Most hafted weapons (hammers, axes, spears, etc.) have wooden shafts. This leaves them vulnerable to being sundered as wood is much weaker than steel, mithral or adamantine.
So 2 questions:
1. If a weapon such as an axe is sundered, is it assumed that the wooden shaft is what's broken and that's all that needs to be replaced?
2. Is it possible to make a hammer or axe with a metal shaft. For example: could someone custom make a dwarven warhammer that was forged from a single piece of adamantine from hilt to hammer?
Morag
I would imagine that a wide variety of things could be wrong with a weapon when it becomes 'broken'. Bending, loose pins, cracks in the blade, etc.
Yeah, depending on the manufacture, an axe could just have a few small parts break/but, and it just becomes loose. Check an example: here (warning, while this page and the following are tame, this work has some degree of violence. Nothing crude, but still noticable)