My original tire finally fell apart after 487,958 strokes and I replaced it the other day. The original was 195/65/15......and the new one I found at the tire shop is 185/60/15......so slightly narrower which means less tall on its side. I would have preferred wider but that was the only 15" tire I could find. Also I figured out that cutting out the metal band in the center is much better for your axe. I was getting mine all dinged up from hitting it. Also by removing it the tire has bit more flex to it and that's super useful for those splits that are a tight fit that otherwise were getting stuck after I split it. This gives enough wiggle room to easily remove the wood. If I have non-cooperative wood I put it aside until I have a nice pile for the splitter. Today I lent my splitter to my neighbor and so since it was out I decided to use it to split a bunch of beech rounds I got as well as the aforementioned splitter pile. Having processed what has to be 40-50 cord in the last 14 months and say 80% of it using the tire, I am absolutely loving it. To each their own. I didn't start this thread for any other reason than to share my experience with the tire. I'm sure the people who operate a lever only enjoy their process as I do mine. Keep on hoarding everybody! Old: New:
LOTF, 40-50 cords is amazing, sheesh. Thanks for your info, your posts are always so informative. Like Dennis, I split the majority these days with hydraulics, and like Dennis, I sit and split vertical! However, I need to revisit the tire method because I do some by hand and, yep, the splits fly everywhere but main thing is I have chronic back pain. I am 6'2" so I guess I need about a foot tall based on what you said. I don't understand this metal band thing in the center of the tire. Radial tires have metal women in them, right? What is this band you are talking about. And how, exactly, do you get it out? Do you use Fiskars x27 or splitting maul? Also, do you process oak? What is most of your wood, that's a lot of wood.
Thanks man. Where the tire meets the rim there is a metal ring. I cut it out by using a utility knife. It's not the easiest thing to do but if you take your time and lift up the edge of the tire with your other hand it makes it easier and kind of pops open the cut....kind of like the cross cross method of slicing a mango. I use the x27 99% of the time. Every once in a while I'll give the shorter fiskars chopping axe a few swings. I don't chop any logs so it hardly gets used but I thought it would be neat to have. I've processes a lot of red oak (probably 20 cord) and a much smaller amount of white (maybe 5). I have processed the following, in no particular order: Red/White/Black/Pin oak Black locust Red/Sugar/Norway maple Beech Black birch Elm (Never again!) Cottonwood (that stuff stinks - never again as well!) Juniper Spruce Pine Poplar White/Red Ash I think that covers it. I think it's a toss up between the oaks and maples in terms of the majority of the wood. I did score a huge load of spruce which has really been saving my arse since all that oak is unusable still. It's taunting me at 22% MC. I'm actually a bit concerned I'm not going to have enough dry wood for the winter if I keep going at the pace I'm going. With the 3 kids at home doing full remote for schooling I'm running the fireplace all day long. And it's only going to get colder. I can't remember which video I saw which showed the person cutting the band out.....but in this video below from CTSCAPER (love that guy) he is reusing a tire and you can clearly see where he has cut the center band out. With the tire the higher you go the easier it is to remove the splits.....but it's harder to lift the log up into the tire......and you may lose some of the power in the stroke as well...... But like I said earlier I'm much more concerned with accuracy than power. I swing about 50% most of the time and that is sufficient unless you hit a hidden knot or something. As I'm getting more picky with the rounds I split I'm splitting straighter less knotty stuff in general with the x27. My favorites in terms of splitability are red oak, ash, black locust, norway maple, red maple..... Species that were impossible to split by hand for me are pin oak, spruce, black birch, and beech if it's twisty. I split all my wood green since I have no room to store the rounds for an extended period of time. 90% of the wood is from tree service guys so most of the time the trees were very much alive. I found some spruce in the dump that had been sitting there a while it looks like and those were a lot easier to split.......but someone had noodled them in half and they were shorties too......so I don't really count that. Going back to the round I gave my neighbor buddy a large maple round to use for the tire....and he's only 5' 8" and I ended up making the block only about 6" tall. It depends on your swing, your axe length, etc......but you can always just saw it down a little if you find it too high. Too low you'll have to find another round heh heh. I have 3 herniated discs and I hurt myself pretty badly when I first started chopping wood........I was going too hard for too long and swinging way too hard. I learned the hard way......that working smarter is more important than working harder. Also using a hookaroon to move rounds from the pile to the tire has really saved my back. Now I feel great, stronger than I've felt in a long time, and my back pain has been almost non-existent (knock on wood har har). I wore a back brace for a while after I got back to splitting after getting hurt (of course not before) but now I don't wear it any more.
Removing the steel reinforced bead is a great idea. I never thought to do that! The Fiskars are very easily dinged. No comparison in splitting speed with the tire setup. Makes the hydro look stupid slow. However. Gotta have the right wood!
