Last year I stood in a snow-dusted field in Finland, about 100 kilometers west of Helsinki, handling a variety of bladed tools. There at Fiskars' proving grounds, a bunch of us visitors took turns chopping, cutting and slicing wood with a series of ingeniously-designed gardening tools that surprised me with their ease-of-use.

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Case in point, I was handed a pair of loppers (the ones you see below) and provided with a branch—a sapling, really—that I did not think loppers were appropriate for; at roughly two inches in diameter it seemed to call for a saw. But as I brought the handles together there was little resistance, the blades felt like they were cutting through a thick noodle, and the branch separated cleanly. This will sound silly, but it was fun; I wanted to spend half an hour wandering through the nearby forest cutting things in half.

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"That's the PowerGear," the Fiskars executive overseeing us explained to me, pointing to the geared mechanism near the blades. "That's what makes it so easy." By employing mechanical advantage, we were told, the force exerted by the user was multiplied by better than a factor of three, versus your standard single-pivot-point pair of cutters.

I handled several different tools varying in length and blade size, from the SWAT-team-boltcutter-length, to handheld, to Zombie-Apocalypse-size. All of these were the second-generation versions of the tools, the PowerGear2 line, which had been tweaked (see video below) over the first generation. At the time the PowerGear 2 line was not available in North America, but Fiskars is finally launching it here this month.

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At the proving grounds the Fiskars exec explained some more of the technical details to us while pointing to the different parts of the mechanism, but at the risk of me sounding like an American idiot, I have to confess I had trouble cutting through his Finnish accent. Here, however, is a new video from Fiskars with Dan Cunningham, a Senior Design R&D Engineer based at their Wisconsin facility, explaining the mechanisms, the improvements, the different tools in the line and what they're going for ergonomically: