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Firewood Splitting Simulator

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231–240 of 302 posts

Re: Firewood Splitting Simulator

#231

Looks like its coded by someone who has never split firewood. The challenge is not deciding where to split, its executing the split. Like hitting the same gap if it doesn't split, deciding orientation to aoid knots, figuring out how to put it on end if it wasn't cut straight. And some of the cuts it allowed me would hit the ax handle on another part, the shock from that damages the ax handle and is painful on the han…

I am shocked that tapping a touchscreen is nothing like splitting wood with an axe.

I'm exhausted by all this tapping! Who knew cutting firewood was such hard work!

/s

Re: Firewood Splitting Simulator

#232
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is kinda fun, but doesn't match most of my experience splitting firewood. Neither mine, I have a machine that does it for me. Much safer and efficient.

I find it much easier to use AI to vibesplit my firewood. Sure, it costs me lots of money to buy axe tokens, and sometimes all I end up with is a useless pile of splinters or sawdust, but it's the way of the future; just imagine how efficient it'll be when the tech has matured?

If only you could pipe the waste heat from the data centre…

Re: Firewood Splitting Simulator

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a surprising amount of technique and knowledge that goes into splitting firewood. It isn't rocket science, but I know a 75 year old who can chop wood faster than any young guy who works out at the gym.

It's a combination of technique and the type of wood. Even with perfect technique, some wood is simply too hard to split. I've got the bottom 5 or 6 rounds of a bigleaf maple sitting in my yard that I simply can't make a dent in. You're welcome to take it if you can split it :)

Are you trying to split it with an axe? You need a sledgehammer and a few splitting wedges. The sledge lets you apply a lot more force than an axe and striking the wedge focuses that force onto a small area. The first wedge will open a crack, then you use additional wedges to expand that crack until she splits.

Source: grew up in a wood burning family, helped split many stubborn hardwood trees (all by hand).

Re: Firewood Splitting Simulator

#234

Looks like its coded by someone who has never split firewood. The challenge is not deciding where to split, its executing the split. Like hitting the same gap if it doesn't split, deciding orientation to aoid knots, figuring out how to put it on end if it wasn't cut straight. And some of the cuts it allowed me would hit the ax handle on another part, the shock from that damages the ax handle and is painful on the han…

And the domain expert has build how many playable wood splitting games?

Re: Firewood Splitting Simulator

#235

This is kinda fun, but doesn't match most of my experience splitting firewood. The wood barely moves after it's split. If you split it perfectly, the two halves will almost certainly both fall to each side (they're pushed outwards by the axe). You can't just randomly split it across the grain into slices like you're slicing bread. I guess mostly: it's not tiring, which sort of sucks when you're doing it for real, but…

Use a nice large maul. Will go through most wood like a butter knife.

I stupidly used a axe for a long time.

Re: Firewood Splitting Simulator

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a surprising amount of technique and knowledge that goes into splitting firewood. It isn't rocket science, but I know a 75 year old who can chop wood faster than any young guy who works out at the gym.

It's a combination of technique and the type of wood. Even with perfect technique, some wood is simply too hard to split. I've got the bottom 5 or 6 rounds of a bigleaf maple sitting in my yard that I simply can't make a dent in. You're welcome to take it if you can split it :)

If it didn't require flights, I'd bring my maul and wedges and take on your challenge.

Big rounds are the most fun.

Re: Firewood Splitting Simulator

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I could have vibe coded that. At the very least, he photographed and built models of logs and his own yard.

I do a lot of game stuff (professionally and just for fun) and play around with maxing out vibeing little feature samples. This would be fairly straightforward vibecode over a day or two. Definitely not to throw shade at the guy. But yea, there is nothing here that wouldn't be easily vibeable.

My point is that it's easily vibeable for you, because you do game stuff.

I don't - I did large scale web, embedded, data, and security, but no graphics or games. I wouldn't know where to begin.

