More on Splitting Wood

I'm still having trouble with the sweetgum.  Some of those pieces just won't give up.  I have tried again with my manual splitter to no avail, and also got a heavy-duty wedge and tried pounding it in.

As you can see, the results were less than satisfactory. After taking the picture I pounded it farther in, and eventually had to use the sledge side of the maul to pound it back out after it failed to achieve the desired results.  For now, the piece remains unsplit. According to this site, it yields about 21 million BTU per cord, versus around 26 for oak.  That's certainly decent.  I do question the page's splitting rating of 'fair', however.  Or rather, if sweetgum is fair, I don't want to deal with elm or sycamore, the two species rated 'poor'.

I next put it back on the electric splitter to see if I might have weakened it enough to split it.  I did get it into two pieces (you can see the blue paint marks left by the wedge in the picture below) and I got one stove-sized piece to spall off, plus a few smaller kindling-sized chunks.  But as the picture also shows, it's not straight-grained.  It is splitting in a swirling pattern. 

A different site suggests splitting sweetgum when it is freshly-cut.  I did have that opportunity (although I didn't have the Boss splitter back when I first got it) but I didn't try.  So it's definitely well-seasoned now (although mostly gone, except for a few remaining large-diameter pieces).  To finish it off, I may see if I can find someone with a gas-powered 20-ton+ splitter.

I'd still take more sweetgum if offered to me, preferably about six inches in diameter or less.  That size both of my splitters can handle.  I'm not sure I'd jump too fast on sweetgum that was much larger than that.

On the other side of the splitting-ease scale is tulip poplar (listed in the chart as good).  My friend offered me some newly-felled poplar and I jumped on it.  I would've let it season before splitting, but he suggested I try it while still green (within a couple of days of being cut).  The results were surprising (to me).  It split pretty easily.  The small pieces more or less fell apart when I used the electric splitter on them, and even the larger-diameter pieces broke apart easily--but the larger chunks were pretty stringy.

The tulip poplar is lighter in weight and lighter in BTU content (17, only about 65% as much as oak--this is more like pine, which I also have some of waiting to be split). These factors probably mean that it will burn pretty fast, as the University of Kentucky site suggests. The small amount of pine I have burned so far has gone pretty quickly, but I do not have any experience with poplar or willow, two of the non-pine species that yield comparatively little heat per volume when burned.

In a relatively short amount of time I was able to split almost an entire pickup truck bed load. The stringy pieces were more time-consuming to split, but the split wood now has integral kindling.

I have never (as far as I am aware) split any of the woods listed as 'excellent' (black walnut, ash, and hemlock).  I do have some black walnut tree trimmings to cut to stove length, but they are small-diameter so won't need to be split. 

In the picture of the larger stack, the stringiness can be seen in some of the pieces.

Oak splits well when dry, but I also have some of that from a freshly-felled tree.  It's as stringy as the large-diameter poplar and not the easiest to split when wet.