Splitting Wood

I'm not an expert at this--at all.  However, expert or not, I needed to start splitting some wood fast when I moved last year (at the end of November, into a house with no central heat). I had two pieces of equipment when I moved in: a manually-operated 10-ton splitter like this one, and an 8-pound maul.  I also had the rack of oak logs that had been cut the year before.  Splitting with the maul was a mixed bag.  Some pieces readily split, but others only gave up after an extended battle.  Eventually, I started pre-splitting the larger pieces with the 10-ton splitter, then finishing them with the maul.  The 10-ton seldom split the wood completely; its range of motion was limited.

That worked relatively well, although it was slow. I have since gotten a second maul, as well. When it comes to using the wood to generate heat, problem #2 was that the winter was very wet, with  heavy rain December-March.  The wood was fairly wet; I wasn't covering it very well initially.  Problem #3 is that the chimney, visible in this post, is pretty short.  It doesn't necessarily draft that well.

However, manual wood splitting was viable, if slow. I learned that if there were a lot of branches coming off the piece I was splitting, it disrupted the grain and splitting was harder.  Also, some types of wood split more easily.  I have a friend in the landscaping business who soon supplemented my wood supply with a lot of mixed pieces, but he warned that some was sweetgum, which has a reputation for not splitting well.

Some sweetgum pieces split easily, but others were fibrous and stringy, requiring a lot of effort to separate.

 

 

This spring, I had to have an oak tree taken down; it was dying and right next to the garage, and also within falling distance of the power lines and house.  The big parts (large branches and main trunk) were left by the loggers.  Some of those are as much as three feet in diameter; they'll have to be chainsawed (either cut with the grain or across) before splitting in any fashion.

So I have plenty of wood on the property at the moment, but was interested in speeding the splitting process up a bit.  One option was (and still is) to rent a towed gas-powered splitter; they are readily available from independents and places like Home Depot.  A quick check showed that a 24-hour rental was about $100. Another option is / was buying a splitter.  In addition to gas splitters, there are electric ones, as well, ranging from 4-10 tons.  Gas-powered ones are typically in the 20-30 ton range.  So electric ones have their limits and are relatively weak compared to those that are gasoline-fueled.  There are YouTube videos of people splitting very large logs with 5-ton electric units, but the specifications for electric splitters typically say up to 10"-12" depending on motor and hydraulic ram size.

Cost is a factor.  Gas-powered ones are generally $1300+, while electric ones are roughly $250-$850; most are in the $200-$400 range.  Ones like the manually-operated splitter mentioned above generally cost around $120-$150 but are frequently on sale for $100 or so.

I decided to give an electric one a try and settled on a 7-ton model.

 

So far, it seems to be working okay.  it's definitely slow compared to a gas model (my one experience with those came a long time ago with a friend whose father used one to split a mountain of cottonwood in an hour).  However, the wheelbarrow load shown below took about 10 minutes, which isn't bad.

There are some small-diameter sawed pine pieces at the top right; those came from a dead pine branch that fell into the driveway.  The rest is mostly sweetgum with some hickory.

So far I haven't used it on anything bigger than the 10" recommended, but it is handling that size well.  I do have some wood to split that is larger.  Shown below is more sweetgum. Even though the sweetgum mostly showed the same characteristics described above, the wedge forces enough of a split to make it easy to separate the pieces.

As long as it doesn't break, it'll be very helpful.  It's substantially better than my previous approach.

Bread Comparison

FWIW, here are two loaves:  on the left is one made with all white flour; the one on the right was made with a 50/50 blend of white and white whole wheat.  Both turned out extremely well (or as extremely well as things get with me).

Everything else is the same (except the amount of water used in making the dough). I generally use 3 3/4 cups of flour, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 1/4 cup sourdough starter, and about 1 2/3 cups of water. Baking is 35 minutes at 475 followed by 15 minutes at 450 with the lid off.  I bake it in a Romertopf clay baker. It initially rises in a large mixing bowl with plastic wrap over the top.  I put it in a proofing basket with a liner for the final brief rise (I'm not a Breadtopia affiliate and get nothing from anyone buying things there; the links are for reference only).

The countertop rise is about 8-9 hours at ambient temperatures, though when it's cold in the house I either let it rise for a longer period of time (up to 12 or even more) or put it in the oven on the bread proof setting, which keeps the oven at 100 degrees.  After forming the loaf, it rises about another 25-30 minutes while the oven is heating to 475.

Another Bread Post

I seldom bake white bread.  While it has its pluses, overall I prefer some whole wheat flour.  Since I just baked a loaf of 100% whole wheat, however, I decided to go the other way and do a loaf of white.

Temps for the overnight rise were rather warm, probably about 82 or so, and rise it did: over about 8 hours, it bumped up against the plastic wrap covering the bowl.

This has happened before with all-white flour dough, and it has always been in the summer when it has done this--I have never seen anything this explosive with dough mix that includes any amount of whole wheat flour.

Ordinarily, a vigorous pre-baking rise seems to portend poor oven spring, and that may have actually happened in this case.  However, the volume of the dough mass that went into the baker was so large it didn't really matter.

What came out of the oven was pretty nice.

I haven't often (or maybe ever) used a ruler for scale, but this loaf has a bigger cross-section than anything I have ever baked with whole wheat (even with vital wheat gluten added).  That's just the way it usually goes.  For a semi-useful comparison, here's the 100% whole wheat loaf again from the last baking session:

Back to the white loaf:  the structure shows that the rise, while pretty dramatic in comparison, was well-controlled and uniform (unlike what I was getting last winter when I let the dough sit out overnight at 60 degrees then switched to the oven for a couple of hours at 100).

So it was a success.  Maybe it's easier to be successful with white flour, but I usually get at least decent results (if not serve-to-guests-good) with some blend of whole wheat, despite occasional spinouts.