Model H1 · Concept freeze · Pre-launch

Axe. Hammer. Saw. One helve.

A 31.5-inch saw lives inside a 19-inch handle — and makes the handle stronger. One tool for every cut you have to make out there.

Reserve your place — $0 today See it come apart
Total weight
3.30 lb
As an axe alone
2.34 lb
Cutting edge, saw
31.5 in
Max reach
52 in

Figures are design targets at concept-freeze stage. Nothing has been built yet — here's exactly where we are.

HELVE ONE · engineering render · not a photograph

The problem nobody solved

You carry two cutting tools into the backcountry.
You use one at a time.

An axe splits, limbs and drives. A saw bucks, fells and cuts clean. Neither replaces the other, so you carry both — and the one that isn't in your hand is dead weight for the entire trip. On a solo long-stay, that redundancy is the difference between packing a tarp and going without.

Every existing "combo" fails the same way:

  • Saw folded into the handle.You hollowed out the handle. It snaps. And the blade is 6 inches long.
  • Multi-tool with a saw.A three-inch blade. Useless on anything thicker than your wrist.
  • Hatchet plus folding saw.Two tools, two sheaths, two things to lose. Full weight penalty.

The constraint everyone hit: you cannot take material out of an axe handle without destroying it — and you cannot fit a useful saw into 19 inches.

Why this works when the others didn't

Two ideas, and they depend on each other.

01

The stowed saw is the handle's core.

And the curve you see in the handle? It's in the skin, not the spine. A telescoping rail can't pass through a bend, so the bore runs dead straight while an asymmetric section and a variable-wall overmould sweep the grip line out to a 14 mm drop and a fawn's-foot butt — the same geometry a curved wooden helve has always used to index your hand and neutralise your wrist at impact.

A drilled-out wooden handle snaps because you removed the material that was carrying the load. A tube doesn't have that problem: bending stiffness scales with the fourth power of distance from the centreline, so the material in the middle of a solid handle was barely working anyway. Take it out and you keep almost all the stiffness at a fraction of the weight.

What a tube can do is dent, oval, and buckle locally under a hard strike. So we put something in the middle that stops it: the spine rail, clamped in compression between the head collar and the butt cap. It acts as an internal mandrel.

In axe mode the handle is a tube plus a core. In saw mode the tube is empty — but in saw mode nothing is striking the handle. The empty state and the load case never happen at the same time.

Solid — heavy Hollow — dents Tube + rail
02

A segmented blade on a shared rail behaves as one bar.

A 31-inch blade will not fit in a 19-inch handle. Three 10.5-inch segments will.

Segmented blades normally fail because every joint is a hinge — pull hard and the assembly folds at the seam. HELVE's segments never join to each other. Each one indexes onto the shared rail with a dovetail foot and a sprung ball detent, and the rail runs continuously past every seam.

Bending load goes into the rail. The segments carry tooth load only. Cutting length becomes a function of how many segments you brought — not how long your handle is.

seam seam continuous rail bridges both seams

Provisional claim language

“A hand tool comprising a striking head and a hollow handle, wherein an elongate saw spine member is removably received within the handle bore and, when received, is retained in axial compression between the head collar and the butt closure such that it functions as an internal structural core of the handle; and wherein a plurality of discrete saw blade segments are indexable onto said spine member exterior to the handle to form a continuous cutting edge spanning the segment seams.”

Draft independent claim. Not yet filed — see the honesty section.

Five configurations

One object. Whatever the wood needs.

0s

Chop

Axe, saw stowed. Full-weight felling and splitting tool at 3.30 lb.

0s

Drive

Flip it. The poll is a rated sledge face — stakes, wedges, froe work, anchors.

40s

Saw 32″

Rail, three segments, T-grip. A one-handed bucking saw with 31.5 in of edge.

55s

Reach 52″

Telescope the rail out. Overhead limbing and brush clearing without a ladder.

15s

Light

Leave the saw kit at camp and the tool is still a good axe at 2.34 lb — not a crippled one. This mode matters more than it looks: it's the answer to “I don't want to carry the saw up the ridge today.”

