Yep, I could not split that much faster than someone with a splitter as I would run out of energy by then. It is likely that I could split one full cord faster than someone with a splitter.
I would be fun to try.
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That would impress me as well. I’ve split many cords by hand as well as with a splitter. I suppose when I was in my 20s and splitting nothing but 8-10" straight grained black oak I may have been able to do a face cord by hand more quickly than a gas splitter, especially if I had somebody else setting up the chunks to be split. A number of decades later, there’s no way I could come close.
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Last January… i took down 4 hickory trees… 18-24 inch diameter.
I split all those rounds with a splitting hammer and had 2 wedges… all muscle powered.
I have never used any kind of fancy wood splitter.
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How many cords do you go through annually to heat your house?
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This takes the Versus out of the equation.
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firewood grows alot differently in the north compared to the south. because it grows slower, it tends to be more twisted and knotty. splitting clean strait oak compared to yellow birch or sugar maple. is 2 different animals. you need the power of a good splitter to handle wood like we got here. ive seen my father do it when he was in his 30;s -40’s with a axe and wedges. its damned hard, slow work! even with a splitter you sometimes have to back off and reposition the piece so it can split it. the wood dealers here run 15-20 hp vertical splitters to split it efficiently. very dangerous work.
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We split lots of elm when I was a kid. That stuff was stringy as he!!. We did it all by hand until my late teens. Then we bought a splitter along with a neighbor. Some of that stringy elm was so tough it was damn near impossible to split with a gas splitter. We also would split some huge cottonwood from time to time. Some of the knotty chunks got tossed. The splitter had no chance against that stuff. At first, Dad and the neighbor would use a chainsaw to cut those chunks into small enough pieces to fit in the woodstove. When they figured out the BTUs they were getting didn’t equal the saw fuel used they stopped messing around with cottonwood.
Anybody who is dependent on wood for fuel in a lengthy northern winter understands how much work goes into cutting/splitting/stacking wood. I’ve got enough dead/down wood on my 95 acres to heat a number of homesteads pretty much forever. I don’t own a woodstove or fireplace. I had enough “fun” making wood when I was younger.
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i remember using a axe to pound chunks of twisted y. birch bound up in the splitter. it took 3 of us to handle those big pieces. ive never split elm but y. birch is horrible. probably the best to burn but very stringy. sometimes you get lucky and get nice clean strait s. maple that was nice to split but because red maple, y birch and white birch regrow quickly that’s the main types of firewood found in the woodpiles nowadays. like i said in the past if i had the land, id grow red oak. they are rare up here put ive cut a few off the university’s property. very nice wood to split.
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My parents built a new home in '71 and Dutch Elm Disease went through our area in Upstate NY around that time. My Dad was cutting dead American Elm off the property for firewood. He found an old McCulloch two man saw and got it running to cut the big stuff into firewood rounds and I got stuck on the business end of that bar holding onto a handle with the chain coming at me. I hated that thing! And the fun wasn’t over, then we got to split that stuff with a sledge and wedges, the worst stuff ever to try to split. By the early 80’s the Elm was gone and I sure didn’t miss it.
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I’ve never split yellow birch. I’m not sure I’ve even seen that species to be honest. Paper birch here is what all the city folks want for their fireplaces. It’s “pretty” I guess. There’s an outfit north of me not far that only cuts and splits paper birch. They’ve got skidsteer mounted splitters and produce dozens and dozens of split cords daily. My understanding is that they make a pretty good living. Paper birch splits pretty easy by hand, but there’s no way you’d make a living doing it that way.
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That is very close to my memory and timeline. I think Dutch Elm disease hit southern WI a little later than the east coast, but not by much.
Have you split any Siberian or Red elm? They’re every bit as stringy as American elm, probably worse.
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we had lots of big elms here along the rivers. Dutch elm disease showed up in the mid 70’s and wiped them out. only ones we find nowadays are growing it isolated places along fields. too bad as they are a nice tree to look at.
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No, but just last summer we finally ID’d a tree growing next to our cabin. We had mis-identified if for a few years and finally discovered it’s Slippery Elm (*Red Elm). Now that we know what it is we’ve taken note of a few more on our property. Haven’t cut any or had any on the sawmill, what we’ve found are too small. Siberian Elm hasn’t really spread too much here in the Adirondacks, but I recall in the 90’s the planting of Siberian was being discouraged in NY.
