Ready, Aim, CHoP!

It's that time of year again, when a few chilly nights are the wild's warning of the soon to come winter. My source of heat is wood, in a Treemont wood stove that was already here at the Luck Cabin when I moved in. I lucked out cause it holds a coal overnight, and that means I won't have to start a new fire every morning, which may be one of the harder things about heating with wood.
but not the hardest.
The hardest for me would be splittin' those logs into firewood! Remember last year when I was just learning how to really do it right? Weighing in at about 100 pounds (that would be me) made splitting wood with an ax something of a zen practice more then force.
I set up the log in a stable place and take a good look at my aim. I don't have tons of extra energy to waste on missing my mark, I have to make my swings count.

I am using a "Go Devil" type ax (heavy sledge hammer-ish shape on the back end), which works WAY better then the standard tree chopping ax. I figure if i start splitting a few logs a day now, by the time the real cold comes I will be ahead of the game unlike last year which was a harsh HARSH winter that caught everyone off guard.

It may take me way more swings then I would like (check my swing style I learned last year here) and my wood may still be a lil' green (aka- not totally dry)... but it's way more efficient, good exercise, and saves alot of money to spilt the logs myself. A stack of logs a day keeps da' doctor away!

How do ya'll stay warm for the winter and what do you think is the most earth friendly way to heat your home?

XOxoxoox

Learning To Use An Ax

Oh...Gawd... today I learned how to better split wood with a "go devil" style ax! I have not done much log splitting in my life, being that I grew up in a tropical big city that only sees the icy junk we call snow like once every 20-30 years and also thrived on central heat for the rare chilly days. I remember begging my parents to put logs in the fireplace, just for fun. :)
As you can see in the very top pic, I have to stand and meditate before i swing the ax, getting just the right position before swinging. And I can tell ya, I was doing it all kinds of wrong.
See in the pic above, my hands are WAY too far apart at that point, but my legs are not. The reason I am standing so funny is because should I miss the log, I didn't want the ax to hit my leg instead... even the thought of the chance of some possibility of this occurring terrifies me more then the worst horror movie ya eva' saw X's a million nightmares.
Because my hands were so far apart at the end and too close together at the beginning of the swing, I could not get proper momentum going to crack the log...only getting a few dents...
Once ya give it a good wack and it doesn't split or crack, the ax kinda gets stuck in there - which can seem impossible to pull out, but if you hold down the log, and then pull the ax handle down to the ground in front it will roll back out.
THEN START OVA' !!!
Hells yeah! With the right amount of force, aim and hand placement (which is not really shown below, cause i slid my hand back down after it split), it gets alot easier. The hands start out on opposite ends of the ax in order to pull the weight up over head, and when coming down they slide to the bottom together.
The thing is, I used to use something called a "wedge" to split logs and I can say for someone my size (AKA tiny as hell) using a wedge is a little easier if ya' don't have the body weight to really slam an ax down. But it is never a bad idea to have some basic skills to work with, in case you are ever in a situation where all the easier tools are not available and ya need to make a fire. (Blizzard perhaps? Zombie Apocalypse? Peak Oil? Living out in the middle of nowhere and have no car to get supplies easily? Extreme poverty?)
BTW- the logs were from trees already dead on the property here. Supa' eco-nomical. :)
XoXo