certainly has seen better days, but it still tells a story. It has a very minimal poll with squared corners.
I'll go out on a limb here and ramble on,i'll say right off that i've really no idea why or wherefore and wassup with that axe,other than at a glance it looks like it was purposed for hewing...
But,it so happens that i originally hail from that unhappy place where people don't have much(in general
),but in particular any decent wood to haft their tools with.
Birch is the best it gets there.
So they adapted by making their eyes larger,to admit more wood in volume,and at first glance that's the very look many of their tools have,just such poll-less,triangular eyes.
However,i must say that i've never seen where the back piece was mitered and welded in separately...And i hesitate to say just Why it was done.
In theory,every Bend results in diminished section,unless the mat'l at corner is carefully upset.
Mitering and fitting in Would kinda fix that,but in such minor way that it hardly seems worth the trouble.
Maybe someone was just short on stock,and used a chunk off the floor,as was done Very commonly in old rural shops,or maybe they just had a bright idea,after a late night with lesser than normal quality moonshine?...We may never know...
But chances are this is influenced by a bad heredity,something like an Eastern European indentured worker left alone in the forge while the owner went to town...
Or some combination of that bad heredity and expediency...Makes it quite a bit easier to handle,this would.
That asymmetric weld forward is also quite typical of those types of axes,standard,really...