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ive heard Siberian elm is invasive. you guys have much of it there? the btu’s arent very high for elm . about the same as w. birch. yellow birch likes water. it grows along seasonal ravines coming of hardwood ridges, brooks and rivers. in the right conditions it grows quickly. a nice old growth strait yellow birch is big money for veneer and furniture.
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Yep, quite a bit of Siberian elm here. Even more further west of here. I think nurseries in the Dakotas still grow and sell them. When not many trees will grow, you plant what will. I believe Russian olive is still grown for re-sale over there too.
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When I had a friend with 8 acres of almost entirely hardwood we would do this once a year. We would get a crew of five of us guys, rent a towable horizontal/vertical splitter for the day and run it as a team in rotation. One guy would run the hydraulic controls, another would place and rotate the rounds that we were splitting and the other three would be grabbing and stacking the splits. When one got tired of their position we would change out for somewhere else in the operation. With all of the rounds already positioned nearby we could split all of the hickory and oak that had been cut over the preceding year quick fast in a hurry. Team work makes the dream work.
There were times when a large diameter round was just too much for the machine. I discovered that I could actually those split with an axe by working smaller chunks on the edge and then feed the remainder through the machine. It is akin to breaking concrete with a sledgehammer: you look for the weak point and chip it away in triangles.
There was a thread (I think on ArboristSite) where people were discussing their favorite splitting axes. Some people said that double bit axes (cutting faces on both sides of the head, like what you would see depictions of Paul Bunyan carrying) split better than single bit axes. I spent a while wondering why that might be and realized that the answer was in their statements about how it would throw the pieces farther away. A double bit axe has a mass farther away from the cutting edge than the single bit. When it makes contact that momentum causes the head (and handle) to rotate a touch, which isn’t really perceptible to the user, thrusting the wood farther apart. This is the principle exploited in the Vipukirkes LeverAxe. That desire to rotate is why I find the axe side of a cutter mattock to be useless and simply cut mine off. The fawnfoot handle of the single bit axe causes it to remain more straight in the user’s hand than the swell end of the double bit.
The guy who created the LeverAxe had another very important thing that he helped to promulgate in his demonstration videos, but I’ve found a way that I like even better when splitting with my 4.5 pound parabolic curve splitting axe. He would nail or screw an old tire to the top of his splitting block and arrange it full of rounds of similar length, then split them all at once. It kept them upright, prevented them from being launched and gave a rubber surface to bounce the axe off of if he came up short, keeping his lower extremities safer. I prefer to run a ratchet strap around a large stack of rounds, halfway between the ground and their tops, and then go to town on it. Partway through I’ll have to tighten the strap up a bit as voids fill up and everything consolidates, but I find it to be much more versatile and portable, and almost as safe.
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Absolutely. Also some of the oaks in my area are large, dense and knotty. I had a pile of some knotty oak logs that were even impossible to split with a sledge and wedges. I borrowed my neighbors hydraulic splitter. If the wood didn’t split it just cut its way through.
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Same… Sometimes with white or red oak a knotty piece simply won’t split… With 30-tons of pressure, my splitter just cuts it’s way through. The noise it emits sure changes, you can hear it complaining!
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Bragging about hard to split wood always deserves mention of sweet gum. It is at best poor quality fire wood, but I have a bunch of them to get rid of. Sweet gum has naturally twisted grain so does not split worth 2 cents.
A guy near Birmingham built a custom log splitter about 30 years ago for commercial firewood production. It had a dozen cutters and a hydraulic ram to handle a 28 foot long tree in one cycle. Start to finish took less than 2 minutes for an entire tree up to 30 inches diameter. He was running 30 to 40 cords an hour through it. It took 3 logging crews working full time to bring trees for the splitter
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@smsmith … when I lived at home until i was 18 we heated with wood. Had a big ashley wood stove in the living room… we had a wood shed that held a lot of wood and we filled that thing up every fall. My dad cut… and i split… and my brother and i loaded the truck.
Today my home is heated with elect and gas.
Last January when I took down those 4 hickory trees was the first time in many a year that I cut and split a bunch of fire wood. Brought back some old memories… and made sore some muscles that have not been used so much in a good while.
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