Meet the new Hand Forged Tomahawk

The Cast Chapter

To meet demand, New West moved to a cast tomahawk made from S7 tool steel — tough, reliable, and much faster to produce at scale. It sold for years. But casting has a ceiling, and the cost eventually caught up with it.

"The price just got out of control," Corey says, "to the point where it wasn't very attractive to the customer." Worse, even with a genuinely tough steel, the cast hawk never quite matched the feel of the original hand-forged version behind it.

Eventually, they stopped selling it.

Replacing Automation With Skill

The obvious next move, in most of modern manufacturing, is automation: build the jigs, build the fixtures, make it fast and repeatable. New West tried thinking that way too — until they didn't.

"We kept talking about how to automate this thing," Corey says. "And at some point it was just — let's not. Let's just make them."

So they did it the old way. An 8-inch length of quarter-inch mild steel gets bent into a U-shape to form the poll. A piece of 1095 high-carbon steel — "same stuff I'd make a knife out of," says Jack Rellstab — goes into the bend and gets forge-welded in place, using the same heat-and-pressure principle that produces Damascus and Damasteel. From there, the bit is drawn out thin under a power hammer, the eye is drifted under a press, and the head is ground, shaped, heat-treated, and sharpened entirely by hand — then hung on an Appalachian hickory handle.

It's not a new formula. Outside Magazine wrote up an earlier version of this same construction years ago: "A hand-forged head slips over a tung-oiled hickory handle for a relatively lightweight, perfectly balanced hatchet designed for throwing." Some things don't need reinventing. They just need someone willing to still make them by hand.

"We're replacing automation with skill," Corey says, "which is kind of the opposite of where manufacturing is going right now. I think that's a really cool factor of the whole process."

The Real Thing

It's built to throw — that's still the job it was born to do behind the Jackson store. It's tough enough to handle camp chores if you need it to be more than a target. And it's made the way the first ones were: forged by hand, on purpose, by people who could've automated it and chose not to.

No rubber required.

Shop the NWKW Hand Forged Tomahawk at MTN MAN Toy Shop, Jackson Hole.