Re: Firewood Splitting Simulator

#238
post #204
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you're really going to love this. The proper term is a shortened form of "hear him, hear him," which was necessary because British Parliament didn't allow clapping or cheering. Instead, if you wanted to show agreement with a speaker's point, you'd shout out that everyone else should "hear" him. Not to be confused with "hear ye," which evolved from the French "oyez," which is the imperative form of "to listen," w…

Thanks, that was interesting to learn, I’d never thought about how odd the phrase sounds as-is. There’s a fascinating complexity to what constitutes constructive feedback, criticism, or dismissal. And to when it’s okay to provide one, the other, or none at all.

France is bacon.

Re: Firewood Splitting Simulator

#239

This is kinda fun, but doesn't match most of my experience splitting firewood. The wood barely moves after it's split. If you split it perfectly, the two halves will almost certainly both fall to each side (they're pushed outwards by the axe). You can't just randomly split it across the grain into slices like you're slicing bread. I guess mostly: it's not tiring, which sort of sucks when you're doing it for real, but…

There's a surprising amount of technique and knowledge that goes into splitting firewood. It isn't rocket science, but I know a 75 year old who can chop wood faster than any young guy who works out at the gym.

I had to take down two absolutely enormous Douglas Fir trees on my property (> 36" base), and asked them to leave the wood rounds for me. I knew it was going to be a lot of wood, but even then, I was not prepared. I spent about a fair bit of my free time over the next 1-2 months just out there slowly working my way through the pile, and you're absolutely right - you get substantially better at it. For me, it looked something like this:

Stage 1: At first, I could chop essentially nothing, probably 60+ minutes per round as I mostly puzzled about how to make progress and got lucky from time to time with a round that split easily (fortunately, I had a nice splitting axe)

Stage 2: Then I bought some splitting wedges, and I used a handheld sledgehammer to drive them in to what I thought were the weak spots, and then ultimately pried open the log, to pieces that I could split more readily.

Stage 3: I bought a massive demolition sledge hammer (essentially a two-handed battle hammer) and used that to drive the wedges in after getting them started, and made a bit more progress on actually splitting the rounds.

Stage 4: After doing this countless times, you just a knack for reading the wood, and where it will / won't split. I reverted back to using just the splitting axe, since if you hit the wood in the right spots, it really just splits on its own.

Here's where I ended up, if it helps any of you:

- Start by establishing the fracture line that will be used to split the round in half. I would eyeball any existing line on the round towards the center, and use the axe head to mark a line, away from any knots , from the center to the edge. These two center-to-edge didn't necessarily need to be inline. They could be slightly offset, like hands on a clock.

- With moderate force, just repeatedly strike that line, working from the center outwards. You'd be shocked out how quickly repeated strikes widen the line, and eventually the wood's own weight almost causes it to fall apart.

- Recursively do this with the two halves: Draw the line from (what was the center), radially out to the edge. Repeatedly strike until these pieces have been halved.

- Continue this process until you have proper pizza wedges. At this point, it's pretty trivial to just chop the pizza wedge, from the wedge to the base, into 4 or 5 smaller firewood-sized logs.

I know y'all probably didn't care to read this, but this was quite honestly weeks of my life in learning this, and I couldn't find a great guide on YouTube or anything, especially for rounds this big.

Re: Firewood Splitting Simulator

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a surprising amount of technique and knowledge that goes into splitting firewood. It isn't rocket science, but I know a 75 year old who can chop wood faster than any young guy who works out at the gym.

Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC872sqjMNC8kHU0GU0ShZFw while cautioning that she seems to be genetically engineered to split wood. Her technique is like watching an Olympic athlete. No wasted motion at all, all energy delivered to the maul straight down. She’s a muse.

She's got a video where she explains in detail how to chop. She goes through everything from stance - including protecting the shins - to axe technique. Absolutely terrific - I feel a strained shoulder just watching the videos.
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