Batonning with small blades .

You need to try wedging wood like this :

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y269/CliffStamp/bruks/maul/crossknot_rounds.jpg

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y269/CliffStamp/bruks/maul/thick_knots.jpg

This is even worse, as it is smaller so it almost all knot, and the edges are not sawed, it is just a cut stick :

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y269/CliffStamp/swamp rat/ratweiler/ratweiler_knotty.jpg

and this isn't even close to really difficult wood yet. None would actually take more than one metal wedge, and I have seen wood take three and not split.

Wooden wedges get broken when the grain twists and this puts pressure across the leading edge, as long as the wood is opening up they just get direct compresson on the poll and that won't even break pine wedges.

Knots are also a real problem because wood wedges can not cut through them and this is necessary to split certain knot patterns such as :

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y269/CliffStamp/bruks/maul/knot_split.jpg

It was either chop through that knot directly, or try to chisel cut through other ones. In regards to time, I don't think I could actually split the side off the round in four seconds on average, that fast let alone shape the taper. Generally it takes me a few minutes to make a set of wedges, but I am generally not racing against a clock when doing any knife work, it is just way too dangerous, you also have to check the wood, grain, knots, etc., you don't want a wedge with a bunch of knots at the point, etc. .

The shape and nature of the wedges is just as much of an influence on their performance in wood as the shape and nature of a knife, they both perform the same basic task after all, in fact soft wood felling axes and splitting axes have near identical grinds. Yes you can do it with just about anything, just like you can cut wood with just about any geometry, some are just more efficient.

The above rounds by the way were not actually hand as the worse, I split about 250 yesterday, fully half of them where like that, only about 10-20% were actually readily chop split with the GB maul :

http://i7.photobucket.com/albums/y269/CliffStamp/bruks/maul/rounds.jpg

None of it was overly large, 6-12", most was about 8", it is too heavy to carry above that, plus there isn't much of it anyway as it is usually cut for sticks for lumber, not burning.

-Cliff
 
Years ago I sold hand split rails. We would fall Port Orford cedar snags, cut them into 10' lengths and split these into rails.
We would start the split from an end and would keep it going with wedges set along the length of the log. Often we had to create long, heavy wooden wedges out of thick branches to keep the splits going when the logs were too thick and/or tough for the metal wedges.
The main purpose we used plastic wedges for was to wedge a cut while chain sawing - you really do not want the chain hitting a metal wedge.
The wood wedges can be quite useful when you need more width or length or do not have a metal wedge.
 
Y ou,ve been a knotty boy . L:O:L

Is that first chunk spruce ? If you don,t mind I am going to stick to the possible before I tackle any of those bad babies . My first will be some pallet wood . While tough it should be easily split .I then will further split some knotty firewood into kindling .

I think one of the good things about knots is the caloric energy in them . If you get one of those bad boys going it puts off a fair amount of heat .
 
Generally yes, straight off with clear straight wood with a nice open grain. If you have any scrap lumber then that is very easy to split, cedar shingles are so easy you can just chop split them with a small knife, and they burn very well. Outside, depending on the nature of the local wood, usually what you have to split is seasoned because you are mainly working on deadfall, because trying to burn a fresh piece of wood doesn't tend to be productive.

Probably the worst time to split wood is the in fall because any dead fall had the full heat of summer to dry it out, season it as hard as a rock and twist it gnarly. Then you get some rain which means you have to split the wood and it will absorb the water and now gets very resistant to splitting as the wet wood will bend and compress rather than split so it just deforms around an axe. After you have done a lot of work on that wood, everything else seems easy in comparison.

-Cliff
 
I have learned a lot about wedges and thank you for the photos of the wood wedges. Having never used or fashioned wood wedge, I had this vision of something shaped like the steel ones you get at the hardware store. The long or tall ones actually opened my eyes a bit to the potential effectiveness of batoning a wedge through a log. A small hatchet would seem to work, but the width of the wedge portion is not that much and you might want to split the wood wider to apply more pressure in splitting a log. Hence, the wood wedge would be an effective way of doing that task. This discussion actually adds to the effectiveness of the SOG Revolver series of blades and makes me consider the Hunter Revolver as a true survival knife to double as a fixed blade and a saw. The saw blade is pretty aggessive.

I hurt my strong side arm recently, and there is no way that I could use that arm currently (until it heals) to pound or baton anything through a log. But, I could pretty effectively saw up small wood with the saw blade and do minor splitting if it were necessary with my weak side arm. The injury points out how important it is to do whatever task you are doing as safely as possible because a injury in a survival situation may in fact be a death sentence.
 
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