Try the tire ring for splitting with ax or maul.
I take a couple of old tires, cut the bead and about half the sidewall out, stack them and sew them together with bailing wire where the sidewalls touch. A heated nail or a soldering iron works as a good awl making the holes. Fill the ring with sticks or toss it over a round and split away without bending to much. I am getting a little old to be fast but I think I still can get more split with a maul than can be done with the average hydro splitter in the same amount of time. It takes less time to fill the ring than to put the sticks on the splitter. I only touch the round once in the splitting process. Using the splitter you only make one split per cycle, and have to reposition each round several times. I strike about every 2 seconds and most strikes produce a stove sized stick of wood.
I take more breaks now days, but still get more wood split in an afternoon than most do with a splitter.
A few years ago I was splitting with some friends, working up some hickory trees that were already cut into rounds, I worked along the trees, splitting the rounds where they lay after standing them up. The boys with the splitter, three of them, carried the rounds to the splitter and took turns carrying, positioning, and operating the splitter. By lunch time I was way ahead but by the time we quit and loaded the trucks they had caught up, almost.
The next weekend they left the splitter home and we had both trucks loaded before noon. This was before I was shown the tire ring splitting trick, I sure wish I had learned it 60 years sooner!
