Axe Techniques: Firewood Splitting On Snow

Description

http://paulkirtley.co.uk

The amount of firewood required in the northern forest in winter demands the use of an axe.

You need to have a repertoire of axe techniques that include being able to safely split logs on snow as well as easily produce kindling.

The latter may seem simple but I've seen some frightening techniques where people are literally playing chicken with their own fingers.

This video covers some key techniques for splitting firewood on snow.

For more information see the following article:

http://paulkirtley.co.uk/2012/splitting-firewood-on-snow/

Tags: axe techniques,firewood splitting on snow,splitting,firewood,snow,bushcraft,axe,ax,saw,firewood splitting,winter camping,ax techniques,logs,wilderness,outdoors,camping,northern forest,boreal forest,northern bushcraft,paul kirtley

Video Transcription

okay so if we're just splitting a piece of wood we can just find a little indentation get the log nicely nicely placed in there and then that's nice and solid over time though that's going to get degraded the logs going to keep banging back into that snow there each one and your trench is going to get deeper and deeper and you're gonna find it harder and harder to hit the front of the log so we can do is have a bit more of a kind of semi-permanent setup here where I've got a log in the snow and I've got a bit of a backstop here but I can but a log up against just here so you can see then that then works against there and stays there so when I'm splitting this I'm hitting the face here with the axe and if I stand behind the face and there's a deflection or I come off the side I stand the chance of hitting my ankle on my lower leg and injuring myself quite severely so it's really important imperative that you get your heels if there's any deflection the axe is

got nowhere to go or at least nowhere to go that you so you're not going to hit yourself then just aim aim off decide which grip is going to be most comfortable for you get your aim and then strike with a big log like this you probably need a couple of hits so try and aim to hit in line with that just to create a split all the way down standing in front of the face again split nicely standing in front again safety first so this is some of the firewood that we're using and you can use that to help you split some of the smaller bits of wood that you've got so you've split out your log and got some got some reasonable sized pieces split out but now you want to split some smaller ones you can do it between the legs the techniques that I've just been showing it becomes harder to so a really safe way of splitting while in careful not to trap your hands in between you