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• This is a splitting wedge with a built-in slide hammer. You raise the intentionally heavy handle up, then slam it down to drive the wedge into the wood.

• This isn’t really technically an axe, but it’s in the same family. A slash hook or bill hook is used to quickly cut down brush, branches, and small trees.

• Post mauls have wide faces to spread the impact over the whole end of a wooden stake or post.

• Splitting Maul

• The classic sledge hammer, supreme implement of destruction.

• This is a cheap axe I got because I needed a picture of a clean new one.

• I got this sledge hammer for an iron worker friend of mine fallen on hard times. The hammer also fell on hard times, which is exactly what’s supposed to happen to hammers, more so than iron workers.

• The classic axe has two cutting faces, one with a thick, sturdy edge for heavy chopping, and the other with a finer, sharper grind for delicate shaping and trimming.

• I made this tiny axe when I was a kid. Being a small child the only metal I was strong enough to work was lead, so I hammered the head out of lead and then painted it with silver model paint. It would not work very well as an axe.

• Fire axes have a pick on one side for greater destruction.

• I got this lovely hand-made adz at a flea market in Indiana, from the craftsman who made it.

• The stereotypical “peace pipe” of old Westerns was a pipe for smoking tobacco, but shaped like a tomahawk. It was used to symbolically “bury the hatchet”, or I guess if things didn’t go well during the negotiations, you could use it the other way.

• Sledge Hammer

• Short-handled sledges can’t deliver nearly the same impact, but for close-in work they are great, and much heavier than a typical framing hammer.

• The classic axe, with one flat side for hammering.

• My local fire department has a lot of axes on every fire truck. When a house is on fire and you need to get in right now a saw or prybar may work, but very few doors can withstand a solid blow from a heavy axe.

• I’m not sure if this is a splitting maul with a broken handle, or a splitting wedge with a helpful stub handle to keep it in place for the first hit.

• This too, in my opinion, is still a sledge hammer, but it’s edging in the direction of being a chipping hammer.

• Splitting Wedge

• This politically incorrect tomahawk, a form of small axe, was made in India to a design popular with the indigenous people of North America, who are not, and never were, Indians.

• Firewood can also be split with a normal sledge hammer, or the back side of a splitting maul, and a separate wedge like this.

• This is definitely a splitting maul. It’s like a dull axe, used for splitting firewood.

• I feel like I remember at one point knowing what this seeming axe head is from, but no longer.

• With a blunt wedge like this I would still call this a sledge hammer.

Do you have a better example of this kind of tool? Let me know by leaving a comment, and include a picture of it if you can so everyone can see!