Sweetgum, 2021

 I have commented more than once about splitting sweetgum. Sometimes relatively small pieces split okay, and it does produce decent BTUs. So I'm happy to take small-diameter sweetgum if offered.

 The smaller pieces actually did split fine.  Up to four inches or so, one hit with the maul is all it took:

 

Larger pieces were more challenging to do manually, turning into a death match with maul and wedge, so I broke out the splitter.  It got the pieces split, but they tore badly.

These were mostly in the six inch range.  Although the splitter was able to crack them, they often needed significant mauling after the splitter to separate.  On the bright side, this fall and winter all of those wood shards will help the pieces catch fire and burn.

Sweetgum and Eggs

 I've related my difficulties with splitting sweetgum a number of times previously.  While relatively small pieces (up to six inches or so) splits fine, larger pieces are a nightmare.  The wood doesn't have a straight grain.

Yesterday I was splitting what I thought was some oak cut last year about this time.  It was hard to split when fresh, so I stacked it for a while.  Wood that I'm splitting now is for next fall.  I grabbed a piece that was about 10-12 inches in diameter and put it on the splitter.  The splitter was able to split it once, whereupon I saw that it was sweetgum.  I tried to quarter one of the halves and the splitter choked.  I then grabbed my maul and wedge.  I manged to get it into quarters but it took a lot of work.  You can see the blue streak on the wedge as it dug erratically through the piece.

It looks like a straight-grained tree that was twisted by some malevolent force as it grew.  I'm still amazed that there's wood rated worse for splitting than sweetgum (sycamore and elm, according to the University of Kentucky site).

In other news, the chickens are steadily, if slowly, laying eggs. I may have up to three laying now, and I'm getting one per day most days.  They seem to be using the nesting box on the ground inside the tractor consistently now.  The lighter-colored eggs below are from my birds, while the darker ones are from Costco.

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.

More on Splitting Wood

...And more on sweetgum.

As I just described, I got an electric wood splitter to help improve my productivity when splitting.  For the most part, it has worked okay.  So far, I have mostly used it with a bunch of sweetgum I got from my landscaping friend.

Yesterday, I had a piece that the electric splitter choked on.  I moved it over to the manual 10-ton and that choked, too.  After a few tries, this is what the log looked like:

As you can see, the wedges on the two splitters didn't make much headway.  The wood seemed to have a spiral grain that resisted splitting.  I hauled out one of my mauls to see what I could do.

After a couple of tries, I split off a piece.  However, I also did something that I have been aware of is a risk when splitting manually.  It's a best practice to bring the maul straight down onto the wood being split, so that if it misses or glances off, it is less likely to impact body parts.  Swinging in an arc could be bad.

Below is my left boot.  When splitting off the piece, on one swing the maul went to the ground, hitting the boot on the way.  I use steel- or composite-toe boots when splitting to provide some protection, although injury would still be possible.  The visible cut is deeper than it looks; it was taken after I used some adhesive to close the wound. I don't think I would've hit a toe if the composite hadn't been there, but I can't rule it out.  Cleaving off a toe with the maul would not be good.

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.