Splitting firewood with a hand tool is a solved problem—the axe is one of the oldest tools on Earth—but there's still a mess of people experimenting with different ways to do it. Here we'll take a look at a few of these alternate methods, ranging from crazy to clever.
Mechanical Advantage
Any homesteader worth their salt will scoff at these, but they're worth including just to see the range of what people have come up with.
The Logmatic Wedge Axe has got a real buy-one-get-one-free kind of vibe, and the video quality is horrible, but it's an earnest attempt to design an easy-to-use tool that concentrates a lot of force on a single point with minimal effort.
The Foot Operated Log Splitter seems like it looked great on paper, but turned out to be underwhelming in reality:
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