If you read what I wrote I said most the wood is easy to split, not all. Yes you could split anything by hand I guess. You could take about 8 12" long steel wedges and a 20 lb sledge and start forcing your way through a good wet 36 inch round of cottonwood. You would need at least that many to get it to hopefully split. To me this would be very silly and would take you several days of hard work just to split one round??? Kinda like saying we could cut all our wood without a chainsaw, and just use a bow saw. It can be done too, although I would not suggest it. I try to work smarter, not harder. I will agree with what you said "One of the reasons I have multiple tools is because different wood requires different tools and different techniques". So true, and for cotton wood the technique is rolling the round to the splitter, the tool is the hydro to bust it easily into 8 inch wedges.
