Gents,
In researching axe making, seems all are normally a mild steel/wroght iron body with the eye either punched and drifted or forge welded around then always slit open and inlaid with a forged welded high carbon sliver for the cutting edge.
I understand this making a lot of sense when steel was very expensive or hard to find (200 years ago) but would it not be simpler now days to just make the entire thing HC? will the high carbon not forge weld back on itself with the wraps round eye method? are blacksmiths just being sentimental? seems proper tempering could handle the whole shockability issue with HC...is there something Im not seeing?
Josh
