Some of you might remember a couple months ago Dad and I picked up a manual 10 ton log splitter from one of those Cummins traveling tool shows. We've got a little camp with a wood stove and burn maybe 1/4 cord a year on trips there. I didn't want the expense of a powered splitter but some of the larger rounds, particularly poplar can be tough to split with the axe.
Its basically a regular splitter with a bottle jack for the force. The jack has 2 handles one operates a smaller cylnder. So you use both handles until the larger cylnder is too hard to work and then you use the smaller one until the wood starts to split and then you can use both again to complete the split.Well my last trip up was 9 days long and I split at least a piece or two of wood every single day, some days we did a bunch of splitting, probably did just under 1/4 cord (I'm trying to get ahead) in that time. Mixture of poplar that had been sitting on the ground for a year, fresh white birch, fresh and standing dead silver maple and some crazy unsplitable wood that has a grain that twists. First the unsplitable wood continues to be pretty much unsplitable, it'll shred but never really split.
The old poplar split easy, even the bigger 10-12" rounds that were a pain with the axe, even when it was freshly rained on, and we've had ALOT of rain recently.
The maple all split easily. The standing dead was very easy. We even had a race and it was hard to split it with an axe because the splitter just had to ease up to it and it would split, just setting up took more time with an axe and with the splitter you could do it all sitting down. The birch was more difficult but still no big deal, the strands inside it tend to hold together tightly so some "manipulation" was needed to get the pieces apart. On the whole for $100 I'm very pleased even if it only lasts one or two seasons its made things alot easier. We still used the axe, sometimes we'd cut the wood too long or two short for the splitter to work well or the fibers in the birch would be too hard to pull apart. My wife and I took turns, one on the splitter and one with the axe and we could process quite a bit of wood quickly. I'd think it would also be handy during cold weather you could split inside or if you were too sore or whatever to swing the axe.
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