EXACTLY! I never thought to do it either until I saw it in a video.....but now I can't remember which video it was. Minimizing the number of bends my back has to endure is more important than minimizing the weight. I'd much rather lift a heavy round once than bend over 86 times when splitting that same round.
If I have a bunch of easy splitting rounds I put them all on the ground in a big group next to each other, biggest on the outside. I split the middle first and nothing can fall over. You can split them from all angles. It takes time to set up but chopping goes so fast. No fooling with anything. You do have to be a bit limber because you have to stand on the rounds sometimes to get to the middle.
A lot easier with a tire......especially when you have a bunch of small diameter limbs......you can stuff the tire and whack, whack, whack away without having to fiddle with anything falling over!
Ya I've used a tire and a bungie. They do okay. Problem with a tire is the rounds are different sizes so you need more than one tire. Bungie cord can be a hassle. I like my method best.
If I split on the ground here, with all the glacial till rocks, I'd be constantly re-edging my splitting maul. Splitting on a splitting block is safer than on the ground as there is less chance of contact with one's feet. This is a (somewhat short) study in rather simple and obvious math. The ground here is also often rather soft which absorbs blows from a splitting force. Even a splitting block tends to distort the ground in places and after a while isn't level any more. Of course, splitting on the ground can end up with a good dimple in the ground too if on softer ground. I tend to prefer a shorter splitting block though, often a good size stump, but a good size stump in the area where I need to split isn't always handy. Which also yields closer proximity to one's feet but I like the tiny bit of extra momentum and force a shorter splitting block offers.
I don't find the need to have different tire sizes for different rounds. Either the rounds fit the tire or they don't. If they are too small, I throw a bunch of small rounds in the fill the gap. If they are too big I split those in half on another stump first until it's small enough to fit into the first tire. Pretty simple and does not need to be complicated. Nice! If one needs maximum power every stroke you're doing something wrong anyways. Accuracy, accuracy, accuracy. You still need some power....but nowhere near 100% power all the time.
I have seen some of this before, but I am find this to be a trade off. If you do this for everything you split, that means that you have to pickup every single round and set in the tire. And a lot of rounds are pretty heavy. I am afraid this is mostly lost on me. I can see how it would help on maybe holding small wood together, but I find it too much trouble to pick everything up and set it on a chopping block. I split all of my wood in the field or woods, on the ground, at the falling sight. I will bend down and stand some rounds up on end, but a lot of rounds I don't even touch until time to pick them up and load them. I will hook them with the ax or maul and stand them up, or on easy spitting wood, I don't even stand them up, I split them however they lay. It just seems like less handling to me. If they are too hard to split, I noodle them pretty much right where they lay often only sawing them about 3/4's of the way through from the side of the log and then I find most will split fairly easily from there. Bottom line is I never pick up a round at all until after it's split to load. But my soil is just sandy loam with a few sand stones, so I don't worry about hitting the ground too much, and with the flick method I don't hit the ground too much anyway. Picking up all of these rounds and putting them on the chopping block is just added work the way I see it.
Tire method works great for easy splitting wood like western larch. However I'm looking to put the hand splitting days behind me as my next equipment purchase will be a hydraulic splitter.
I spent the weekend processing a bunch of red oak rounds about 20-24" diameter most of which had some big knots. I was able to split them all in half and then some further into quarters with my Fiskars X27, and then the knotty sections got put on the hydraulic splitter and the straight ones I finished with the Fiskars. It was a lot faster splitting by hand on that nice straight stuff. I have a big old pine block and a tire but it's buried under a pile of branch wood right now. I have used this method for years, it's been very efficient.
I use a block with a tire. It works for me. I tried the chain and bungee cord thing and didn't like it so much, but the tire does ok as long as you clear out the debris in the tire when it fills up. I sometimes split on the ground, but I don't like my head going into the dirt and rocks.
I'm still a fan of doing it both ways. Yes, I think anyone who has not tried it who splits by hand should really give it a go. I think it's safer and more efficient than just swinging away at rounds on the ground and then making a huge pile of splits. That's just asking for an ankle to snap and nobody is getting any younger or nimble as a general rule of thumb. I tried the chain and bungee experiment as well and did not like it at all. It was too easy to chop the bungee cord and cut it.....and too hard to get the chain just right without it falling off. Clearing the debris that builds up in the tire - I just take the big chips and throw them into the kindling containers and the rest I scoop into a trash can to be chipped up later by the wood chipper. I split a few splits today to test MC on the ground since I was far from my stump/tire. Luckily I did not hit a buried rock. We have 489,348 rocks on our property. Lots of rocks. Bad bad!
