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Cold Steel tomahawks are far superior to conventional hatchets, particularly the Pipe and Hudson Bay models. The slip-fit 16 ounce head with the thin blade geometry beats everything out there and the heat treatments are consistently excellent. With conventional hatchets you're typically looking at a 20 ounce head, which is excessive for camp use. There's no way to remove the handle so if the hang isn't perfectly straight you have no way to correct it, and you can't play around with different handle lengths to find your ideal. You can't expediently remove and replace a broken handle in the field, often you have to literally bury the blade and make a fire around the eye to burn the wood out. Alternately the head may be chronically slipping loose and pose the risk of flying off. The longer and narrower eye of a hatchet means you have to start with a much larger diameter piece of wood to make a replacement and do significantly more carving, more opportunity for something to go wrong. You're also often stuck with a thicker blade geometry that isn't ideal for camp-sized wood, it may be better for splitting but that's irrelevant because you'll be splitting larger logs with wedges anyway. A tomahawk has none of these disadvantages and is the superior design for camping and survival use.
