Welcome to this strange world Nick, I'm building/planning/designing something over the summer as well so should be interesting to see what I can learn from seeing the efforts of someone with better engineering facilities than me
Axe recoil can be solved easily by having a counterweight on the other end of the shaft...it adds weight (obviously :P) but Iron Awe 2 used that very successfully and had a very powerful axe as a result, running off full bottle pressure CO2 with no real recoil (although they tended to spend more time flipping people than axing them, heh)
I remember reading Thz had a custom made rod and the stock seals in the ram do the job nicely, might be worth looking at their site and see if there's anything on there.
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