Traditional Japanese... batoning?! Making cedar shingles

Grease said:
Stumbled across this while surfing YouTube. I guess batoning is the right way to split logs after all!

It's interesting to see the control and precision he achieves with his cleaver and baton.

Click to expand...

I have seen a similar technique used for making traditional shingles in Slovenia.
 
Traditional Japanese tools are always interesting. I thought the cube shaped hammer head that was used starting at 1:20 was particularly interesting.
 
Check out the one in Slovenia that Lapedog mentioned: Hersetellung Von Holzschinden. The man starts with a much larger log, and used an axe, an axe head and a large mallet to break the log into smaller pieces, then an axe and three wooden wedges, and finally Slovenian style From to make long shingles. They also show him and his crew re-roofing a church, and it would make an OSHA official cringe. John
 
Entertaining to watch for sure!
I'd love to see the same thing done with native Australian timbers! They all seem to have a 45° turn every 1 or 2 feet in length...
 
All through saskatchewan there is a generation of farms that all have at least one froe for splitting shakes. Since there wasn't/isn't much ceder I'm guessing a lot of roofs were done more often, or ceder logs were imported, and it was easier to get a few green logs cheap, season them yourself and cut them, than to buy shakes that had been cut somewhere else. I used to see the froes all the time at auctions, didn't know what they were for at first as some were re-hung upside down.
 
Thanks for this. I just ordered two Natas recently from japan and was wondering about their use
 
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