As a bit of a side note, an old guy named Nate taught my dad, and later taught me how to split wood by hand. Nate grew up during the depression and his dad ran a saw mill. Due to his background, during the war Nate was an inspector for the lumber used to build gliders and such. When he bought his farm (in the 60's I think), he paid $25K, and had the wallnut select harvested and paid the farm off the next year. Point is, that by the time dad and I met him in the 80's, he was a smart old man and he had been cutting wood all his life. Even in his 80's, he could walk up to any piece of wood, identify what it was, and know exactly where to hit it, and what to hit it with to make it split. I rarely saw him have to hit a piece of wood more than twice to split it, and I never saw him miss his intended mark. Even when I was a young teenager, he could outsplit 2 of me. The wood didn't need bark on it to identify it, and he knew whether it needed to season first, or to split it green. He knew whether to use an axe or a maul (he normally used an axe), and he knew how to read the grain in the wood, and any check patterns present in order to know exactly where to hit the wood to get it to pop open. He taught me (us) that where you hit the wood is a lot more important than what you hit it with, or how hard you hit it.
Just food for thought.
Mark
