Splitting Wood

You may recall our having some dead trees cut down around our property in WI last July. Three of them were ones I wanted to cut up for firewood. It is important to have fuel for all those s'mores events when grandkids come for visits. My good neighbor, Jerry, had offered to help me split the wood, once I got the trees "Tootsie Rolled." Up here, that is how they describe the process of cutting a tree into short logs.

Jerry owns a splitter, a machine I have seen but never worked with before. So, I was looking forward to that experience. I love seeing different machines and how they work, of course. Here we are assessing part of the pile of logs waiting to be split. By the time this picture was taken, we had already split about half the pile.

The splitter uses a good-sized hydraulic cylinder to press a wedge into the ends of the logs. The wedge consists of two parts, a narrow, sharp, leading wedge followed by a wide, separating wedge. The machine was amazing to me in terms of its capabilities. Jerry says it can handle much larger pieces if you tip it up into its alternate vertical position. Working with it at waist level is much easier, though, in terms of reducing the amount of bending and stooping one must do. Important safety tip: Keep your fingers away from being between the wedge and the wood. (We did!)

Of course, Jerry really had the techniques down for operating his machine, so I did most of the work of grabbing and placing the next log and then tossing the pieces into my wheel barrow. It is kind of fun to see the inside of each piece. Most of the time, it was just nice Spruce grain, but occasionally we saw some color or figure in the grain, or we might encounter some insects (ants, worms) that had taken up residence inside.

You must know that Kathie took these pictures. She was busy stacking, when not photographing. I would deliver each wheel barrow full of split wood to the area where we keep our firewood.

Then, Kathie created this nice, neat stack of wood. This is probably about 2/3 of the total. We'll have plenty of nice pieces next year for sitting out by a cozy fire near the lake or for roasting wieners or marshmallows. Thanks for all the help, Jerry!