Thank you Jay. Probably I have lain it out that poorly from the start so your inquiries will give me a way to fill in what's got left out. To begin I approached the robinia like I would have as if it was oak or sweet chestnut, or any number of woods, lets leave it at that, with my prescribed set-up, bandhacke, bundaxt, breitbeil, but after having worked a side or two it was clear the wood was not amenable. It's what I meant by saying the robinia is an unforgiving wood, every slightest deviation in the angle of each particular chop is doubly accentuated on the wood's surface. I have never seen a thing like it, just terrible.
So I hung those axes up and went to experimenting. First I chose the axe that was closest conceptually to the Austrian breitbeil which I love so much. It may well be what you call winged head, maybe coming from another American term, goosewing. It is much smaller, lighter and more curvy which is to say, arching in the cutting edge's length and with a big old sweep, heel to toe on the back-side ie flat side. And it was an improvement, clear to see in the first two in the series of four pictures here above the cuts transverse to the grain. Still, the result was to much axe, not enough of the wood for me to accept, these sharp cuts at the termination of every chop are disturbing to my eye and somewhat unique to the wood. Not that such traces don't occur in other woods but when the wood is less hard there is more possibility of the , swing, cut, follow through action. Here the swing gets stuck in its tracks. Not impossible to follow through, you must make only the finest of shavings to do it. In that way this wood it very good for helping to build axe skills. Any way, I'm also concerned with axe progress so moved on to the sparrbila
and the outcome is there in the two pictures following and this was better on all accounts or at least more to my liking. This axe, one with a double bevel and much mass.
The last picture though is the work of another Swedish axe called Tjälyxa. It's a late and cheaper to produce version of the classic 1700 timmerbila. The wood gets worked again transverse to the grain almost a necessity on these tall sides where it can otherwise over power and have its way with you.
