What are the types of Axe?

Axes are an important tool in our life. It includes a handle and an axe head, today, there are many styles of axes to help tackle a wide variety of tasks, including felling trees, hunting animals and so on. Today, the axe is most commonly used in garden or outside, such as camping, but the type of axe you need will depend on the purpose you intend for it. Axe usage include a vast number of tasks which depends on their many different sizes and shapes, and different types of heads.

The Various Major Axe Types

Splitting Mauls

The first type of axe isn’t an axe at all. Well, it is, but it's more commonly referred to as a splitting maul.

If the name doesn't give it away, this tool is used mostly to split trunks into smaller pieces of wood. It does so by having a much chunkier wedge-shaped head.

This wedge will literally split wood along the grain, thus where it gets its name from. Where splitting mauls are concerned, weight and width of the wedge trump a sharp blade. These are not precision instruments.

Another feature of a splitting maul that makes it easily recognizable is how wide the butt, or non-contact side of the head is. This is partially due to the fact that it's necessary in order to get a great wedge shape for splitting wood while also making the head heavy enough to do its job. But, this wide butt can be used in tandem with another person to help drive their maul through particular hard woods.

Felling Axes

Much different than the mauls above, a felling axe is used to fell or chop an entire tree down as opposed to working on already fallen lumber.

A felling axe has a thin bit as it's meant to dig deep into trucks with each swing of the handle. They are typically fairly light with long handles or shafts allowing the user to to get good leverage and power into each swing.

Not all felling axes are the same. Some may have handles made from different woods and there are both single and double bit axe (sometimes called a double headed axe) variations.

Regardless of the specific design, if you are looking to chop down a tree or clear limbs from a truck, a felling axe is the right choice.

Carpenter’s Axes

You can probably take a pretty solid guess as to what a carpenter's axe is used for. If you guessed they’re perfect for chopping down giant redwoods you aren't even close.

A carpenter's axe is a small almost hatchet-sized axe made with control in mind. Like the Hudson Bay it's a one-hander, but it's even smaller. Most handles are around one foot in length, give or take a couple inches in either direction depending on the manufacturer's design.

Another very telling trait is that these axes have very long beards. The reasoning behind this is the higher the user can choke up on the handle the more control they have over the blade. That’s something that is very important for someone doing woodworking.

They also tend to have a fairly sharp blade because anyone working with one of these needs to make plenty of precision cuts.

Chances are if you need a carpenter's axe or carving axe, you already know why.

As you can see, not all axes are the same. They vary in length, weight, shape, and blade or bit sharpness, all according the what their specific purpose is.