![]() ![]() Probably because that's what the forests of Sweden are mostly made up of haha! The edges come quite sharp but the head weight always seemed to be a bit light for the handle length to me. The thing that I found though was that the GB's seem to be strongly designed towards light work, light/medium splitting and softwoods. Don't get me wrong, they are amazingly made pieces of axe art! And anyone that likes axes should have at least 1 GB pass through their hands. Particularly Gransfors Bruks axes of which I have had all sizes, but at this risk of offending all the GB fans, none of them really seemed to hit it for me. One interpretation is that Washington Mill Company had come up with the design, and had then tapped Davis to fabricate them for shipment back to Seabeck.I am looking for a new axe and have been researching this for a while now. ![]() There’s evidence that Washington Mill apparently placed an order for Puget Sound axes with the Davis Axe Company in Massachusetts in 1868. As for theories about the origins, one online reference points to Washington Mill Company in Seabeck on Hood Canal. Also, “Puget Sound” isn’t a brand name, it’s a design or pattern that was manufactured, royalty-free, by multiple companies. There’s no patent for the Puget Sound Falling Axe, and as far as anyone can tell, there’s no single logger or blacksmith who was ever credited with the design. “Probably because he was tired of breaking his handle, when he bashed it against the trunk of the tree as he’s cutting his springboard notch.” “It’s likely that somebody asked the camp blacksmith to make him a long-bit ax for cutting his springboard notch,” Allyn said. Thus, a more heavy duty version of a carpenter’s mortising axe would be the ideal tool for cutting springboard notches. With a long, narrow bit (or blade), the shape and length mimic a carpenter’s mortising axe, Allyn says, which is a tool some loggers would have been familiar with 150 years ago. ![]() Those springboard notches, Allyn believes, are key to why the Puget Sound Falling Axe is shaped the way it is. Even in 2021, evidence of old springboard notches are visible on stumps along trails and on the edges of campgrounds all over the Northwest. This meant cutting holes or notches into the trunks of trees at shoulder level or higher to place springboards, those planks that functioned as scaffolding-like temporary structures for loggers to stand on and use a crosscut saw to cut down a tree. And, because the big cedar trees in the Northwest often grew from stumps and “nursery trees,” this meant that, in order to cut a big tree down by hand, loggers needed to get many feet above a very complex and sometimes rotted stump. That’s why a longer handle was useful – it gave a logger more reach across a wide tree trunk. The timber here in the Northwest – Washington, Oregon, British Columbia – in the 19th century was significantly bigger than in most other parts of the country, Allyn says. Allyn says the inspiration, not surprisingly, was likely the trees of Puget Sound themselves. But the basic design had to come from somewhere. “Everyone’s working with these big old iron tools, and you need to maintain them.”Īnd, before a factory could turn them out back east, it was a blacksmith who was likely first to create what became the Puget Sound Falling Axe. ![]() “These logging camps all had a blacksmith in camp, because you needed one just to maintain all your logging tools and your digging tools,” Allyn told KIRO Radio. KIRO Radio asked Tom Allyn, a Maple Valley man who collects axes and who knows a lot about their history and how they work. Just how – and why – would an axe like this be developed in lumber camps around Puget Sound 150 years ago? There are old catalogs that show “Puget Sound Falling Axes” alongside other regional tools named for places where men once chopped or sawed down trees by hand, such as Jersey, Michigan and even Long Island. More than a hundred years ago – and maybe as recently as the 1950s, when chainsaws displaced axes and handsaws – several manufacturers, mostly in the eastern United States, were making and selling them to loggers in the Northwest as well as other parts of North America. It’s a specially designed axe that is believed to have been developed somewhat organically, right here in Western Washington, in the pre-mechanized days of logging, perhaps as far back as the 1860s. The piece of essential logging equipment in question is called a “Puget Sound Falling Axe” – falling as in falling, or felling, or cutting down trees. Doesn’t everyone want to know the stories behind the names of nationally-known products that are inspired for Northwest places?įortunately, experts on today’s topic were much more forthcoming than Toyota and Costco. ![]()
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