I haven't picked the thing up in 3 years. But I'm running low on firewood,..and it's getting cold. So I decided to split up those logs I've got from the last black walnut tree I cut down.

I've got enough to heat the house for 2 days. But I'll probably be too gimped up to build a fire tomorrow.

2 Aleve per half a rick of firewood seems to be the magic formula. We'll see if it holds true for tomorrow morning.

I love splitting wood and normally cut, skid, block, split and pile about 10 cords a year for entertainment. I don't own a wood stove but sell it for beer and hooker money. I get to cut trees for new shooting lanes, plant some new kinds and keep from getting fat. The snow is already up to my knees here so I likely won't get as much put up this winter. The colder the better for splitting wood. At -20 most blocks you don't even need to stand up, just one good crack and they bust right open.

Splitting mauls warm you up twice, once when using them and then again when you are standing by the fire

Wondering how much firewood you could have bought with the money you could have sold that tree for.

Get a six pound fire axe. Easier than a maul! Then wedge and short handled 8# sledge! Been using that combo for fifty years. Splitting mostly fir and pine. But some oak and madrone! Mauls work you to hard.

I always thought that a heavy axe worked better than a maul for splitting straight grained wood. Gnarly stuff is better done with hydraulics.

And this is for people who think their walnut tree is valuable:





Jerry

Fucque all that. I make an elevated V to drop the wood onto and I use the Husky 28" saw to split wood. I can stand and saw at waist level no strain no pain.

Black walnut trees are common as dirt around here. The road I live on is lined with them. I've got a big one right off the front door to my house. It dropped about a ton of walnuts this year. They're a nuisance to clean up.

Walnut does not heat worth a crap compared to oak, hickory, and ash

I'd run down to Home Depot and get a $300 electric log splitter.

says ts will split 20" logs that are 10" diameter.

I've got some oak that needs to come down too. I took three of them down back in the early spring. It's already gone up the chimney.

I also took down a big pine a while ago. I'm mixing the pine in with the walnut to keep it hot.

There's a big walnut stump in the ground that was here when I moved in. It started out about 4' tall and 50 inches across. I'm guessing g that it was cut about 10 years ago,...big burl of walnut.

I know that walnut isn't considered a particularly hard wood, but a big, burl walnut stump that got a decade's worth of seasoning on it will go hard on a chainsaw. A sharp chain will just pull dust off of it. It's like sawing concrete,...burns a long time, too.

Sawing length way through block, that's how guys with man buns split wood ! Nice pile of shavings to get rid of been there done that, no thanks. Probably too much soup and not enough beans in your diet! Bacon doesn't count.😁

I bought a boom to go on my old 8N. When I cut a tree, I use the boom to lift it off the ground then saw it off a piece at a time like it's a roll of bologna. It saves a lot of trouble from getting the saw bar pinched from trying to cut it while it's laying on the ground.

Save the energy for satisfying the woman. LOL

You might need a longer bar on that husky!

I’d hate to have to rassle these up onto a splitter, 14” long rounds of green red oak this size probably weigh 150# or more each. I try to cut a couple big trees like this one every winter and bust them up and stack them out. They’re burning nicely in the stove as we speak about a year later.
I enjoy cutting and splitting wood. 8lb maul is my tool of choice. Good exercise and satisfying work.

No picture, I screwed a tire on the splitting stump at the cabin, it saves a lot of bending to pick up the splits.

I feel your pain, but from digging up a sewer line. I'd rather split wood.

Buy a Fiskars Splitting Axe! Been splitting wood off and on all my life. Bought one of these and will never use anything else!

thats for sure. i lost about 15 big white and red oak to gypsy moths about 15 years ago and have been burning them ever since. some of the rounds are 30+ inches across. ended up with a hernia just moving them fuggers to split them vertically. learned my abdominal muscles ain't as strong as my arms and legs. but then my boys grew up so now i have a lot of help when i can wrangle them. red and white oak are the best i have found around here for firewood.

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

I used one of these last fall at the pard's camp. It worked very well, as well as my Fiskar.

