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Splitting Firewood is an unavoidable job for anyone who wants to heat their home with firewood. Whether you have a wood stove or an open fire you will need dry and seasoned firewood.

Seasoning firewood progresses far more rapidly when it has been split as fresh cut hardwood dries by only one inch of its thickness per year. When you split firewood down it’s length each piece seasons much more quickly than the original log.

Splitting firewood large quantities of firewood is exhausting work and a few simple tips can take some of the strain.

1) Make sure you have the right tools – you need a good log splitter. This is a heavy headed, broad shouldered axe. This design is important as the weight and shape of the axe splits the two sides of the log and drives them apart down the length.

2) A heavy tree stump to support the wood and split on – this is ideally a heavy, knotted log cut to an appropriate height (18″ or so)

3) A splitting wedge and mallet – use these on knotted or tough logs to split in specific places.

4) Practice aiming – with focus and practice you should routinely hit within half an inch of the place you are aiming for

5)Swing confidently – pecking half heartedly at you logs will tire you out and split no wood. Confident, firm swings of the axe are the most effective.

Tips for efficiency
When you are splitting firewood each extra time you handle the wood adds an extra step, extra time and extra effort to the whole process. It may not seem like much for each individual log, but when you are doing a whole seasons supply it can add many hours to your labours.

With a bit of careful planning you can cut out some of these handling stages and make the whole process much more streamlined. Before you begin locate both your log supply and the final location your split logs will end up in. The ideal is if these two are adjacent to each other, but on a practical basis this is unlikely to be the case. Instead, you are likely to need to transport the split logs at least a short distance to where they will be stacked for 6 to 18 months to season properly.

A likely handling order for splitting logs is:

pick up round log
set it on block
pick up splitter
swing it to split log
reset pieces and swing again
pick up split pieces and stack them nearby
(repeat for remaining logs)
then pick up split wood
load into barrow
transport to final location
unload to final stack

That is a lot of handling stages for each log, but we can cut this down dramatically with one neat trick and a bit of organisation.
1) fix an old car tire around your chopping block to make a rim – put two or three logs in place at once so they are held firmly. When you swing the splitter the split pieces remain in place without flying off the block so you save time resetting and collecting logs between swings.

2) Keep your barrow or trailer right beside your splitting area – as logs are split put them directly in the barrow and when it is full take it to the final location. This saves a handling stage between splitting and loading the barrow.

3) keep your tools in a convenient place where you can reach without bending – an upturned bucket serve to lean your log splitter, mallet and wedges on at a convenient working height. Much less bending down to ground level and overall much less effort.

Now our log splitting task looks like

pick up 3 round logs
set it on block, within tire
pick up splitter
swing it to split logs
toss split pieces from within tire into barrow
(repeat for remaining logs)
transport to final location
unload to final stack

A much shorter list of tasks and a dramatic saving in effort!

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