The use of an axe to split kindling.
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Following these few simple tips will make splitting wood a snap.
Tips On Making Kindling
1/ You need a small hatchet, gloves, safety glasses and a solid piece of wood to chop on. Short pieces of wood, 4-6 inches split the easiest.
Short pieces of kindling are great for starting a fire, and you end up with more kindling by shorting up the wood supply, long kindling is overkill.
2/ Place your chopping block of wood on solid ground. The solidness beneath the wood, sends shock waves back into the wood you are splitting, which helps split the wood. Soft ground absorbs the blow of the axe.
3/ The axe should not be too sharp, only sharp enough to act as a wedge. You are not cutting the wood, only prying it apart. The axe blade only need be sharp enough to wedge into the wood a short distance, with light force. One would call this a dull axe.
4/ Choose your wood to be split, dry with no knots. A good straight grain wood will split easier. Pine and cedar splits very nicely. A short piece of dimension lumber, about four to six inches long makes good kindling.
5/ Gloves and safety glasses on, hold the wood to be split with your left hand about two inches down from the top on the edge of the left side of the wood.
Grip the hatchet, on the handle, with your right hand, where it feels balanced and comfortable in your hand.
6/ Place the wood on the solid chopping block, and balance it with your left hand. Lift the hatchet just high enough to produce enough force on the downward stroke to simple enter the wood, just enough so the wood sticks to the axe blade.
7/ Next raise the axe with the embedded wood together as a unit. Use your left hand to guide and stabilize the wood and bang the wood on the chopping block, repeating the action, until the wood splits.
8/ The weight of the axe does the job, not hard swings of the axe. A hatchet of about one to two pounds, is about right. Too light, and you
have to swing harder, too heavy is clumsy, and over kill.
9/ Repeat the procedure until the wood is reduced to kindling.
The Woodpile
Build your wood pile with some thought in mind, this will save you time and frustration later.
Place the best wood to one end of the pile, such as birch, as this will be used for nighttime
burning. Place all the wood with any rot, light wood, knotty, unshapely, very short, and
very long pieces together.
These pieces will be burnt in the day, where a few pieces are burnt, at
a time. The very long pieces may have to go into the stove sideways to make it fit,
nighttime time is not the time to find out it will not fit, while one end is in the stove and on fire.
Place all
The good solid wood gives longer hours of burn time.
Cord of Wood Calculator Formula.
A cord of wood is 128 cu ft. Enter the length of the wood stick in inches.
Enter the height of the row in inches, and enter the length of the row in feet.
Examples of One Cord
4 ft. x 4 ft. x 8 ft.
4 ft. x 2 ft. x 16 ft.
Wood 16 inches in length, row 6 ft. high, 16 ft. long.
The first axes were made of stone over 10,000 years ago. The stone axe progressed to copper, then bronze, iron and steel. The iron axe orientated in Europe, but was later manufactured in North America. The axe designed and built in North America was more designed to fell large trees. The handle was long and had a double bitted iron head. The axe usually had one sharp blade and the other dulled. The sharp side was for cutting deeply into wood, the dull blade was for splitting wood, cutting knots, and for chopping tree roots in the ground.
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