No first hand experience, but I've read that vegetable oil/mayonnaise can be used to clean pine pitch/ssp.
Our driveway is reclaimed processed pavement and when my boots are new the stuff gets jammed in them all the time. PITA with a piece or two stuck in there.
I still have some blue spruce in rounds - it's awful to split. Might be because it was a yard tree. I wasn't impressed with the burn/effort ratio.
Yeah those tiny knots buried deep inside the round made it real tough for me to split my spruce. That was one of the reasons why I bought the Champion 34-ton hydro splitter. I just had so many crazy spruce pieces along with an entire dumptruck load of pin oak that was impossible for me to split by hand. The load I picked up at the dump had been there a while and had dried out and I've found these pieces in general to be way easier to split. They were also noodled in half so I think that really helps as well.
