How long does it take you to split a cord....?

Okay. I'm new to splitting firewood, and I'm curious to find out how long it takes others to split a cord. Let's say the wood is oak in the round approximately 12-16" in length.

Please state your method (gas splitter, wood maul, etc.) and how long it would take in hours.

cheers

Good straight grain oak with only small knots I can split a cord in an hour with a maul. I usually stack it while I am splitting, so it takes a bit longer. Large splitters can go a whole lot faster. If logs are easily manageable, the Super Split can really go fast, maybe about 20 minutes or so. A splitter with a 6 way wedge and conveyor would probably be the fastest though, maybe like 15 minutes.

With the wood right there in a pile next to my little 5 hp splitter it would probably take 6-8 hours for me to do it by myself.

With wood that size it would be a little quicker to do it with the super split ax from fiskars.

I am currently splitting 26-28" red oak logs and only use my hydralic splitter and it is slow. I have almost 2 cords done and have put in about 15 hours total. This is probably on slow side because the wood is so big.

:rockn:

Approx 1 hour with 2 guys a TW 5 and a conveyor. Rounds are fairly close to the splitter and are anywhere from 16inches to 36. This with a 4 way wedge. Im talking full cords.

redoakneck said:

With the wood right there in a pile next to my little 5 hp splitter it would probably take 6-8 hours for me to do it by myself.

With wood that size it would be a little quicker to do it with the super split ax from fiskars.

I am currently splitting 26-28" red oak logs and only use my hydralic splitter and it is slow. I have almost 2 cords done and have put in about 15 hours total. This is probably on slow side because the wood is so big.

:rockn:

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You could cut a ton of time if you noodle those big blocks in 1/4s or even 16s or 1/8s. With time like that I think you must be splitting your pieces really small.



If I was splitting that wood from my OWB I could do it in 0 minutes.:biggrinbounce2: If will fit like that. But with my splitter it would take a little over an hour splitting how I split it. There is usually right around 1000 pieces in a cord when I'm done slitting. If it's cook wood there is around 1600-1800. Cook wood ts even longer.

Scott

2 good guys, grippo/aka supersplit, no conveyor, hustling, 1 hour.

3 of us did a 1/2 cord out of a pickup truck, hence the third guy, in 18 minutes last winter.
This was not a sustainable speed, but gassin it hard....so my guess would 1 cord per hour.

times are diminishable as the day wears on.

If the rounds are right near the splitter and I have my log claws, I can split a 4'x8' face-cord in about an hour. That's 16" long, so all 3 face-cords in about 3 hours per cord. That's with a slow gas hydraulic splitter and by myself. I split half of them on the "thin side" also.

That size wood, not stacking as i go about an hour with the super splitter. 2 guys half hour easy. Last year 3 of us split 4 full cords (128cu ft) in about 3 hours and that was all 8"-30+" maple and twisted cherry in the 6"-20" area.

Never timed it but a rough guess, about 3 hours with a maul, and less than one hour with the Super Split. I'm not as fast as I used to be either.

Ambull said:

Good straight grain oak with only small knots I can split a cord in an hour with a maul.....

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This is difficult for me to fathom. Surely you must mean a face cord. I end up with somewhere between 1000-1200 pieces per full cord, all 16". However, hydraulics are slow though.

We cut and split off site and fill a 5’ x 8’ trailer on the go so it might be a little over 1/3 cord of oak if it for home use. Once we pull on to the property, I connect the trailer to the Sportsman 800 and the Specco 34 ton splitter to the 500. Well go in to the woods where we have wood stack along the trails for up to 2 years. The wife will pull the splitter next to the pile while I pull the trailer next to the splitter. We split all wood at least once and load the trailer. Once the trailer is filled, we leave the woods, connect the trailer to her Honda CRV and we are on our way to a 35 mile trip back home. We average about 1 trailer per hour and two loads per day on the weekends. (some of the larger rounds might be split in fourth so we have a mixture of wood in the pile)

After we fill our second load, we start cutting on the white ash that has been dead for two years now. Most of our ash is 16 to 20” in dia and 30 to 40 ft long. We cut this in to 18 inch rounds and stack it along the trails for next years splitting. We keep between 6 to 10 full cords at home and another 10 cords on the property.

On an average, we only split 1/2 cord per day (two trailer loads) or maybe four trips per weekend. The rest of the weekend is spent working on trails, filling deer feeders, checking food plots and having roasted hot dogs and chips for lunch. I could do more wood per day but the wife calls it our bounding time and I’m no spring chicken.

We don't think if cutting our wood as working. We would be going up to the property to fill deer feeders and making trails anyway so the wood is a bonus for us.

We cut on 80 acres of woodland so we never leave any cut or split wood where it can be seen from the road.

buildmyown said:

That size wood, not stacking as i go about an hour with the super splitter. 2 guys half hour easy. Last year 3 of us split 4 full cords (128cu ft) in about 3 hours and that was all 8"-30+" maple and twisted cherry in the 6"-20" area.

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128 cu. ft. is one cord, not 4.

If the wood is by the splitter and I'm really busting my but I can do a face cord in about 15 min with tw 6 with a 6 way wedge and throwing it in a backhoe bucket

Splitting and loading at the same time by myself takes me about 1.5 - 2 hrs per cord on average. I have hustled them out a little faster. Now if the stars aligned and I had good straight pop 1 time with the four way wood I imagine I would be quite a bit more productive. Most of our firewood is far from straight grain and hardly ever the right size for a perfect four way split.

The above time is using a tractor with a homemade splitter ran off the remotes and I usually don't run the tractor over 1200 rpm when I am by myself so the cycle time is slow but it is plenty for me to keep up with.

2 guy's troybilt 27 ton gas splitter about 1hr.

with my timberwolf tw-p1 its about an hour and a half if i have my dad and brother moving the wood around and stacking it. 2 hours if i have to grab logs out of the pile and then stack it in our barn. i cant complain really because im always waiting on the splitter as well so i really dont break a sweat to much. every once and awhile ill get a (splitting job) where a client asks me to come back after a removal or large pruning and split the wood and i need to start charging by the cord instead of by the hour.

Wow, some of you guys are really fast with the splitting. It takes me every bit of 3 hours to split a cord of wood and about one to stack it. Now I'm not working as hard as I could just at a nice pace. The most I've split in one day is two cords and I mostly work by myself.

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Pulp Friction said:

This is difficult for me to fathom. Surely you must mean a face cord. I end up with somewhere between 1000-1200 pieces per full cord, all 16". However, hydraulics are slow though.

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Never counted the pieces. I use 18-20" logs. The good stuff I can split faster with my maul than I can with the splitter. Down side is that I am burned out after one cord. It is Miller time after that.

I probably was exaggerating a little, but not too far off.

Probably take me a day with the gas splitter...but I have the attention span of a cat.

I'll split for a half hr and then mow grass for 20min, clean up here/there for 30 min then, then split again for 30 min or so...run a gas trimmer etc.

We're way ahead on wood so to take the drudgery out of everything esp wood I keep bouncing from one task to another. Things get done but nothing becomes a 'project'.

Sounds like it wouldn't be productive for wood but it is and I'm so happy to have adopted this puttering method to hit all my personal work assignments.