Everything they said it was

Reviews: Fiskars 7884 X27 36-Inch Super Splitting Axe

My entire reason for even finding this axe was that I was looking for something to add to my splitting "arsenal", since I had finally encountered a piece of severely knotted wood of unknown ancestry I couldn't break up with my 15 year old 8 pound Oregon fiberglass handled maul. I also had some big rounds (2'+) and giant wedges (30" across) that I had filled the back of a pickup with a couple of weekends ago. Never have I seen a product on Amazon so unanimously praised so I thought I'd risk $50 and see if it was everything it was cracked up to be.

It's certainly a very nice axe, both from a manufacturing and aesthetic standpoint. Medium effort breaks up most logs. On only the biggest or gnarliest logs did I have to put my shoulder into it, at which point the log would either come apart or start breaking up so I could work my way around it to get the job completed.

The way some folks were describing the axe it sounded like all you had to do was touch steel to wood and the log would magically split in two. It doesn't do that. What it does do, though, is make what was hard work more effortless, similar to going from my old Jonsered chain saw to a Craftsman electric...less like work, more like fun... As someone else here said, this is more towards the scalpel than the sledgehammer end of the axe spectrum.

Half of the paint is gone from the sides of the head after a half hour of splitting, not certain whether that's the non stick coating or not, but noticed no change in splitting behavior with it gone.

Just to put things into context, I stand 6'/180#. I've been splitting wood for close to 40 years, if you count my time as a Boy Scout. I've been a professional cutter for both the State of Colorado and private cutters, and have been cutting and splitting wood for heat since I moved here in '75, so I know my way around an axe. This is one of the good ones.