Attempting to Solve the Mystery

Today in the News:  All is quiet on the homefront.  Monday means back to reality. Hope you all had a good break.

Link of the Day:  http://outdoorconnections.blogspot.com/ . Another fellow blogger that I found at the BCUSA forum.  I checked out his blog and I like it a lot.  I only wish he'd write more. ;)  In addition, he has fantastic music on his page!  He has about 6 followers at the moment.  Head on over and click "follow" in the upper left hand corner.  I did!
Attempting to Solve the Mystery

I went home to Maine in August of '10.  Uncle Bern gave me a lot of cool items on that trip, including a badly pockmarked Hudson Bay Head which was attached to a handle my Grandfather (from here on known as "Gramp") had carved before he died.  I talked about it here.

Uncle Bern and I discussed it back and forth and between us, we believed the head to be a Norlund, though we couldn't prove it.  It was really more of a semi-educated guess.  Last week I was cruising ebay and I was several Snow and Nealley heads come up for auction, one of which was an older Hudson Bay model, pictured below.

  I noticed that the seller had taken a picture of the bottom of the pole, which indicated the weight of the head, which was 1 3/4 pounds.  I have the same notation on my S&N 3 1/4 lb. axe, but not on the other two that I found in Gramp's garage.

 That tells me that the HB axe on ebay is from the same era (I'm guessing here).  Out of curiosity, I went out to the shed and looked at the bottom of the poll on the HB that Uncle Bern gave me.  This is what I found:

Let's make that a little clearer:

I'd never looked hard enough to see it before, but it is there - the remnants of a 1 and the bottom of a 3, including part of the slash for the fraction.  I was stoked.  In the above picture, I outlined it in red so you can see it better.

So I went to the Snow and Nealley website and found the link for customer service.  I emailed them and asked if they could identify the era of the heads with the marked numbers on the bottom of the polls.   I doubted I would get a response.  Nothing against the company at all (I LOVE S&N, in case you haven't figured it out) - I was emailing them about a rusty old head I didn't even pay money for - they owe me nothing, but much to my surprise, I got an email about two days later from a lady named Barb.  She wrote:

"Hi Mark,

You can send it and I can ask Leroy.  He has work for S&N over 30 years so he may have some idea. 

Thanks

Barb"

It's on like Donkey Kong!  I don't know who Leroy is, but I'd like to buy him a cup of coffee and shoot the breeze with him for a bit.

I'll keep ya'll posted on what I find out.  Just for reference, here is my new hudson bay beside the old one.  As you can see, they've changed slightly.

Pax Domini Sit Semper Vobiscum,

Mike, Oscar, Hotel.....out.