If you have no chopping block and wish to cut your firewood into smaller pieces, you can hold the stick safely with the hand if you use the axe as shown in [Fig. 345]. This will give you as a result two sticks, and the upper one will have some great splinters.
How to Split Kindling Wood
When splitting wood for the fire or kindling, make the first blow as in [Fig. 346], and the second blow in the same place, but a trifle slanting as in Fig. 347; the slanting blow wedges the wood apart and splits it. If the wood is small and splits readily, the slanting blow may be made first. These things can only be indicated to the readers because there are so many circumstances which govern the case. If there is a knot in the wood, strike the axe right over the knot as in [Figs. 348] and [349].
If you are chopping across the grain do not strike perpendicularly as in [Fig. 350], because if the wood is hard the axe will simply bounce back, but strike a slanting blow as in [Fig. 351], and the axe blade will bite deeply into the wood; again let us caution you that if you put too much of a slant on your axe in striking the wood, it will cut out a shallow chip without materially impeding the force of the blow, and your axe will swing around to the peril of yourself or anyone else within reach; again this is a thing which you must learn to practice.
In using the chopping block be very careful not to put a log in front of the crotch as in [Fig. 340], and then strike a heavy blow with the axe, for the reason that if you split the wood with the first blow your axe handle will come down heavily and suddenly upon the front log, and no matter how good a handle it may be, it will break into fragments, as the writer has discovered by sad experience. A lost axe handle in the woods is a severe loss, and one to be avoided, for although a makeshift handle may be fashioned at camp, it never answers the purpose as well as the skillfully and artistically made handle which comes with the axe.
Holders or Saw Bucks for Logs
Select two saplings about five inches in diameter at the butts, bore holes near the butts about six inches from the end for legs, make a couple of stout legs about the size of an old-fashioned drey pin, and about twenty inches long, split the ends carefully, sufficiently to insert wedges therein, then drive the wedge and ends into the hole bored for the purpose. When the sticks are driven home the wedge will hold them in place. You now have a couple of "straddle bugs," that is, poles, the small ends of which rest upon the ground and the butt ends supported by two legs. In the top of the poles bore a number of holes for pins, make your pins a little longer than the diameter of the log you intend to saw; the pins are used exactly like the old-fashioned drey pins, that is, you roll the log up the incline to the two straddle bugs and hold the logs in place by putting pins in the nearest holes. Of course, the pins should work easily in and out of the holes ([Fig. 357]).
With such an arrangement one man can unaided easily roll a log two feet in diameter up upon the buck; the log is then in a position to be cut up with a cross-cut saw ([Fig. 357]). Another form of sawbuck may be made of a puncheon stool ([Fig. 358]), with holes bored diagonally in the top for the insertion of pins with which to hold the log in place while it is being sawed. But with this sawbuck one cannot use as heavy logs as with the first one because of the difficulty in handling them.
I have just returned from a trip up into the woods where they still use the primitive pioneer methods of handling and cutting timber, and I note up there in Pike County, Pennsylvania, they make the sawbuck for logs by using a log of wood about a foot in diameter and boring holes diagonally through the log near each end ([Fig. 359]); through these holes they drive the legs so that the ends of them protrude at the top and form a crotch to hold the wood to be sawed. The sawbuck is about ten or twelve feet long; consequently, in order to provide for shorter logs there are two sets of pegs driven in holes bored for the purpose between the ends of the buck.