Kickstarting a tough, flexible first responder axe carved from AR400 armor plate

boing
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Did you watch the video, BTW?

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Jesus. It’s a Frost Axe! Who wouldn’t want one?! Also, this video, for the accuracy of his line:

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You say “Kickstarter” and I say “The Walking Dead.”

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@albill says “The Walking Dead” and I say “Dread Zeppelin”.

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Is this really an advantage? I thought much of the axe’ impact is caused by a weighty head?

Same direction as the quoted portion above: Isn’t a less dense handle helpful to concentrate more mass in the head?

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This reminds me of the dad of a friend of mine from high school who took normal axe heads and had them cut into fancy viking shapes at work.

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Yes. The advantage to a firefighter is they have less weight (in tools) to manage. Thus a firefighter can be lighter, faster, and more agile.

The difference in pounds is (mostly) from reducing the number of tools, not from reducing the useful mass/weight in the axe head. Not sure what the comparative axe-head weights are, but this one doesn’t seem to suffer.

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They buried the lede! It also deals an extra 1d6 points of cold damage on a successful hit, and dispels all non-magical fires in its area…very helpful for firefighting…

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I completely understand the choice to use an abrasion resistant alloy like AR400 but why the ‘carved from AR400 armor plate’ angle? Is this different from any other ANSI AR400 plate I can buy to make digger blades or hammer bits?
Have you looked in to using Magnabraze? I’d be concerned about the high phosphorus and sulphur levels in AR400 leading to stress cracks and breakage over time. An axe breaking on a hit would be a bad time for the operator. It might be worth looking in to.

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You’ll have to ask Cory why he chose the term “carved”. I just build 'em. :grinning:

Yes, I specifically looked at magnabraze. IIRC it work hardens over time, which is a neat feature in a striking tool. But AR400 seems to be holding up very well - having shot bullets into AR steel literally thousands of times I feel like I have a decent comprehension of how long it will last and how it will fail.

And our AR400 supplier is literally across the street, which is s huge help.

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I was more wondering about the ‘armor plate’ bit but point taken.
Easy access to a supplier is a great reason to choose one steel over another. Cheers and here’s to hoping high speed soft lead impactors are a good way to test for mechanical fatigue at the stress points.

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Water jet cutting does “work better” than certain alternate methods in many cases, and is really good for hard, thick metals. It can cut almost anything with good levels of precision and cut quality, doesn’t produce toxic vapor, etc. Lasers are great but have limits on thickness and cut quality that a water jet can exceed. EDM can handle thick metal with awesome cut quality, but only works on metal and is slow. Plasma cutting is cheap, but the cut quality is quite poor. Water jet machines hit a good balance between all of them, the main drawback being high initial machinery cost and somewhat high operating cost and maintenance requirements.

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From the video, it looks like like this has a fairly blunt wedge edge. Is that right? Good for smashing things apart, maybe not the best choice for chopping firewood? :slight_smile:

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Space Monkey and Peter Biddle make good points, but also I think you may be confusing flexible as in “bendy” with flexible as in “having multiple uses.”

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I think it would open a bottle.

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Tools which can smash brittle stuff like cinder blocks and concrete aren’t difficult to find. What would be impressive is to see that axe cutting hardwood afterward.

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looks neat. i’d love to hold one and see how it is weighted and swings and feels in the hand.

i recently got this and have been quite happy with it.
http://www.sogknives.com/tactical-tomahawk-satin.html

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Point taken!

Fortunately we have lots and lots of good examples of repeated impacts on AR400 in the form of all the many things that are made out of it. Your average bit of excavation tooling will likely go through more stress in a week than one of our axes will go through in years. We’ve also beaten the hell out of our test axes and so far they are proving to be remarkably resilient.

HOWEVER I’m now thinking of setting up a robotic tester that will drive it with fire-fighter levels of force into something (maybe one of those crap Harbor Freight anvils?) over and over again until it fails. That should be a fun test.

We will need to do it somewhere that won’t drive people insane with the noise…

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I think that’s fairly typical of fire axes. Break stuff made from a wide variety of materials but don’t break the axe. Clean cuts optional.

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