Before you begin splitting, ensure your axe blade is sharp – it should bite into wood easily on contact without bouncing. If ...

1. Get a good ax and make sure it’s sharp. Having a quality, sharp ax is key to a successful split. Zdon recommends a 36-inch handle with a 4-pound ax head (Zdon used a Best Made Co. Felling Ax for ...

Watch as an old, rusty axe gets a second life in this detailed restoration and modification project. See the complete transformation process, from removing stubborn rust and sharpening the blade to ...

If, like me, your credentials as a woodsman come primarily from watching movies set in the woods, you might think you can just swing any ax down the center of a log to split it. That’s not quite right ...

While a short, light hatchet is great for intricate tasks such as making kindling, carving, or clearing trails, nothing beats a long-handled axe for chopping logs into firewood. With its two-part ...

It’s nice to picture yourself chopping firewood like a lumberjack–deftly swinging an axe through log rounds to cut perfectly sized pieces. That said, it's simply not how it happens. For most of us, ...

Dead-blow hammers are well-known in the construction industry for minimizing rebound. [Jacob Fischer] is on a mission to bring this concept to splitting axes. Over the course of several months, ...

My woodland in the Black Mountains, South Wales, is small. There is a mix of young oak, alder, beech, birch, hazel, lime, hawthorn, wych elm, the odd sweet chestnut and a lot of ash. When we moved to ...