Cutting Firewood-Cutting & Splitting

Jacques Couture: Hello, my name is Jacques Couture from Coutures Maple Shop & Bed & Breakfast in Westfield Vermont. Today I am going to show you a little bit about -- a few things about cutting and splitting wood and thinking about how you want to size it for your stove. One thing you need to know is the dimensions of your stove so that the wood pieces that you want to put in there will actually fit. So I am going to demonstrate using a chainsaw and a hand model, how to do it by hand and then we will do it a little bit a with a wood splitter.

Okay, chainsaws could potentially be very dangerous piece of equipment but we use a few safety features of equipment so that we don't end up hurting ourselves. Now this hard hat would be a protection and a face guard here is a good item to use. The other thing about a chainsaw that it's pretty important to know how to handle the saw. You have to have good solid footwear and good footing. Don't try to use a saw in a slippery place because you could fall down and get hurt.

Okay now that we have our cut pieces to a length that will fit in a stove, these pieces are just a little over a foot long. Then we need to split them for instance if your stove is about maybe an eight inch tall, this might be a little tough to get in. So we will split these in half using our regular hand splitting hammer here. Luckily these are pretty straight grained so they split pretty well. I have got to tell you they are not always this easy to split.

There is the one, I need a second here. There we are. Nowadays most of the time we use hydraulic wood splitter to split the wood because the pieces are not always as easy as last one that I showed you. So we will get this thing started and split a few of them. Okay you can speed this back up, down. The last few pieces you saw me split were actually pretty easy. Some of these -- the grain is a little tougher and much easier when hydraulic wood splitters than with a hand ax. Sometimes the grain is kind of twisted, trees grow in windy places and they are not that easy to split, but with these machines it doesn't make much difference.