With great movies like The Patriot and The Last of the Mohicans, it is hard not to pay tribute to one of the original tools in our American History: the Cabelas throwing tomahawk. OK, so maybe it wasn’t made initially by Cabelas. Anyway, this tool didn’t start out as a weapon, but as a practical trade item between early settlers and the Indians. Of course, beyond the obvious uses of hacking trees down and fashioning things out of wood, it also became a pretty good weapon. If you think about it, in the old days when you had to either carry all your tools or drag them along with you on a horse or wagon, versatile and universal tools ruled.
Design and Build Quality
Our particular Cabelas throwing tomahawk is based on an authentic early American design. It features a single sharp blade and hand-forged hammer blows that are still showing. The temper on the carbon steel is just so that the tomahawk takes an edge really well and keeps it even after a lot of use. The steel is soft enough, though, that it is pretty easy to touch up the edge when needed. The hickory handle is about 20 inches long and provides a pretty good grip since there is no finish on the wood.
Testing the Throwing Tomahawk Hatchet
Coming up with some testing procedures proved a bit more challenging than some of our other tools. Let’s face it: We weren’t going to try to scalp someone or worse, like the movies show, but we figured it was a throwing tomahawk after all, and at the very least, we should give it a try.
To start off with, we built a target out of some 2×10 short ends and a 2×4 framework that gave us a 3 ft by 3 ft target area. The target was attached to some 2×4 tripod legs so that the center of the target was about 4 feet above the ground. After some experimentation… ok, a lot of experimentation, we determined that about 10 paces as they would say in the old days (or 30 feet away) was the ideal distance for us to be able to throw the Cabelas tomahawk and have the blade stick in the wood target (as you can see from the ic we were aiming for the target’s most, uh, vital organs).
Throwing a tomahawk is a mix of art, science, and lots of practice. The art part is how you feel doing it, like you almost want to let out a battle yell! The science has to do with how hard, how many revolutions, and when you let go of the handle, and the practice part is pretty self-explanatory. Throwing a tomahawk is not for everyone, and as with any other tool, proper caution and safety procedures need to be exercised while using.
Conclusion
As far as other useful things you can do with the Cabelas throwing tomahawk, we found it will chop kindling for a campfire just fine, and clear small brush too. It will also work well to pound in tent stakes, just be careful since it does have a sharp edge. Our Cabelas tomahawk has a longer handle than most hatchets on the market, which helps it have some extra leverage for those hacking and chopping needs.
While we have become more civilized and have certain tools for specific tasks, it is nonetheless fun and exciting to implement a versatile piece of history like the Cabelas throwing tomahawk. From a professional stand point, no one would show up on a job with one of these and expect to get much done, but from the value side, we think this tool represents terrific quality and can give an experience like no other.
