Well, I have cut up several logs dragged up out of the woods, previously, and need to get this cleaned up in the field. I had some Hickory and Red Oak, and I think probably some White Oak which some of it was hard to split. My hands have been bothering me some, and I won't split the hard splitting wood, much anymore by hand, and just choose to noodle it, instead. So, some got split by hand and some got noodled. My noodle pile is about has high as my wood pile, but that's OK, as I have a use for the noodles. I use them for my dog pens and that works really good. In one picture, my Jonsered 2255 was the last man standing, out of four saws, mostly because I ran out of gas in my gas can, and ran all of the other saws dry. I had practically no plugging issues with any of my saws. All of my saws had square filed chain on them. The 461 probably did the best and cut the fastest with full comp square filed chain, and My 361 did really good with the same chain and did most of the noodling, I think I ran 3 tanks of fuel out of it, but was starting to get a little duller by the third tank. I used my 261 some with full skip square grind, factory Stihl chain, and it did good, but I can tell it probably would not do as good with full comp as the other saws did. Finally, I ended up with only one tank full of gas left in the Jonsered and finished up with it. I was running skip on it, square filed also, but I don't think that saw was as sharp, still it cut pretty good, considering I cut some really hard knotty rounds with it. I hand split a bunch of Hickory, by hand, with my ax also, not in the pictures. Now, I have a lot of wood to haul, and I am thinking 4 years out on burning it, based on how far I am ahead on my hording.
Yes, it doesn't take that long, really. Pretty fast really, and a lot faster then trying to used wedges to split hard to split rounds. I will never mess with wedges to split rounds. I separate out my wood, by hand splitting and if and when I run into some hard splitting rounds, I just noodle them, anymore. Sometimes, I will only have to noodle the rounds in half, and then they split a lot easier by hand, but if I get to going, a lot of the time, I just keep on noodling. I will stand up a couple of bigger rounds and notch the top round to hold the wood up about 30" or so off of the ground, while noodling, and this works pretty good. I don't like bend over to saw, much or anything.
Yep, and I don't own a hydraulic splitter, or anything, and really don't even want one. I am only cutting for myself, and to get a little exercise. Besides, I have used hydraulic splitters before, and it's still work, by the time, you get done.
