Hop Hornbeam, I have seen sparks from tbe maul. I have never split elm with a maul, but the splitter makes it look like shredded wheat.
I have no idea. But I scrounged some sort of conifer that fell on a friend's house in a storm, and that was a killer to split. I wish I would have paid more attention to what it was. It is now in my stacks though, I won.
I embarrassed myself trying to split sweet gum. The only reason I ever cut it now is to throw it in a ditch.
After reading these post, I'm counting my blessings that I hand split mostly oak and maple. An occasional ash, sassafras, locust, and black birch. Happy to have none of the discussed devil wood!
I think he's meaning the elm. It's a pita to split. I'll agree it's slightly easier to split when it's dry and the bark has fallen off of it before harvesting it, but it's such a nasty grained wood. To me it's hydro splitter only work. Locust splits pretty easy in comparison. Yes, if you have thorns like that, it's tougher to cut down, but splitting is still easy comparatively.
I've never had to split elm or any of the other bad ones that have been mentioned. But I've noticed that yard trees are infinitely harder to split than one taken from the woods. Particularly bad have been the sycamore and silver maples that where taken out of a yard.
Trees that grow in fence lines and sometimes in yards can be a twisted up mess and hard to split. Typically there are or used to be lots of elm in yards and in villages and those were buggers for sure. Also, try splitting elm when it is green and has a couple knots in it. Nasty for sure. I don't remember who posted the picture below but it shows the results of trying to split some elm.
The hardest wood I have split is Sugar gum then River red gum and Yellow box. Earlier this year I cut some Sugar gum while camping at Dimboola I left it a month before bucking and splitting, man was that hard work. The maul just bounced off the stuff, so I got out my wedges and 10lb sledge then the 18lb, most of the time I had the whole wedge in the split and it still would not come apart so in with the second wedge and so on. I take it as a matter of pride that I split all my wood by hand but that sugar gum nearly broke me if it had not been a Sunday and the local saw shop was open I would have gone and got myself a hydraulic splitter! I find that the more arid the area the harder the wood is to split. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Understood. It's that I'd rather deal with elm any day over long thorned locust. Between flat tires and stepping on a thorn, I avoid them. Had a thorn go straight through a newer pair of logging boots and had to have a buddy pull it out with my shoe on as my foot was speared in place, not fun.
