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The panabas is a chopping bladed weapon or tool from the Philippines, variously described as both a sword and a battle axe. [1] [2] [3] It has a distinctive long straight haft and a curving blade of various designs. It can range in size from 2 to 4 feet (61 to 122 cm) and can be held with one or both hands, delivering a deep, meat cleaver-like cut.
For splitting wood, this tool is much better than a typical axe. The weight of it is more advantageous, and it is less likely to become stuck in the wood thanks to its width. The wedge section of a maul head must be slightly convex to avoid jamming and it cannot have the elongated "hollow ground" concave-section that a cutting axe may use.
A froe. A froe (or frow), shake axe or paling knife is a tool for cleaving wood by splitting it along the grain. It is an L-shaped tool, used by hammering one edge of its blade into the end of a piece of wood in the direction of the grain, then twisting the blade in the wood by rotating the haft (handle).
The edge itself does not need to be sharp: cleaving relies more on wedge action than chopping (cutting) with an edge. The section of the axe should be triangular though, with flat sides, rather than the deeply hollow-sided forged and welded axes, or the modern convex-sided "apple pip" axe grind. [4] Nor should the edge be ground at a bevel.
When splitting a log by hand, it is best to aim for the cracks (called checks), if there are any visible. [5] Some types of wood are harder to split than others, including extremely hard woods, as well as types like gum which an axe will often bounce off of, and cherry, which is typically so twisted it's near impossible to get a clean split ...
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The handle of the axe also acts as a lever allowing the user to increase the force at the cutting edge—not using the full length of the handle is known as choking the axe. For fine chopping using a side axe this sometimes is a positive effect, but for felling with a double bitted axe it reduces efficiency.
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