I grew up helping my dad cut trees, stack firewood, and splitting kindling. Of the three, kindling always took the most time – trying to get the wood to balance and then hitting it with the axe. When I got older and had a splitter, I would use the splitter to crack up a load of kindling while I was at it as well. That worked great if I had the splitter running but if I needed something right away, out came the axe and the balancing act.
I was reading through some stuff over the summer and heard about something called a Kindling Cracker from Australia. It looked gimicky so I read up on it and the thing actually works — it gets great reviews actually. Basically you set the piece of wood to split on this cracker that has the blade facing up side the unit and hit the wood with a small sledge, foundry hammer, etc. What I especially like is that you can get the kindling down to very small sizes – I could never do that with an axe or hatchet — at least not easily.
It works great! You could screw it into something if you wanted but I cart it around to where I want to crack the kindling at plus it doesn’t get left out in the winter. I think this thing is great and have bee building up a pile of kindling for the winter and also my BBQ.
The ring diameter does limit the size of log you start with but its easy enough for me to find wood that will fit – I have several cords to choose from at any given time. I did learn quickly on to pick small enough pieces of wood so they would not jam during splitting but that was another easy lesson learned.
Because it is steel, it holds the logs quite nicely and I find I can get nice thin kindling because you can set the wood right on the blade to start however you want. The above is my actual chopping block. I keep the Kindling Cracker in my garage where it is nice and dry and take it over there when I want to split wood. It’s very convenient, safe and effective – I’m very happy with it.
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