Drawing HV-H1-001 · Rev A

The blueprint.

Open full drawing →
SEAM SEAM 19.00 in 483 mm 7.65 in HEAD WIDTH 31.50 in / 800 mm CUTTING LENGTH 54.50 in OVERALL — REACH 52 CONFIG HM-1 · 4140 CrMo · 26.0 oz HS-1 · 7075-T6 · SWEPT SKIN, STRAIGHT BORE SR-1 STOWED = CORE SR-1 RAIL · 2-STAGE · 1/6-TURN CAM LOCK HELVE ONE — H1 · GENERAL ARRANGEMENT DWG HV-H1-001 REV A 1/1 ALL DIMENSIONS ARE DESIGN TARGETS AT CONCEPT FREEZE. NOT FOR MANUFACTURE. TOLERANCES TBD AT EVT.

Mass budget

Head HM-126.0 oz737 g
Handle HS-111.5 oz326 g
Spine rail SR-15.8 oz164 g
Blade segments ×36.9 oz196 g
T-grip TG-12.6 oz74 g
Total, full kit52.8 oz1497 g
Axe mode (LIGHT)37.5 oz1063 g

Materials

Head4140 chrome-moly, drop-forged, differential temper
Handle7075-T6 aluminium, Type III hard anodised
Head jointSteel collar, tapered wedge, 2× M6 shear pins
GripDual-durometer TPE, 60A palm / 90A ribs
Rail6061-T6, two-stage, 1/6-turn cam lock
BladesSK5 carbon steel, impulse-hardened teeth
T-grip30% glass-filled nylon 6/6 over steel insert
SheathWaxed canvas over HDPE liner

Pre-launch reservation

Reserve your place. Pay nothing today.

We are not taking money for a tool that hasn't passed its impact test. What you can take is your position in the queue — and the first 100 reservations hold the serialised tier when the campaign opens.

100 units · serialised 001–100

First Hundred

$179 / unit

46% off the $329 planned retail

  • Serial number 001–100, engraved on the poll
  • Full kit: head, handle, rail, 3 segments, T-grip, sheath
  • Name in the run book that ships with every unit
  • Direct line to the build updates, including the bad ones

400 units

Early

$199 / unit

39% off retail

  • Full kit + sheath
  • Build updates

Uncapped

Campaign

$249 / unit

24% off retail

  • Full kit + sheath

Uncapped

Pair

$459 / two

30% off retail

  • Two full kits + two sheaths

60 sets

Outfitter

$1,095 / five

33% off retail

  • Five full kits — crews, guides, schools

Where the $285,000 goal goes — every line costed, nothing padded into “marketing”

  • Hard tooling $109,000
  • Prototypes A + B $38,000
  • Impact rig + DVT $27,000
  • Certification, patent, trademark $30,000
  • 3PL + first freight $25,000
  • Contingency 15% $34,350
$285,000Funding goal — tooling, testing, certification and the first run
Feb 2027Campaign opens
Q4 2028First deliveries — deliberately padded, see below

The goal is the true minimum, not a low number chosen to look achievable. Full breakdown below.

Reserve — takes ten seconds, costs nothing

No payment, no card, no obligation. One email when the campaign opens, plus build updates if you tick the box. Unsubscribe in one click.

Where this goes

The road to a shipped tool.

  1. Aug 2026

    Reservation page live

    You are here. Provisional patent drafted; trademark clearance underway.

  2. Sep–Oct 2026

    Prototype A

    Head machined from billet, off-the-shelf tube, printed T-grip. Purpose: prove the rail-as-core idea and the segment seam are real.

  3. Nov 2026

    Prototype A reveal

    Into the hands of twelve people who process wood for a living. Their unedited verdict gets published.

  4. Dec 2026–Jan 2027

    Impact rig — the gate

    10,000 strike cycles on the head joint. Pass and we launch. Fail and we don't — and we publish the failure either way.

