Mine are yard trees. I made a decision today after giving up on splitting my big rounds.....I'm going to wedge the giant pieces into slightly smaller ones, and then throw them in the firepit. I'm not going to spend $75 to rent a splitter to split soft maple that burns almost as fast as paper. For now, I will only take rounds 18" and smaller.
I can see not liking to wrestle the big rounds. My shoulder is messed up so I get it. So much wood from the big rounds.
if it were huge oak rounds Id have no problem, wedge em in half and then the bust right apart with a little work. These maple rounds are just brutal though, 5-6 strikes with the maul to get a single split off it. Unfortunately, I need wood that will dry sooner than oak right now. I have two bad shoulders and a bad back. Surprisingly, my shoulders arent bothered by all this, but my back is another story. Last night if I took a deep breath I had a searing nerve pain that went from front right to back left. Just not worth it.
This one is borderline punky. I burned some the other night and I burned twice as much wood in an evening as I have ever burned this year.
Ah, that's why it burns like paper. Gotcha. I've left plenty of Maple in the woods that's punky. Not worth my time.
This seemed solid, or I wouldnt have wasted my time. Though, I only expected to use it for shoulder season.
Yes, yard trees. A subdivision here was laid out in the 1920's using silver maples as lot markers. Huge, multi forked, twisted, metal filled monsters.
Sounds like a splitter would be a good investment for you, to cut down on tearing your body up and be more productive . The maple I'm working on most of it started out as big rounds, last fall I split em vertically on the splitter and piled them there so I could Finnish splittn em all up in the horizontal position . These were all yard trees the city near me was taking out between the sidewalk and the road
I agree 100% with HD on this. In the end, spending 600-1200 on a hydraulic splitter will be way less than medical bills. If you've got health issues already, you should really have a log splitter.
Did well here this year with the Red dave Got around another 10 cord stacked waiting for there time and might of burned about a week of dead Elm back in January.
I've got almost 1/2 cord left in the shed, with another 2/3 cord going in for this coming winter. Another 2/3 cord for 18-'19. All this is very dependent on how winter goes, of course.
This fall I will have the extra cash for a splitter. The home market here was going batchit crazy, and to get what I wanted I needed to overreach a bit, knowing that I had the cash reserve to buy me a year, knowing that someone was going to retire, and that I would be getting his position, which was 30 days ago. Now I just need to wait until August when I will start getting my bigger bonus checks to start buying yard toys.
