Words by Patric Fransko

The Hults Bruk Dvardala – Over 300 years of Swedish forging meet a compact 1.5-lb head and 17.5″ hickory handle — built to earn its spot in your rig.

There’s a moment every overlander eventually faces at camp: firewood needs to be split, a fire ring needs clearing, or a tent stake needs to be driven a little deeper into hard-packed ground. You reach for the axe in your rig, and in that instant you find out whether you packed the right tool — or just extra weight. After spending real time in the field with the Hults Bruk Dvardala Hunting & Forest Axe, I can say with confidence: this is the right tool.

A Forge With Three Centuries of History Behind It

Some gear companies lean on heritage as a marketing gimmick. Hults Bruk doesn’t have to. The forge traces its roots to 1697 in the Hult Valley of southeastern Sweden, a site chosen deliberately — surrounded by forest for fuel and situated along a stream that could power the hammers of the day, with the water and timber resources of the valley making it an ideal location for a forge that would run on water-powered hammers. The operation didn’t even start as an axe maker. Its earliest output was ship nails and iron bars for the shipbuilding trade, and axes only became a serious part of the business generations later, with axes not becoming a major share of production until the 1870s.

That transformation into a dedicated axe forge is where the Dvardala’s DNA really begins. In the late 1800s, then-owner Gunnar Ekelund traveled to the United States to study American production methods and machinery, returning home with new forging techniques, American hickory handle designs, and a fresh vision for the company, bringing back not just updated production techniques but hickory handles and axe patterns that would go on to become some of the forge’s most enduring models. Those same forging principles, refined further in the 1930s, are still the foundation of how Hults Bruk builds axes today, with the materials and production breakthroughs from that era still evident in the current lineup.

What strikes me most is how little has changed at the source. The forge still sits in the same valley, powered by the same stream, and still produces over 100,000 hand-forged axe heads a year with a crew of roughly twenty craftspeople, a small team that continues to hand-forge more than 100,000 axe heads annually at the original site north of Norrköping. When you pick up a Dvardala, you’re holding the output of that same 300-year-old lineage, not a mass-produced import wearing a Swedish flag as a sticker.

The Craft Behind the Steel

The Dvardala’s head is hand-forged from a proprietary Swedish steel alloy engineered specifically for Hults Bruk, produced in a carbon-neutral, fully recyclable process. Each head is shaped using an open-die free-forging method, then hardened and tempered to a Rockwell hardness of roughly 54–56 HRC — a sweet spot that delivers excellent edge retention without making the steel brittle in cold-weather use. The cutting edge is hand-ground and polished before the head receives the traditional Hults Bruk stamp, a mark that has represented the forge’s quality standard for generations.

This isn’t a one-step stamping process pulled off an assembly line. Skilled blacksmiths heat the steel to roughly 1,200°C, then work it in stages — first pressing the eye for the handle, then shaping the beard of the blade, then reheating and refining the final form on a second pass, a multi-stage process in which one blacksmith rough-shapes the head before it’s reheated and refined by a second craftsman on the other side of the forging hammer. It’s a genuinely delicate process, and it shows in the finished product: a clean, purposeful head with none of the sloppy grind lines you sometimes find on cheaper hatchets.

The 17.5-inch handle is American hickory — a nod to those same techniques Ekelund brought back from the U.S. over a century ago — curved for control, sanded smooth, and treated with linseed oil to protect the grain and give it a warm, finished look. It’s engraved with the Hults Bruk logo and topped with a pronounced end knob that locks the axe into your palm during a swing. Every Dvardala ships with a vegetable-tanned, full-grain leather sheath and a user manual, packaged the way a tool with this kind of pedigree deserves to be.

Why the Dvardala Is the Perfect Camp Axe

Here’s the problem with most axes people throw in a truck bed or a Sprinter storage bin: they’re either too small to be useful or too big to justify the space. A hatchet handles kindling but stalls out on anything larger. A full-size felling axe splits firewood all day but eats up cargo room you need for recovery gear, water jugs, or a folding table.

The Dvardala splits the difference, and it does it on purpose. It shares its head geometry with Hults Bruk’s larger Akka forester’s axe, but on a shorter 17.5-inch handle — which makes it noticeably more portable without sacrificing the cutting geometry that makes the Akka effective in the first place. The head is slightly thicker over the cheeks, which gives it real splitting capability for camp firewood, while the semi-straight edge and flat, wide grind let it sit flush against a workpiece for controlled carving, notching, and shelter-building tasks. The slightly curved edge also makes it usable for light trail-clearing work if you find yourself needing to clean up a track before you can get the rig through.

At just 1.5 pounds for the head and 2.2 pounds total, this axe earns its place in a rig without weighing down your gear list — something I care about as much as anyone who’s packed a Sprinter for a month-long run. I like the weight and size of this axe specifically because it strikes that balance: substantial enough to trust with real chopping and splitting work, light enough that it never feels like dead weight tucked behind the driver’s seat or strapped to a MOLLE panel.

The handle deserves its own mention. It has a nice, substantive feel that just feels right in your hand — not the thin, whippy grip you get on some entry-level hatchets, and not the oversized, hard-to-control handle you find on axes built for felling trees. The curve and the end knob work together to keep the axe locked into your palm through the swing, which matters more than people realize when you’re working one-handed around a fire ring at the end of a long driving day.

Built for the Overlanding and Dispersed Camping Lifestyle

Whether you’re setting up a basecamp on public land, building a fire stand at a dispersed site with zero amenities, or just need a reliable tool to process firewood after a day on the trail, the Dvardala is sized for exactly that use case. It’s not a bushcraft toy, and it’s not overkill. It’s the kind of axe that goes in the rig and actually gets used — for shelter-building, for kindling and firewood, for light trail maintenance, and yes, if you’re in the right part of the country, for field-dressing tasks around a hunting camp.

A tool like this is also a reminder that good gear doesn’t have to look brand new to be worth carrying. Hults Bruk builds these with the expectation that the head will get sharpened, the handle will pick up scuffs, and the leather sheath will darken with age — and that all of that is part of what makes it yours. That’s the same ethos we look for in every rig, trailer, and piece of gear we feature: honest tools built for real use, not just for the photo.

Final Verdict

The Hults Bruk Dvardala Hunting & Forest Axe earns its spot in the “just right” category of camp tools — small enough to pack without a second thought, capable enough to actually do the job when you need it. Backed by a forge with over 300 years of hand-forging history and modern Swedish steel metallurgy, it’s a tool built to outlast the rig you’re carrying it in. If you’re building out a camp kit for overlanding, dispersed camping, or hunting season, the Dvardala deserves a serious look.

Specs at a Glance

• Total Weight: 2.2 lbs
• Head Weight: 1.5 lbs
• Handle Length: 17.5″
• Handle Material: American hickory, linseed oil finish
• Steel: Proprietary Swedish axe steel, hand-forged and tempered (approx. 54–56 HRC)
• Includes: Full-grain leather sheath, storage box, user manual
• Price: $205.00