MAKE FIREWOOD, SAVE BIG MONEY
Some time in the 19th and early 20th centuries, we Canadians picked up an international reputation for being hewers of wood and drawers of water. And while most Canadians I know don't spend any time at all hewing wood or doing anything else with it, things shouldn't be this way.
Cutting, splitting and burning firewood is the best way I know to get exercise while making use of a renewable home heating resource that can save big money.
Even when I lived in the city as a young man (a longtime ago) with my parents during my high school and university years, I found plenty of discarded logs and limbs in the neighbourhood that I hauled home in the family station wagon, unloaded, then cut, split and stacked for household firewood. If you're able-bodied, I encourage you to try the firewood lifestyle for yourself, but I do need to warn you about something.
Firewood usually is split along its length to make the pieces smaller and promote drying.
Bark can hold moisture within a log for years, and by opening up that bark with splitting, moisture is free to evaporate from the wood. Splitting firewood with an axe certainly is an option, but I don't know anyone who cuts sizable amounts of firewood this way. Instead, they use a mechanical wood splitter because they're so much faster and easier. Learning to use a wood splitter is one big step toward making firewood to boost your personal and household self-reliance.
Wood splitters are mechanical devices that cleave short logs into smaller pieces lengthwise along the grain. They take the heavy work out of splitting with an axe, making firewood more quickly and more easily. Like any new skill, learning to make firewood involves new techniques and there are three things you need to know to use a wood splitter safely and efficiently. Wood Splitter Tip No. 1: Always keep hands away from the danger zone. Putting your non-dominant hand behind your back before activating the splitter is a simple but effective safety technique. The main danger with any wood splitter is getting your fingers or hands caught between the log and splitting wedge. Activating the splitting wedge takes only one hand on a control handle.
Hands and fingers are perfectly safe on that handle, though the other hand isn't necessarily safe. Although you need two hands to load a log onto the splitter, as soon as that log is sitting on the machine, put your non-dominant hand behind your back just before you flip the lever with the other hand to initiate a split.
For the same reason, never have one person loading logs onto the splitter and the other person activating the splitting lever. It's too easy to hurt the log fetcher by activating the splitting wedge too soon, when their hands are not yet out of the way. Wood Splitter Tip No. 2: Wear eye and hearing protection. Running any gas-powered wood splitter for long periods of time is loud enough to harm your hearing. My boys and I always wear ear muffs along with eye protection whenever we're making firewood. It's nicer all around.
Wood Splitter Tip No. 3: Lift wood properly. Sometimes even a 16-inch-long piece of firewood is too heavy to lift safely up onto a splitter, and that's why they invented splitters with dual positions like the 25-ton Champion I've been using. This is the best selling wood splitter in Canada, it's just the right size to be a pleasure to use and it lets you split big logs as they sit on the ground. Steve Maxwell always feels best when his wood pile is full. Visit him online at BaileyLineRoad.com for the largest collection of online hands-on how-to articles and videos in Canada.