Use a garlic press for hazelnuts! 
What about other nuts? What’s your favorite way to crack nuts or your favorite nutcracker?
My 20 or 22 ounce rock hammer does the trick for me. 
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i just use the Ol’ fashioned round handled nutcrackers, the set i have was my grandparents and i got a few more at garage sales. for hazels they do the job well, barely damaging the kernel once you get used to it.
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I like using the garlic press because our hazels are small and you don’t have try to balance them between the nutcracker using it.
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I bought several of Gerald Gardner’s Master Cracker about 15 years ago. I think I paid $65 each plus shipping. They handle hickory nuts, walnuts, pecans, and most other nuts relatively easy. If I were cracking at a large scale, there are several automated nut crackers on the market that run in the $4,000 to $10,000 range.
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I use a vice to crack walnuts
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It depends… Do you intent to eat the nuts inside? Because if that’s not a requirement then there are marvelous ways to go about cracking them nuts 
All joking aside, how many nuts are we talking about? Cracking a few vs. cracking the entire load from a pecan tree (as many nuts as 100 pounds of them may be) we are looking at a whole different set of requirements.
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At the hazelnut research center in Corvallis they crack them with a hammer
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both
Hickory nuts mocker and shag… you dont crack them… but insteaad cut them.
Use a knife and hammer to split them perfectly in half… then compound beveled wire cutters to cut out the nut meat.
TNHunter
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I like this one for hazels
Shell fragments don’t fly across the room
JD
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i used to do that but wind up smashing the meats.
What’s the best way to crack black walnuts?
Any ideas on the best way to clean the husk so my hands don’t get stained for a month?
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The easiest way, I buy mine already cracked, lol.
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Me too.
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There are a few viable ways to remove the husks from black walnuts. One is to run them through a corn sheller and use gloves to pick out the nuts. You can also drill a hole in a piece of thick plywood and use a mallet to knock the walnut through the hole. Big time is to build a custom de-husking machine using rebar and the tire/axle from a front wheel drive car. Attach to the pto of a tractor to rotate the tire and pour walnuts into a hopper on top. The tire runs the walnuts around inside the rebar cage to remove the husks. Gerald Gardner used to build these.
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This right here. There are lots of methods to crack, but if you want big nut pieces get yourself a good pair of side cutters.
@Bigdoug03 … below is what i use.
Knife and small hammer for initial cut in half.
It takes about 2 or 3 seconds to get the nut cut perfectly in half.
Then those red handle compound diagonal cutters make easy work splitting the shell to get the nut out.
I get mostly quarters… but sometimes halves.
Shagbark hickory are my fav…
We dont have shellbark here… wish we did.
TNHunter
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There are plenty of shellbark along the Tennessee river. Veterans park in Florence has some large producing trees.
@Fusion_power … I found this natural range map for shellbark hickory online last fall…
The red dot below is me…
My location is called the highland rim…
Looks like I could drive a county or two over in just about any direction and be in their natural range.
I think that strip that juts down a couple counties west of me is the TN river… and I am sure you are right about that.
I have a friend that owns a big farm over in a small town in Perry Co, on the Buffalo River (huge river bottom). I have wondered if he might have some shellbark there… He has deep rich river bottom land there. He lets me fish there… I am sure he would let me hunt for hickory nuts too.
May have to try that soon. His location is not in the natural range per that map.
TNHunter
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