mike bayerl LOL rofl!!! Elm is my worst experience, even w/ a 35T hydro. But I had my 1st experince w/ gum today. The ditch sounds like an excellent alternative.
I'll pass on willow and cottonwood as well. Elm though, burns quite nicely. And because it's pretty smooth, with hydro's you can get a lot of uniform half logs and such from it. That makes it great to stack too.
The Wood Wolverine Yeah, that's probably where I should be heading. Thanks for you help today anyways . P.S. the busted finger was from splitting gum.
I have. Sweet gum and elm are equally nasty to split. Hard to say if one is harder than the other. Certain trees may be exceptionally hard to split though. I was at a GTG and there was some elm to split, nothing big, in the 8-16" range. A big hydro could not split it and the Big Super Split SE could not split it. They had to noodle every single piece. But this is not the norm. I have tried to split elm with a sledge and wedge, the wedge completely buried without a single split or crack, I might as well have driven the wedge in the sand.
The only wood I ever gave up on is sweet gum but I don't have any elm. I have a lot of sycamore and willow but I don't burn it in the stove.
Honey locust is good wood without the thorns. Most aren't that bad but the red thorns are the fresh ones and they don't give up! On a side note, Anything that bounces your wedge out, just make a small plunge cut with a chainsaw and you'll be able to go from there. Done it many times when in a pinch.
Dont got no gum trees around here where i live, i would not touch willow for love nor money. I do scrounge a little elm every year and ya i just noodle it. Mostly cut larch and douglas fir which both split very nicely when dead. The tops on pines can be a little tough. And yes i too have buried a wedge in elm arrgh!!
Welcome bang Heckuva screen name right there, I like it! Let's see what ya got going on in a new thread? If you've done any lurking, you know we like pics Great bunch folks here, just like a big family!
The worst wood for splitting by hand is green Box Elder. It was like trying to split a big wet sponge. The maul just bounced off of it. It was no match for my Speeco.
Never split elm, but sycamore is pretty terrible. Prolly not the worst, but the worst ive messed with.
I have a new one to add to my list of hard to split Aussie wood. Today I cut down a golden wattle, and man is this stuff tuff to split! Wattles usual only grow to 26 feet with a trunk 12" to 15" in diameter but this one was more like 35' tall and it was 22" at the base of the trunk it made for some tuff splitting. The wattle tree is an understorey plant and has many branches all the way up the trunk meaning every buck has at least one branch. (the whole tree is full of uglies) Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
My vote would be for elm. However, I can honestly say that I have encountered certain renegade trees of many different species that simply would not split by hand. A particular silver maple comes to mind, even though most silver maple splits great. I have also ran into ash that was nearly as stringy as elm even though most ash splits nicely. And the red oak in this picture was kryptonite to the x27. I prefer to split by hand most of the time, but I could not get through these 16" long rounds without hydraulics.
