How to split large wood rounds (no axe required)

all right today i'd like to show you a really simple trick on how to split these really large wood rounds into something a lot more manageable and a lot easier to move around so what we're gonna do is turn this into something like this something a lot easier to move around you'll just need a couple tools to get this done you can use a splitting axe and a small sledge hammer like that one that's a three pound one right there or the easier way to do it is to get a cheap what do we call it splitting wedge and a sledge hammer and either of these will work the sledge hammer in the wedge is easier but if you have a splitting ax around you can use it the main motivation for using this method is if you have these rounds that just don't want to split with a splitting axe like i have here the outside growth of this round was something like 45 moisture content and the inner growth was i believe around 23 percent so it just makes it really hard to split and there's probably varying opinions on whether green or dry wood is easier to split but at least with this particular species this is fur here uh when it's wet it's really hard to split let me show you what i mean hopefully you can see here that the splitting axe is pretty much doing no damage to this round no matter how much we try here so we have to revert to using a different method which i'll show you now what i do and i have pretty good success with this is i try to find any natural cracks in the growth some people will tell you just stick it in the fresh growth to start off with but i've personally have had really good luck just looking for the natural cracks in the wood so like right in the middle i can see there's a crack and then it kind of comes off forks off into two so what i'm going to do is just start working the wedge into the crack like so so once you've got it wedged in here and it's not really wiggling around anymore this is time to start hitting it with a sledgehammer the premise is really simple i mean once it's in all you do is just keep whacking it with your sledgehammer there's really nothing else to it and at least with this uh particular species with this fur i'm usually able to split it in under uh 15 wax with the sledgehammer uh sometimes less sometimes more i've gotten them split with 10 wax before but usually around 15 it'll just come clean in half so let's get the sledgehammer out the last thing i'd like to note and this is just a safety precaution is that when you start hitting this wedge if you have steel towed boots i would really recommend wearing them if you miss this thing will have a tendency to come flying towards your legs and your feet i've already gotten hit in the shins plenty of times with this thing so even if you have shin guards i'd recommend wearing them too uh but i don't have either in this case i wish i did have steel toe boots when i was doing this but i don't but if you do have them i recommend wearing them one of the fun parts about this is uh starting to hear the wood crack and slowly uh peel apart i don't know it's kind of a satisfying sound so there it is it came in two pieces uh my accuracy was a little bit dodgy at the end there with the last few swings but that's all right so i think that was less than 10 hits with the sledgehammer i think i counted maybe eight or nine so there it is and now it's a pretty easy to uh move these pieces around all these you know half as easy so the other thing i'm gonna do with this one is because these pieces are still pretty big and i need to get them onto the splitter is um i'm gonna turn this into turn these halves into quarters and it should really only take me about five hits with the uh wedge and should be good to go now one thing you can do once you're at this point once it's actually split in half is you can just use your axe to get some leverage and split them apart just like that okay next i'll show you that you can do the same technique if you don't have a splitting wedge and a sledgehammer and that you can just do it with your splitting axe and a small you know three or four pound sledge hammer so let's take a look yeah you can see it split apart pretty quick here so what i'll do is once i'm at this point i'll just use the axe to get some leverage and just start splitting it apart manually by hand it's really easy at this point there it is nothing to it one other thing to remember if your rounds have knots like this round does is try not to line your wedge up with the knots you know try to go around the knots otherwise you're going to be fighting them and they're not going to split very well so if i was doing this round right here i'd probably line it up something like this there's no knots in the way so it's not going to give you any trouble now with this one i want to see if i can just use the three pound hammer with the splitting x in case you don't have a sledgehammer i just want to show you that this can work without a sledgehammer you don't necessarily need it or you don't necessarily need the splitting wedge to make it work as well yeah you can hear it start to crack slowly but surely it's getting there yeah you heard that very satisfying sound so i took the axe out because i think it was trying to split through a knot at the bottom so what i'm gonna do is just move the axe to the other side and give it a few whacks there and see if we can get it split from the other side you can see this piece is being just a little bit stubborn because it's trying to split right down where this knot ends so probably what i'll do is i'm actually going to cheat and be a little bit of a hypocrite here but i'm just gonna put the wedge into the other side and give it maybe like two wax uh with the splitting wedge uh i think this piece is just being a little finicky because there's like five knots on the bottom rim there so it's just making a little bit more complicated normally if your rounds didn't have these knots in it this would have split clean in half but we just have to call in a little bit of reinforcements here you can see just how stubborn this round is i've got the wedge all the way in there and it still doesn't want to split in half so this round here is probably the exception here uh but done all the tricks to it and still not splitting so i'm going to just do whatever i can to get it to split into here i'm just going to use the axe for a little bit of leverage see if i can't just get some sideways force going there he goes we go and kind of see what the problem is obviously this is all just holding it together so that's what's giving us a hard time so we'll just get a couple hits with these splitting axe that should uh split these and it'll just fall sideways [Music] a little bit more work than it should have been than it usually is but either way we still got it and there you have it once you get everything into these manageable splits makes it a lot easier to throw it onto your splitter so hope someone out there found this uh helpful and thanks for watching

Channel: that DIY life

Views: 482,997

Keywords: How to split wood rounds, wood rounds, how to split large wood rounds, how to split wood without an axe, split firewood without axe, wood splitter, wood splitting wedge, wood splitter wedge, man meet garden, split wood with hammer, wood splitting sledge hammer

Id: 9w8G_MADdlM

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 13 2022