Well you see, I hadn’t until now considered that my entrenching tool needed a decapitation-ready edge on it, and thus I hadn’t considered what kind of sharpening system would be most suited for the job and would thus -pure necessity really- have to be added to my loadout.
Have you not read “All Quiet on the Western Front” or other WWI stories?
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hmn… the only WWI memoir I remember reading is Storm of Steel by (German officer) Ernst Jünger. There might have been some shovel fighting in that, now that it’s been mentioned. For a while Jünger had been my favourite author. But. hmn, apparently I’ve forgotten a lot of it now.
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Sharpened spade was a preferred melee weapon over other things like bayonets.
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My first thought as a mountaineer was an ice ax self rescue. Totally off the mark on that one.
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In the Stanlingrad episode of the classic “World at War” documentary there was a old guy reminiscing about defending the Grain Elevator as a 12 year old boy. His tale involved his favourite spade. Horrible, horrible stuff.
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There’s a reason a lot of bayonets got replaced with trench knives.
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Paper, scissors, e-tool
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$375 for an ax? Pffft! $50, or less, for an ax, $50, or less, or a Swiss army knife, and you’ve got it basically covered. This is a needlessly expensive gimmicky tool.
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I find the axe makers comments much more insightful than the axe grinders. YMMV.
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No I really mean it’s not the sort of thing one should use for striking tools or blades of any sort. It’s not a blade steel. It’s not a tool steel. It’s a sort of low/mild steel with a carbon content below what we expect of frying pans. cast iron has a higher carbon content.
Now it’s got plenty of other stuff in it that will do a similar job to carbon (but in a different way). But the spec sheets google vomits up have warnings about it’s tensile strength and subjecting it to forces typical of a striking tool. I couldn’t find any other references too it’s use in tools, blades, or striking tools besides blade making forums where people were using it for practice since it can often be had free. And described it as incredibly difficult to work due to its abrasion resistance. We sharpen metal through abrasion. Most other references to it come from welders. Using it to repair other sheet steel.
Now it’s probably gonna make a functional axe. I don’t know enough about the alloy to really know. Axes are simple. You can make a basic axe out of nearly everything. Even hardened wood, incredible soft metal like copper. So I don’t think it’ll be any worse than typical cheap steel used in no name hardware store axes. And I’ve done my share of camping and yard work with those just fine. But given its listed specs I wouldn’t neccisarily trust it to hold up over time, or be safe to use in the way indicated by this sort of axe.
And it’s certainly not the sort of thing I’d expect to see used in a $300+ product. It’s Chief features are low cost and abrasion resistance.
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I can see a use for it. Not bad to have an axe in the trunk, or in the pack if you are hiking/canoeing into the backcountry any distance.
I’ve actually been in deep country a few times (intentionally) and it is useful to have a few durable tools that make your life dramatically simpler than not having them. A good knife, a good axe or hatchet, some rope, water purification or filtration, a durable pot of some kind. Some bandages etc.
All of that is important and useful, much of it is less important than having a way to call for help (satellite EPIRB etc).
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I had initially read you as lecturing the guy who works with the alloy, making the axes from them. Thank you sincerely for the info, I feel well advised, and thoroughly convinced you will not be buying this axe. 
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Nope.
Know enough about the subject to wonder why that steel and know it’s not appropriate. .
But not enough about either axes or the steel to know how functional it’s gonna be. How well it compares to axes made of similarly low quality metal. Or if it will be dangerous. It’s hard to gauge. I mostly know about kitchen and outdoor knives. The specs and info listed for this kind of steel and for welders is different in subtle ways from spec sheets for tool steels and knife making. And axes have different requirements from knives. Especially those for splitting rather than cutting.
I know a bit about the raw metallurgy. A lot of the other non-carbon additives will compensate to some extent for the low carbon. From the knife forums it sounds like it will take a knife grade edge and hold it. But maintenance and longevity are issues. And at that Rockwell I suspect noone’s going to be “shaving” with it.
But again the spec sheets I saw contain warnings not to use it in certain ways, ways that cross over with rescue axe/striking tool. Ar400 is for skid plates, metal to metal connections etc.
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there’s an xkcd for this.
I think my axe would win, but I’m not willing to do that to it!
I think a super-sharp edge is not optimal for a splitting or felling axe. Sharp enough to shave with is typically just more dangerous to the user and more damaging to any sheath or case without imparting any additional capability to the tool.
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We could have used any metal, and we still can. We CHOSE AR400 for our fire fighting axes because it’s nearly indestructible and it’s available pre-conditioned in sheets. Is it cheap? Compared to some tool steels, absolutely it’s cheaper. But it’s very hard to find ANY steel that comes in a 4 x 4 sheet that’s ready to go. Pre-hardened steels are hard to come by in sheet/plate form.
One of the biggest reasons people shy away from ever doing anything with AR400 in a machine shop is because it’s a fucking nightmare to machine. It will completely destroy your tools. Which sounds like something you want with you in an emergency, doesn’t it?
If an end-mill is afraid of you, that’s a selling point in an emergency.
But we have a waterjet, and waterjets cut thru anything. We have the luxury of picking materials that are considered to be unusable (like AR400) because we don’t have to worry about ruining our machines due to the toughness.
AR400 is ridiculously tough. It’s ideally suited to things like armor, excavator buckets and dozer blades. For some of the reasons outlined by Ryu it’s not been thought of as a go-to material for bladed hand tools. However we have found (thru our testing and in real-world usage) that for an AXE (not a knife, not a razor) AR400 gets plenty sharp.
It’s certainly sharp enough to shave my arm with, I have a bald spot to prove it. Maybe I will do a video of that later today…
Anyway - back to the “sufficient for the intended use”: the ETCH is a rescue/survival tool. The existential life objective of every ETCH is to be ready for trouble and then when it happens to come out whole on the other side in the hands of your healthy user. The objective is not perfect edge retention under laboratory conditions or the best possible dendritic crystaline structure.
The purpose of every ECTH is to be highly serviceable substantially longer than the crisis at hand. Under those circumstances a slightly folded over edge is vastly preferable to a shattered one, which is why we are willing to trade out hardness for toughness.
Our FROST fire axe (also AR400) was recently used to pull children out of a burning car (down in Texas -
there wasn’t enough time to get the hydraulics out). It cut the front window, peeled out the dashboard and went through the car body. Generally speaking the FROST treats everything in a car but the hardened car frame as transparent.
We have a choice for every ETCH what steel we use for the blade. I carry one with me every day and use it for everything from clearing trails to chopping firewood and it’s working great. However we designed the ETCH as a platform in addition to “just” a tool so swapping out cutting edges is a pretty trivial thing to do. The next steel we will be offering for the axe blade is D2. It’s not cheap and I need to get a 240V 60 amp line run to heat treat it (we already have the oven) but I think it will be a nice upgrade for people who want it. The D2 blade is going to be awesome!
But I’ll happily challenge any axe to a durability and sharpness contest - let’s say we will start with shaving our arm hairs, then we demolish two cinder blocks, then we chop all the way thru a 5 inch log, then cut a one inch rope, then cut a piece of barbed wire, then try to shave our arm hairs again. No blade prepping along the way. It will be an interesting test.
This is a purpose built axe for a specific set of purposes, and for those purposes, I don’t know of a better tool.
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What is the difference between that and AR500? I know it comes in sheets and that is what we (the sport) use to make plates to shoot at.
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