A new product called the Lever Axe was submitted by its inventor to some Hearth.com forum members. As of May, 2007, the following opinions were collected:

1. From East Lansing, MI

I currently have a demo Leveraxe sitting in my office at home. I, too, gave it an honest test and really wanted to like it. I read the manual, followed the instructions, and remained unimpressed. I even cut some straight-grained ash to 10” (firepit length) and did some comparison work between the Leveraxe and my Fiskars mini-maul (hatchet-sized). I had better luck with the hatchet.

I posted the following over at AS:

I received the ax a while back and finally had the chance to give a it a good testing this past weekend. I tested it myself, and it was also handled and tested by three other folks who are experienced in splitting wood by hand.

In short: though its build quality is superb, I was not impressed with its performance.

In fact, I was so unimpressed its performance that I didn’t even bother making videos of it splitting stuff because we couldn’t get it to split a damned thing except ailanthus, which splits all on its own when you fell it half the time anyway.

We tried it in green ailanthus and silver maple, as well as some pine, white oak, ash, and mulberry that was cut last fall or this past winter. Even when perfectly aimed to 1.5” from the edge of the round, the ax was more likely to stick than to penetrate and split off a plank of firewood. The performance of the leveraxe was about on a par with that of an old single bit ax that I use for limbing and tapping wedges. It was wholly incapable of cleaving off pieces from the hardwood species, and did a mediocre job in the pine unless it was absolutely clear and the round being split was less than 10” in length.

I offer this report not to disparage the design of the leveraxe or its abilities when used on the wood in the environment where it was designed. I’ve seen the videos on the website and it clearly works on the wood that is found over there. But it is not an appropriate tool for the stuff we burn here in the midwest. It might be able to perform better here if its head weighed eight or ten pounds, though.

…What I would really like to see, though, is how it handles the northwest and alaskan softwoods – I think that these might be a better match for this tool’s intent and design. All in all, I am very glad to have had the chance to try out the Leveraxe myself in the sort of wood that we deal with around here.

2. From Corie, Pennsylvania

Corie had much the same experience as #1 above, concluding:

The Lever Axe is not a splitting tool meant for creating large splits or for splitting knotty or otherwise difficult to split pieces. The lack of performance stems from the design of the Lever Axe head and the need for the axe to penetrate to the notched section to create the rotating action of the head. North American hardwoods seem to be too hard for the axe to penetrate and still retain enough energy to force the splits apart. What the Lever Axe does excel at is splitting previously split or small unsplit logs into even smaller, nearly kindling sized pieces.

and

While the concept is very interesting, significant improvements would have to be made to the Lever Axe before I would consider using it as a full time wood splitting tool. The quality of construction is top notch and from the videos I have seen of the Lever Axe in action, it does extremely well at splitting straight grained pieces of wood into very small firewood splits.

Here is complete report in PDF file: File:leveraxe.pdf