Okay so the thing is I want a wood fire simulation too. With as much physics sim on combustion dynamics as possible.
Firewood Splitting Simulator
271–280 of 302 posts
Re: Firewood Splitting Simulator
#272This 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…
> 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'm right there with you. I've manually split wood with wedges when I was a kid. It was tedious. Now I just use the wedges for felling the trees. I get enough exercise from the stacking.
I've always felt the attraction to manual splitting was some idyllic vision of country life, backed up by the movie trope where characters are having "alone time" but still "being strong". I'd be interested to hear if anyone in this thread burns a significant amount of wood (say 4 cords), and actually splits it all by hand.
Re: Firewood Splitting Simulator
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't burn softwood because hardwood is a much better fuel as a primary heat source, especially when you live in a mixed forest. Sugar maple, red oak, birch, and beech. Beech is the best: straight grain, good density, but less common where I live. The trick to splitting hardwood, other than avoiding burls and knots, is to shave off chords around the outside of the buck. If you tried radial cuts or splitting on the…
Between yours and the parent comment, I'm just surprised how LONG splitting wood takes. A year for a season's wood feels much longer than I would have imagined.
I don’t know. Each year, my dad and I bring the chainsaw before November, fall some dead pines and cut them into logs. We either split them into firewood that evening or the next day. That’s enough for around 3 months of winter (center of Spain, cold, but almost never below 0C and never snows).
We don’t split the, into very small pieces, some logs we don’t even split as they fit into the fireplace in one piece. We don’t look for the highest girth, but for what’s more practical, yearly fires kill enough trees for that.
Re: Firewood Splitting Simulator
#274Well designed. It has a kind of magic that keeps people hooked.
Re: Firewood Splitting Simulator
#275I enjoy trying to get the maximal number of pieces from the log. My record is 16. The game is slightly annoying about forcing a rotate when i'm trying to shave thinner sections out of the log, so it's somewhat constrained.
Can anyone beat 16?
Re: Firewood Splitting Simulator
#276People here seem a little confused. This is a simulator in the same way Goat Simulator is a simulator. It’s from a collection called “screen toys” and it’s meant to be mindless fun.
All those virtual desk toys in the Mac OS X Tiger Dashboard. You had to be there.
Re: Firewood Splitting Simulator
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some adults indeed can't do it, but that doesn't mean it's difficult. And it is certainly not "wear out a whole axe handle just to learn to swing" difficult.
There's a huge difference between say, weilding a hatchet on a camping trip, and trying to get the hang of a splitting axe, with a 3ft or longer handle, when you're a kid. Getting a long, sweeping arc that comes down in the right spot isn't easy and if the axe head's centrifugal force pulls it away from you, you clunk the handle down on the wood. I definitely recall my hands ringing and numb from those kinds of impac…
> There's a huge difference between say, weilding a hatchet on a camping trip, and trying to get the hang of a splitting axe, with a 3ft or longer handle, when you're a kid.
So not difficult for an adult, like I said.
Re: Firewood Splitting Simulator
#278Earlier 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.
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 s…
I cared to read this :) Thanks for the effort invested.
Re: Firewood Splitting Simulator
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Firewood Splitting Simulator
#280This 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…
As a very novice wood splitter the thing that most jumped out to me was the wood splitting in one swing every time. That's one or two orders of magnitude off from my experience.