Remember the nice straight splits, Nice square cross stacking ones. The perfect triangle splits. Well I get quite a few of theses too Some of my "Uglies" today :
I toss those on the top of the stack them skim them back off during shoulder season. Leave the good stuff for when you need to pack the stove tight.
Yikes! Looks the the Fiskars would bounce right off of some of those! That curvy piece is how I end up with a bunch of random lengths I gotta sort through. Ill saw em at those bends no matter where they are, and make the adjacent splits a little shorter. Pain in the neck to split them by hand when they have curvy grain.
Gotta build yerself a firewood guide tray for yer benchsaw... straighten those unruly ones right out...
Yea, I know. Does that mean I win. I have the gooder uglies picture. LOL I know that in my stacks I have some warped, bent, bowed & gnarly splits, but some just have to go in the bone pile. Hard enough to get a stack to stand for a year, but I try to keep splits that will allow me to put more than one or 2 in the stove. Nice to have more wood than air , even for shoulder season. I'll reject more come August 2015 when I move the wood to the shed. Some , will become more ugly with time . May make those campfire wood & sell bundles along side the road, cheap. Am betting the uglies I have now will dry fast, I split any over 3" smaller, That way I get 2 or 3 ugilies from one .
Yea Thread could go off on a bad tangent if we don'e stay with firewood uglies. Butt ugly pieces of firewood only, plez. LOL
I have some uglies in my stacks too and I set them aside while pulling wood out and burn them during the day
Some of it would still be in round form if I was still splitting with a maul. Have had it bounce bad at me many times. With Hydraulics & a sharp wedge on the splitter, I've split stuff that noodling would have been the only way to get it down to a manageable size to burn in the stove. On several pieces the pump kicked down to the slow mode, higher pressure mode, So far, the Speeco 22T, has split / (or cut thru) everything I've put on it. Splitting vertical helps produce more splitting force too, Gravity assist LOL
"Splitting vertical helps produce more splitting force too, Gravity assist LOL " ... Ha... you're gonna get it now from the horizontal uglies crunchers... ... but I like the way you think.
Ain't that the truth. I've only had a splitter for 6 months and hand splitting for all the rest. All those rounds eould still be lying in the woods if I was hand splitting. I think Stinny likes those uglies...
Couple more today, Almost bogged down the splitter. Banana grain with a couple knots. I split them small & into the fire pit pile. Gonna have 1/2 a cord + of uglies & rejects. More fire pit wood
More exposed surface area ? Several cracks , the get drier ? Less wood & more air in the stove, combined with above, better burning conditions. ? Maybe it's just my perception, but the ones I have from last year at the fire pit, burn really good.