  5. Feb 2027

    Campaign opens

    Reservations convert first, at the tier they reserved.

  6. Apr–Sep 2027

    EVT + 60-day field test

    25 units, 25 testers, structured feedback. Handle length gets decided here, not in a meeting.

  7. Oct 2027–Apr 2028

    DVT, tooling, pilot run

    Hard tooling. Drop, cold and salt-fog testing. Pilot 300 units.

  8. Q4 2028

    First deliveries

    Padded by a quarter against our own schedule. On purpose.

Read this before you reserve

What doesn't exist yet.

Most hardware campaigns bury this. We're putting it above the fold of your decision, because the fastest way to lose you later is to be vague now.

No unit has been built.

Every figure on this page is a design target at concept freeze, not a measured result. Weights are calculated from the CAD mass budget. Hardness values are specified, not verified. The first physical object exists in about eight weeks.

Every image here is a drawing.

There is no product photography on this site because there is no product to photograph. We would rather show you an honest engineering render than a convincing render of something that has never existed.

Two risks could kill it.

The head joint loosening under sustained impact, and the tube denting from a glancing overstrike. Both are handle-joint problems. Both get answered on the impact rig in Dec 2026 — before the campaign opens and before anyone's money is involved. That sequencing is deliberate.

The date is padded, and here's the maths.

Our own development schedule says ~70 weeks from funded, which lands mid-2028. We publish Q4 2028. A date you beat is an asset; a date you miss is a refund queue.

Where $285,000 goes.

$109k hard tooling · $38k prototypes · $27k test programme · $30k certification, patent and trademark · $25k logistics setup · $34k contingency. Unit cost is covered by the pledges for those same units. If we fund at exactly goal, we ship exactly the funded units and hold no retail stock.

The patent isn't filed.

Publishing this page is a public disclosure, which starts the US 12-month clock and affects foreign filing rights. The provisional is drafted and filing is the first action item. We are telling you that rather than implying protection we don't have.

Questions we'd ask

Straight answers.

Doesn't a hollow handle just break?

A drilled-out solid handle does. A closed tube doesn't — stiffness in bending comes overwhelmingly from material far from the centreline, which is why the middle of a solid handle contributes very little. The real risks with a tube are local denting and ovalling, and that's exactly what the stowed rail is there to prevent. It's the load path we designed around first, and it's the one we test first.

Why aluminium and not wood or fibreglass?

Because the handle has to be a precise, sealed bore that clamps a rail in compression. Wood moves with humidity and can't hold that tolerance; fibreglass can't take the local dent case at this wall thickness. Aluminium can do both, and hard anodising handles the abrasion. The cost is shock transmission, which we're mitigating with a nitrile isolator and a dual-durometer overmould — and measuring against a wooden-helve control.

Can I really hit hardened steel wedges with the poll?

That's what the 4140 differential temper is for. A plain high-carbon axe poll at 55+ HRC will chip when it meets a hardened wedge. Ours is specified at 50–52 HRC on the face — hard enough not to mushroom, soft enough to deform rather than spall. It's a rated striking face, not a decorative one.

How long does it actually take to build the saw?

Target is 40 seconds for the 32-inch configuration and about 55 for the 52-inch. That's a design target and it will be measured, on video, with the first prototype — and published whatever it says.

What if the impact test fails?

We don't launch the campaign, and nobody has paid anything. That is the entire reason the gate sits before the campaign instead of after it. If it fails we'll publish what broke and what we're changing.

Why is there no ferro rod / compass / bottle opener?

Because every one of them is a hole in something that has to survive impact, and none of them make the tool better at its three jobs. Restraint is the feature.

Will there be a smaller one?

A 15-inch one-hand model is on the list as a stretch goal at $1.2M. It isn't a promise; it's a costed option.

What does reserving actually get me?

A queue position and first access at the tier you selected when the campaign opens. No payment, no card, no obligation, and you can drop out with one click. The first 100 reservations hold the serialised tier.

The last tool in the pack.

Axe. Hammer. Saw. One helve.

Reserve your place — $0 today