The tree surgeons at The Tree Company (London) use many tools to help carry out the various tree related operations involved in Arboriculture. Tree surgeons need a few hand tools including sledgehammers, stake drivers for planting and the humble axe. They are all important members of the tool box.
There are a few different types of axe, including the splitting axe and the felling axe. They are a versatile tool and are not limited to felling or splitting. These days we use chainsaws to fell trees but the axe is used to split wood, either for fire wood or just to make big logs smaller so we can extract timber from those small London gardens. The hand tools we use take a pounding and they do break from time to time.
An axe head is like an old friend, so we are keen not just to replace them when they break. We take them to a tool merchant where the broken handles are loving replaced for us, using air-dried ash wood. It does not take long and that old axe head lives to fight another day.