Vipukirves Leveraxe is The World’s Smartest Wood Chopper

Anyone who has spent more than 30 seconds chopping wood with an axe knows it’s not all that much fun. Paul Bunyan and the workout montage from Rocky IV make it look like a real barrel of monkeys, but it’s actuality painful work.  After about 10 logs your hands are glowing red and covered with blisters and your shoulders are shot.

I know from experience, I spent an afternoon removing a stump with an axe last summer and pretty much needed a full back-e-otomy.

The axe has been around since the flippin’ Neolithic period (Yeah that’s 4,000 BC), and hasn’t changed since modern steel was invented in 200 AD.

Then one day, Finish inventor Heikki Kärnä decided he had enough, it’s time to “work smarter, not harder.” Heikki put his cranium to work and came up with a brilliant design, the “Vipukirves.”

The Vipukirves still uses physics but works much differently than the usual Axe. A traditional axe is a wedge, splitting log by forcing itself into the wood and using its increasing width to open the seam wider and wider. A traditional axe has to go all the way into a log to split the wood.

The Vipukirves works as a lever, which it why it’s shape is so weird. The blade only goes about an inch into the log, the counter weight on the rear then torques the head, forcing the log to split with leverage not force! Brilliant.