I agonized to ages about whether to buy a wood splitter or not. We have quite a lot of wood to split but I wasn't sure once we'd split it how much more we would have. The smaller splitters looked too puny and the larger ones were getting big and expensive so in the ended I actually went down to the rental yard to see the size of the ones they rented. Those weren't too large to get through our fence and I could imagine getting it down to the terrace without too much trouble so we went the rental route. It was certainly the right thing to do. Unlike my chipper which I still love and use quite a lot I just don't think we have enough wood to warrant keeping a wood splitter around.
I picked up the splitter after a nice bike ride and got home and we go to work on the wood that was piled up by the wood pile. This was to get a feeling for the machine before we lowered it down to where the majority of the wood was. 15 ft down a steep incline on a terrace between our backyard and our driveway. The plan was to lower it down, split wood, and then lower it down to the driveway.
Splitting wood is a whole lot more work that you'd imagine but the big machine made it much easier to do than by hand. Lots of the wood was really rotten so crumbly to split and the majority of it was a big old pine tree I'd spent most of the spring (and many chainsaw blades blunted) cutting into split-able rounds. The grossest part was all the bugs and termites we found in the wood. The small grubs, ants and winged ants weren't so bad. What was horrible was the termite queens, they were about 4 inches long, .75 inches wide and white and wormy and stuck in these huge holes in the wood and would poke out when we split the wood. I had to poke them with a big stick and squish them until they were dead, super gross. We also found this cool huge beetle type thing what was close to death and didn't move much, poor tyke.Getting the splitter down to the terrace was the hardest thing since we had to do it by hand, I rigged up some pulleys with a 2:1 advantage, but the splitter was at least 600lbs and difficult to move. We really wished we had some wheel chocks ready before it started going down hill, but we got there in the end. At the end of the day, lowering it down to the driveway was a doddle since we used the truck to lower it down nice and slowly. Backing up while towing was a new experience but not too traumatic and we were finally done. I estimate we split close to 2 cords of wood. Not bad for a days work. But once I was done, I was pretty done with splitting wood for a long time. I'm really glad we didn't buy one. Next time we have some trees cut down I think I'll pay extra to have them split it right here.
