The good: Durable handle, packable size head, and light weight
The bad: Soft steel, ok quality not up to real work
Fiskars used to be a smaller and less mainstream product years ago when I started buying their stuff. At some point in the near past they found a way to make it into American box store retailers, putting product on shelves across the US and the world.
The question is: “did this expansion cause a loss in product quality.”
I bought this axe about 10 years ago, when Fiskars made its entree into the box stores. I bought it from a box store, in fact.
What I intended to use it for was basic wood processing for camping and felling trees. The axe head doesn’t lend itself to much more than chopping due to the weight and design. The head’s blade design is not one meant for working wood or shaping logs into rough bits. It’s more meant for cutting logs to length, medium to small diameter logs. The poly handle that envelopes the head is meant to be a great alternative to wood, for people who can’t aim an axe and beat the handle to splinters as they overswing and hit the wood with the handle.
The Waterloo of the Fiskars chopping axe is when it finds some very dense varieties of wood. The steel of the head is okay as long as you don’t ask much of it, and the hardening of the steel seems to not be very far up the blade face. So, the axe is automatically limited by how dense the wood is that you can chop without breaking bits from the blade face, and then by how much you can file the broken areas and resharpen it. This particular axe found its limits in being used to process a black pine tree. A few whacks into the heart wood and the blade was missing bits and pieces. After I file sharpened it back to a workable edge, the metal began folding and breaking, which meant the heat treat was really shallow and the blade was going to do nothing but degrade after that.
So, I use it now mostly as a splitting wedge.
That pretty much tells the whole story. The axe is okay for light use. If you have deadfall in your yard, or you need to bust up some small stuff, it’s the world’s okayest axe. But if you want it to do something heavier, then you really should consider a better product. If you want it to chop dense wood, you should consider a better product. If you want it to shape wood, you should consider a better product.