The pickaroon was from Baileys & was shipped from Germany in about 2 weeks. The customer service was superb. The pickaroon is very nice for the money($50.00 +$15.00 ship). It has a sturdy hickory handle & nicely forged point. Its drawbacks are that its a little heavier than the Oxhead aluminum ones & doesn't seem to have quite the bite of those. I may still spring for an aluminum 36" although at $140.00 + shipping that won't be anytime soon. I just bought the PA-80 & it does a fine job although it won't touch the pine I have. I need to redo the edge on it as it was not too carefully done by the factory. This has a heavy duty hickory handle. This will bust up stuff that my American pattern wouldn't touch. On a 16" hard maple round its through in 2 hits if you can hit the same place. The sheath is pretty chintzy Stihl/Oxhead. These are both fine quality tools.
Just out of curiosity, what weight is the PA-80? And I agree, very fine looking tools you have there. Thanks for sharing!
The Pa-80 is advertised to have a 6.6lb head. This has a pretty beefy handle so that will ad some more. I don't have a decent scale to measure total weight. It is less work to use this than my American pattern 6 pounder.
I like the look of it, it has a very intense head. Looks like it will handle most hardwoods with no more than 1 or 2 swings.
Oschen(ox) kopf(head). Thanks, it is working well. It has a good geometry to it. I'm going to file/hone the edge to see if it will bite into the pine I have. It also balances out very well & I can actually swing this reasonably accurately. If you have straight grain hardwoods this just blows right through it. What was very surprising was that this never really gets stuck.
Ochsenkopf makes good stuff.One of Germany's oldest forges,located in Wuppertal near the Reimscheid tool making region since 1781.Part of some big conglomerate for about 10 yrs now,no longer a family owned business.The quality seems to have remained however.For years I've had one of their gutter (gouge) adzes,a pre war 1930's American Pattern 3.5lb single bit ax head & just last week their Mortice Axe arrived in the mail from Highland Hardware.
