Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Broke out the splitting maul

My preference is oak. Red oak seems to split easier than others. You couldn't give me hickory unless already split. 8 lb maul is what I use along with steel wedges

Fugg that too

I run my chain into the bark and saw rounds up into quarter wedges. Faster than my 20 ton splitter used to run through em.

none of this is split, all sawn

There is a maul up in the shed with the brown recluse spiders, it can stay there.


Here’s a few we cut Friday, this is the last of that massive Shagbark hickory.

If you u was a man, you’d have your own smokehouse and use all them curlies like I do when I process this hickory for cold smoking pork sausage

^^^^ bagged up

😃

Lmao , your a city boy

I'm not too picky, when wood comes available, I burn it. With the exception of evergreeen, I'll cut and burn whatever I can get. Better than spending 300 per cord of questionable wood. I had a bunch of poplar die off on my place for some reason, it's not the hardest/heaviest wood, but early season or late season, it does just fine.

100% ^^^

I’ve got a maul as a Christmas gift - I wondered immediately why I hadn’t tried them before. Not sure what it is about them but they flat work. Like you - been at the wood prep game for a long time now.

Love my Fiskars maul and axe!
I still prefer the feel of a nice hickory handled 3.5# axe but the Fiskars gets the job done. I stuffed the hollow composite axe handle with foam pipe insulation to eliminate the "boing" sound with every strike.

Most of the wood I cut is either dead ash or dead red elm.
Axe for the ash. Usually don't even need to stand it up.
Maul and a lot of rest breaks for the dry, twisty elm.

Been down into the single and negative digits for the last week. Warming into the upper 30's today. So far, I'm 1 and 1/2 layers into the shed. Five layers of western larch (tamarack) stacked in there to start with, and I'll likely consume about 3 and 1/2.




Have about another 5-year supply stacked in front of and behind the shed. Wish I could do Oak, but the nearest are about 5 hours away.

Have to go up in the distant horizon to get into our National Forest where they charge us $5/cord to bring it out.
I'd freeze before I'd burn walnut

Outdoor wood boiler you burn everything

Puttin Mrs. Lord to work I see.

Why wouldn’t you burn walnut? I’ve burned a bunch of it and when well dried it makes a good fire.

We burn walnut too

Ren60 brought me several pickup loads from a big black walnut in his yard.

It seems to blow over occasionally around here in our soils unless it’s rooted in with other fencerow trees

Or Slum Lady? 😃

I split the firewood with a Fiskars maul. And I whack lots of black walnut. Yes, red oak is better at 25,000 BTU per cord, but black walnut is pretty good at 22,000 BTU per cord. I am quite fond of black walnut and last year put 5 Nissan truckloads in the woodshed, along with the oak and locust. I like black walnut, it is easy to split and is pretty and has a funky smell.

What are you gonna do, chop poplar at 16,000 BTU? No better than white pine.

How cold does it get in Tenesssee? Thought you guys were always warm down there...this is a bit disconcerting. One of my winter time activities is to pretend that one day I'm going to escape this frozen hellhole for winter, and look at maps to figure out where I'm going to theoretically go. Tenesssee seemed nice.
Still -26 outside and windy, driveway is all drifted in again. Probably won't be able to go to work without digging out, and my digging motivation is at rock bottom. Looks like another pretty cold week here, down to -40 some nights. Every year I hate it more.....someday I'll escape and be somewhere warm for winter.....yep, someday.

Y'all western boys and the tamarack. I lived out there one year, near Spokane, and the best wood was tamarack, at 20,000 BTU/cord. I told them about back in Dixie we burned red oak, which was much better. Washington boys thought I was kidding.

That looks like the stack of wood in yard at the guys house in Drewsey. Tamarack is the best and easiest splitting wood there is for getting a hot fire going. Ranchers use it for posts and stays too….let alone shakes.

Has to be something in the water if'n you're splittin' elm by hand.

Elm is why God made motorized log splitters.

Agreed!

I use a Fiskars as well. We burn a lot of maple here. Good heat. Lots of white birch here, not as good as the maple but ok. Yellow birch is very good but hellish to split