KA Heritage Swedish Collared Axe

A traditional shape in Scandinavian axe design, the collared axe was orginally a function driven design element. Having forests of birch nearby to utilize as handle material, the countries of the North Men found a way to work around the relative weakness of that birch wood. The collar helps spread shock and impact forces during use, and greatly decreased the stress on the handles and subsequent breakage. Had they lived amongst forests of Hickory or Ash trees, you'd probably have never seen a collared axe design.

This particular axe was located and shipped in from Southern Sweden, where it was cleaned, inspected and refinished here in the KA shop. One of a few that have come in sterile of any forge markings or makers' marks, who and when has unfortunatly been lost to time. I would approximate a manufacture time frame between 1930 to 1960 based upon personal experience and observations of similarity between other known pieces. What I can tell you however is that this is a well made piece, showing nice clean lamination of harder high carbon steel into the cutting edge and a great uniform shape.

The edge was put on using a slack belt for added strength in the cutting edge geometry, and is currently hair popping sharp. A hand fabricated leather snap sheath protects that edge, and is a bit more unique than the usual in having made use of red thread for a little color pop.