Thanks everybody for your comments!
@ Eric and Col: it is a good idea (at least for me) to always have some tool steel around, just in case of the need of some kind of new, maybe special blade. For me, old files and sawblades are the best and easiest resources, I am not thinking much in recycling when using them. Although, of course recycling is always a good thing.
Tod Gilding wrote:I think that I already have one of these on my Swiss Army Knife.
Of course, there is no tool you can not find on the Swiss Army Knife. It even sports a thickness sander (if you have the patience and skills
).
Kamusur wrote:You come through with the goods again Markus, is it Swiss Spruce you are splitting?
Thank you Steve, and no, it is not spruce (but almost). What you see comes from this stem, which is Silver Fir (
Abies alba) from the woods in the neighbourhood (a 500 meter walk away):
Silver Fir seems to have about the same stiffness to weight ratio as Spruce and, unlike the latter one has (almost) no resin pockets at all which makes it a highly appreciated construction lumber here around.
curly wrote:I like it , a very neat job there .
Thank you Pete!
curly wrote:My version is a heavy blade japanese bone cleaver , mighty effective . Not so elegant .
Before making this "pocket froe" I also thought of some heavy knife like your bone cleaver, but then I just started to like the control this lever gives you when splitting the wood. I have a big and heavy froe (34 cm blade, 2 kg) which I use to split log halves into smaller pieces (for entire logs I prefer wedges). Using that froe I came to the conclusion that I would not like it very much handling that kind of weight on my "desktop" (= bench top, of course).
curly wrote:The froe doesn't lie , soon weeds out timber with run off .
Too true!
It is really amazing what one can find within one tree stem.
Here, still the Silver Fir from above, I got a slight but still rather acceptable twist:
One meter further down the stem things got really wild, from just about the same twist as above in one half, to this:
Click on the picture for more photos of the same piece at slightly different angles of view and lighting
Splitting such interlaced/wavy grained wood with a froe is close to impossible and it is better to use wedges, or a saw if one wants to make something else than firewood.
Sometimes there are very notable differences even within the same length and within the same quarter!
curly wrote:A handy trick i've been shown is to always spilt the billet into halves , getting progressively smaller , it saves getting splits that jump across the fibres .
By the way if anyones interested there's a froe on ebay right now , I think they called it a large shingle splitters axe , a froe it is .
Yeah, shingles... Have a look at this man, how he produces some of the nicest Western Red Ceder guitar tops - for roofing his house!
Picture found here.
Cheers,
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. Last week I was splitting the 8 quarters of some other two lengths to get some bracewood, but two of the 8 quarters are only good for firewood (see the picture above with the interwoven grain).
