Posted this earlier but thought some may not have seen it so decided to post it here. Hope you like. EDIT: This was an elm that we almost let get too far gone but the wood was still good and it burns great. We still have lots in the stacks. The engine is not running at full throttle.
You're darn right. The elm I've split here, American and Siberian, are a pain in the you know what to split when wet. But as the video shows, if you let it dry out and have a splitter it's easy.
I like it when I find wood that isn’t much bigger than a dinner plate or so with all the bark off and its been out in the sun for darn near forever. Then it just literally pops with a hatchet, not this elm stuff though I think I have some winged elm in a stack outside. Heavy stuff and it split ridiculously hard when wet. I didnt know what I was up against but maybe I understand now why people call it some of the hardest to split clean. Not like Alder which makes that pretty ping! when splitting it dry from the round.
Yeah likely at that point it’s not drying out enough in the middle so there’s an even more difficult option. Most choose to noodle it around here anyways.
The Elm I have around here will not split that easy. So I prefer to noodle it. Not a big deal. So far I have done a cord of nothing but noodled splits.
I agree. It also gets really light and hard. Elm doesn't have the highest BTU output, but it burns nice and clean, with very little ash left over.
No red elm around here but I'd surely like to have some. It is a beautiful wood and I hear it burns nicely too. Once again on the elm, leaving it until all or most of the bark is off is one of the keys to putting up elm. It splits really nice and because of no sap, the stink just is not there. Sometimes of you cut it earlier, perhaps up to a third of the bottom of the tree might still have some sap in it. As for burning, I'm not sure without looking where it rates on the charts but it burns really good and we've gone some winters in the past burning practically nothing else but elm and we got along just fine. I tend to leave more rounds with elm and that may be one of the keys to holding longer fires.
I'm done with elm. I actually gave all of this all away. I found the exact opposite. The last elm I did burn left a very firm "brick" of ash that wouldn't break up with shaking my grates. I had to use the poker to knock them down.
Elm is really good clean wood if you wait like we do until the bark falls off. Its like 19 mbtu's, so just below ash, but better than walnut, or soft maples. I leave it in round form up to about 6" in diameter.
Lol. You must be cutting a different species like white oak, red and black oak smell like, well you get the idea lol.
