Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Serendipity is wonderful! I ran across this video demonstrating how to quickly split a lot of firewood by hand:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLULLzZuMn8

o

It's tough to keep up with these guys though.

The thing I notice in these videos is that the wood is straight and not too big. The crotch pieces and really big rounds that have to be split before manhandling or loading in the machine aren't shown. The hard work is in getting your wood pile into a shape where you can go to town with your axe or splitter.

All I've gotta say for the machines is that I can buy an awful lot of presplit and delivered wood for the kind of money it takes to buy one!
Alder splits pretty easily by hand, whether it is green or seasoned. Makes you feel like a hero!
Green wood usually splits easiest, but there are a few species (like cherry) where seasoned wood splits more readily.

I don't mind being inefficient for wood splitting since it's great exercise that I enjoy... There are quite a few local splitting machines that get traded around. They can split cords and cords of difficult wood in no time.
I'd rather be "warmed twice" myself!

I've now used the rope method for splitting and can unequivocally say it's superior to whacking at individual pieces.
I'm averaging two minutes per round by cutting 8-10 rounds from logs, grouping & binding them with a motorcycle tie-down, splitting them into quarters, and stacking for drying. Most of the time is now spent with the electric chainsaw in cutting the rounds off the logs.
Definitely no need of a powered wood-splitter.

@JohnnyH
I'm with you; I also enjoy the inefficiencies of wood heat. I like loading, unloading, splitting, stacking, and finally bringing it in to heat the house. In my inefficient operation, the same stick of wood is handled about five times before it is consumed.
I'm happy to report that my wood pile is 90%. All told, I have about four cords of wood that's cost me $300. That is our main source of heat and will last us until next May(about $50 per month). It is mostly red fir, lodge-pole, cottonwood, and some left over locust.
We have a hydraulic log splitter that we run off the tractor, but I split most of the red fir by hand. Some people think I'm crazy splitting wood with the maul when I've got that fancy log splitter sitting close by. Most of the red fir and lodge pole splits quick and easy, but I did use the machine to split almost all of the cottonwood that we got for free. Anybody that's tried to split cottonwood by hand will know why...