From the 19th of this month onward we'll be making the move from our current location in Frankfort, Maine to our new home in Shapleigh, Maine in the southern part of the state. A brand new house on 3.8 acres with lots of pine trees and sandy loam soil, and we own the place this time! We'll be hiring professional movers to help us make the transition as rapid and painless as possible, but it's a lot of work moving an entire homestead, workshop, office, etc. from one place to another, and so you can expect us to be a little tied up for a few days as a result, so I suggest making any purchases you were planning on sooner rather than later and we can try to get them out the door before we head out the door ourselves! In that vein, we have a couple of new items up on the site. The first is the new Condor Cloudburst Axe, and it's a real looker. An excellent little modern bushcrafting and camping axe inspired by classic American patterns, and it comes not only with the usual leather mask, but with a removable overstrike collar as well. The geometry is nice and thin for efficient chopping and the phantom bevels are very nicely executed on it. We only got one of these in for now just to see how we liked it, so if you're interested jump on it now because we aren't ordering more until we're in our new home. The other is a nifty bolo machete from Okapi of South Africa. The overall shape of the blade is very similar to a Tramontina model, and is about 1/4" or so longer, but the handle is where the big difference is. First of all, it's full tang construction, so if you've ever wanted to customize a Tram but the mortised tang kept you from altering the handle too much, here's your lucky break! Second, the handle is nice and spacious so folks with large hands won't feel at all cramped using it, and for folks like me that have smaller hands you can comfortably shift up and down the handle a bit to alter the balance depending on what you're doing with it. There's a pre-drilled lanyard hole in case you wish to add one, and the scales are made of some unfamiliar native hardwood that's very dense and fibrous--exceptionally tough stuff.
