Malik
Auror
I'm not going to get too deep into this--it's probably going to be a blog post eventually--but I was splitting stumps today. We brought down a maple that had died last year, and now that it's chainsawed into rounds, it's time for the fun to begin.
Seriously; I took a day off work just to do this. I love splitting stumps. Anyway, I digress.
This morning, I bought a new axe, a Fiskars splitting axe with a steel head. I've talked a bit about edge geometry in the Ask Me About Swords thread, and this sucker is a design marvel. It's two-thirds the weight of my 6-lb. splitting maul and carves off huge chunks of wood with one hit.
Against bigger stumps, you have to use a splitting wedge. This is a roughly teardrop-shaped jobbie with a sharp point, and you put it into a crack (or indentation) in a stump and then drive it down with the back of an axe or maul until the stump breaks apart.
This is important, because I bought a new splitting wedge today at the same time that I bought the axe.
The wedge is iron.
The axe is steel.
They are both blued to near-black. They looked exactly the same when I bought them.
We'd talked about the relative hardness of iron vs. steel in other threads?
After three hours, the respective tools looked like this:
The hardened-steel axe head smashed the ever-living snot out of the wrought-iron wedge, and was barely scratched. The bluing only came off the steel on bad hits that concentrated the force onto a corner of the head (or once, as you can see, into the composite handle).
Steel weapons don't slice through iron armor, but man, they can sure do a number on it.
Just something to think about.
Seriously; I took a day off work just to do this. I love splitting stumps. Anyway, I digress.
This morning, I bought a new axe, a Fiskars splitting axe with a steel head. I've talked a bit about edge geometry in the Ask Me About Swords thread, and this sucker is a design marvel. It's two-thirds the weight of my 6-lb. splitting maul and carves off huge chunks of wood with one hit.
Against bigger stumps, you have to use a splitting wedge. This is a roughly teardrop-shaped jobbie with a sharp point, and you put it into a crack (or indentation) in a stump and then drive it down with the back of an axe or maul until the stump breaks apart.
This is important, because I bought a new splitting wedge today at the same time that I bought the axe.
The wedge is iron.
The axe is steel.
They are both blued to near-black. They looked exactly the same when I bought them.
We'd talked about the relative hardness of iron vs. steel in other threads?
After three hours, the respective tools looked like this:
The hardened-steel axe head smashed the ever-living snot out of the wrought-iron wedge, and was barely scratched. The bluing only came off the steel on bad hits that concentrated the force onto a corner of the head (or once, as you can see, into the composite handle).
Steel weapons don't slice through iron armor, but man, they can sure do a number on it.
Just something to think about.