Im trying to figure out this beech wood too. Everyhing I read conflicts with other things I read. You say splits easy some say hard to split. Who knows at his point.
maybe because it was soooo cold it split so easy. maybe because i was using the fiskars x27? who knows but this beech split super fast. i had this smirk on my face while i was spliting it because it was going so well. a 20 inch diameter piece by 18 inches long, took about 30 seconds to split from first hit to the last hit. it ususally took 2 hits to split in half, then one hit to half that, and so on and so on. i split to about 3 or 4 inch rounds (or squares as they come out). and once you get to the quarters, i was taking half swings so thats another reason why it was going so fast.