I buy my wood cut, split and delivered. I get it in early May, semi seasoned. Mix of oak, beech, cherry, maple, ash, locust, birch. I get it stacked promptly under cover.. Been paying $210. per cord for several years now. When I started burning 32 years ago I was paying $50. per cord. My only other heat is electric baseboard. We have never used it. Still cut and split wood for out deer camp though.

Your BTU’s are missing some 0’s

I melt down stoves with locust and hedge. Usually stack and fill 8 wagon loads. Love splitting by hand, but with the quantity tend to use the gas powered version. Tried splitting hedge by maul once, doesn’t work well… plays hell on the log splitter to. Hickory and white oak are good too, but I have more locust and hedge available than I will ever get cut. Oberndorf, the German company that makes Stihl mauls are nice. Fiskars did well, just not the maul feel, broke a chopper one. Nice 8 pounder and away you go. I noticed a few like red oak; I don’t feel I get that much heat from it, kinda like burr oak.

Locust burns extremely hot. I make sure I don't fill my stoves exclusively with it. Always mix with other hardwood.

We have a 4 acre grove of black locust out on the farm. I generally cut and stack out a bit of it every year but the thorns are a bugger. It does make a good hot fire.

I have a big ash that just fell I need to go cut up. It’s probably 18” diameter and pretty straight. Makes a pretty fire with big flames but it got it’s name for good reason, bout 2 days and the stove needs shoveled out.

When a buddy and I used to fool around making self bows we’d burn all our scrap and trimmings off the bodarks in his dad’s potbelly stove in the barn where we worked. That stuff would get that old stove glowing hot once you got it going.

My highly valuable black walnut tree.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Yup....I use the Fiskars splitting axe with a 36” handle. Works great!

🦫

Don't just brag about it, send some sausage this way. 🎅 Yep that's the shaving pile I was talking about. We use fir and pine mostly. Not using pine shavings in the smokehouse!

Another thing about black walnut trees,...you can forget about growing a garden within 60' of one. I've got so much black walnut growing on my little patch of land that it's hard to pick a place to grow tomatoes.

I normally do 300 cords a year, I only use a maul to half or quarter the bucked up pieces so I can get them into the truck without blowing my back out. Sometimes I have to saw them just enough so the maul will split them, my shoulders and elbows can't take much more abuse and I am one injury away from a life changing event.

I use splitter, with an engine, then just laugh at the maul. The maul with the fiberglass handle hates me and I hate it, meanwhile the maul with a wood handle...we is friends, and much easier on the worn out joints.

Wow! If one sold that around here he'd have about $50,000. That is a serious pile of wood.

$75,000 around here.

This for sure ^^^


The tannins are toxic or some type chit.

My pops won’t let me saw down two walnuts in my deer plot. He likes his trees

$220-$260 a cord here

I don’t have all the high school boys around any more like I did with my roofing and construction business

I start rounding up fellas now, might look like some John Wayne Gacy type thing. No homo.

Ya, am working on some standing elm right now. I just cut em into burnable chunks! Homey don't split elm no more!

I like it too, bet it does split better when really cold. Ain’t happening here.

All them high school boys napping under the house now?

https://murderpedia.org/male.G/g1/gacy-john-wayne.htm

Oops. Missing 3 zeros. The BTUs are measured in the millions. Thanks for the correction.

Love me some a good splitting maul. I've been using mine since I was 12 and designated fire wood splitter in the family. It just handled some soft maple from a lawn tree that was just dropped. It works just as well as it did back in the 80s.

Quite true. I moved up to the mountains from Georgia. Never had seen a black walnut tree. I spent many dozens of hours making a garden, brought in manure, peat moss, rototilled it, built a 3 foot high fence to keep the rabbits out, bought 6 blueberry bushes at 25 bucks each, planted potatoes and tomatoes etc. Everything died, except the pole beans. Found out later, the black walnut tree near the garden put out toxins.

For many years I used the Sotz Monster Maul. It was great! And then, 5 years ago I bought the Fiskars. I hate to admit it but the Fiskars is better. Much lighter weight and splits the wood slightly better than the Monster Maul.

Fiskars...too much the fancy...need beat up old gear...too be happy. Ok I use and like Fiskars myself. It's good kit.

Hey Kid,
What do you think of that Echo CS-590 in your photo?