Jeff's Workbench

… didn’t go so well.

So, I’m in need of some wood for my first major project.  I wanted to use quarter sawn white oak.  A friend recommended a couple  sawmills he had ordered wood from before.  One didn’t have any at the moment.  The other only dealt in basswood.  So, I’m looking for other sources when he suggests that we attempt to rive some trees he recently had cut down.  He’s has both red and white oak.  Immediately I’m game.

So, Saturday, I meet him at his house and we walk back behind his pole barn to the log pile.  Right on the end, we find a decent sized log right on the end.  We can get to it without even moving it.  Which is good because it’s too big for the two of us to move in one piece.  With two splitting wedges, a maul and an 8 lbs sledge hammer, we go about trying to split the log in half.

We should have looked at the log a little more carefully before we started to work.  We assumed the pith was in the center of the log.  It wasn’t.  So, we wound up pealing a chunk off.  It didn’t run the full length of the log.  It was quite a bit of work.  But, enthusiasm was high.   The second attempt produced a full length split.  We just kept brushing snow off the log as we went.  We should have done that first.  The log wasn’t as straight as we thought.

It was now that we decided to aim at the pith for the next split.  These are things we probably should have read up on before we started.    This split turned out to be MUCH harder to start.  We were splitting a much larger piece, and it was actually in half this time.  But once it started to go, it went.  What a sound the log makes when it splits.  It’s very cool.  And when you get a good split going, even after you stop hammering the wedge in, the log still makes those cracking sounds.  It’s quit interesting.  And the smell!  I love the smell of fresh split oak.  Oh, did I mention this turned out to be red oak?  Well it is.  And it’s RED.

By the time we got that split finished, Bill had to call it a day.  He had dinner plans that evening.  We had to then get it loaded in a truck.  Did I mention it was over a hundred yards from the truck to the wood?  And there was a lot of snow?  Yeah, we had to drag it.  We attempted to drag it with some rope.  That didn’t work very well.  Even with a shovel under the front to keep the log from digging in.  We then attempted to pull it out with the truck.  That worked for a minute, then the rope broke.  A comedy of errors.  We then decided that it was worth the risk of getting the truck stuck to back up to the log.  It turned out fine.

Bill dropped off one of the halves and the two smaller split pieces on his way out of town.  It’s now displaced my car in the garage as it waits for me to finish splitting it.

It probably won’t work for the project I had intended.  I’ll be able to get wood out of it, but I don’t think I’ll get pieces long enough for this project.  And I don’t yet have all the tools necessary to work this type of wood.

All in all this was a fun day.  It was a lot of work, but I learned a lot!

• Make sure the log is straight
• Split the log in half, aiming for the pith.
• Start at the narrow end of the log, it’s easier than starting at the large end (yeah, did I mention that we started on the large end?)

In the aftermath, I am quite sore.  We lost both of Bill’s splitting wedges in the snow.  Bill wound up taking a day off work because his back hurt too much.  Everyone is blaming me for that.  But it was his idea!

Better luck next time!  I’m going to figure out how much quarter sawn ash I need to order.

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