I’ll get to the sword, I promise, but first I want to talk about my wood.

Wood

For the last five years, I’ve been primarily heating our house with wood. We have natural gas (forced hot air), but I love heating with wood for several reasons:

1 “It’s the job that keeps you warm twice”. Splitting and stacking wood is an AMAZING workout. I’m at the best physical shape of my life, despite some creaking and cracking from aging.

2 It’s free. The vast majority of tree removal companies here in NJ are small operations. They don’t have the land (storage) or tooling/operations to run a firewood business. Only the (few) massive companies do this. I learned that the small tree removal companies actually have to pay the dump to leave the trees there, then the towns typically mulch them for playgrounds and such. Thus, they are quite happy for me to call up and say, “dump it right on my lawn for free” – and they do:

3 Wood is “carbon neutral”. Burning (poorly [1]) can produce pollutants, but when burned efficiently, trees are considered carbon neutral because they only release the carbon that they captured throughout their life. I suppose if you never burned them, they would be “carbon negative”, though.

4 It’s extremely effective. At 20 below 0, the house is a toasty 75 everywhere. I burn for days or weeks at a time because our stove is like a battery. We have a soapstone stove (Hearthstone), which is basically a giant rock that heats up and stays hot for many hours even after the fire dies. Cast iron doesn’t do that – it gets hot fast, and cools fast. I burn overnight without any worries at all.

5 Finally, it… just feels good. No, Great. My favorite afternoons are those with an axe in my hand:

This is just a fraction, maybe 1/3 of what I use on a cold year:

Axes

I have four axes, three of them are “splitters” and one is a hatchet/chopper (leftmost).

A common misconception is that [all] axes should be sharp. That is only partially true. Choppers or more properly “felling axes”, the kind you use when you want to cut down a tree, should be sharp. Splitting axes are not – they have wide heads so that they do not get stuck in the wood. Splitting mauls have very wide angles. If you split with a sharp axe, you will spend far more time trying to unstick your axe than turning large logs into small ones.

Fiskars is my favorite brand of splitter. The black one pictured on the right is what I do 80% of my work with. It’s just an amazing fiberglass splitter, probably one of the best tool investments I’ve ever made. A few thousand dollars in saved heating bills, and tens of thousands of calories burned.

For sentimental reasons, that Husqvarna is my favorite.

Oh, and sometimes, for huge chonkers, you will need wedges:

Sword

Now, we finally can talk about swords.

It started when I saw this video. Geez. After seeing that, I had to have one. So, off to the Viking Wood Splitter website I went.

I chose a custom engraving – CARPENTER on one side, and THE UNFORGIVEN on the other.

My order was backordered by about four months. I finally received it two days ago.

It’s gorgeous. Very well made, feels awesome in the hand, and it bleeds quality engineering. I feel like Braveheart in my yard. It’s a solid through tang, and I have little doubt it will stand the test of time.

In fact, I think it would make an awesome gravestone for my ashes. Kind of an Excalibur type of vibe.

But does it work?

All that praise aside – is it a novelty, or is it a tool?

A mix of both. It works. You can blow apart logs with it, just like an axe; that video above is not fake. I have split several large rounds so far with no issue. And the entire time I felt like a bad@ss. I’m not sure about a Viking.. as I feel a Viking would use an axe, but a warrior nonetheless.

But – it is heavy. This is not something I can spend a whole afternoon using (at least yet?). I can split for hours using that black Fiskars – but I won’t be able to get out of bed in the morning if I use this for more than an hour.

In summary – you can use it for awhile, then stare at how cool it is while resting, and then you finish the job with an axe.

Happy splitting, y’all.

Footnotes:

[1] There are many components to this. An efficient stove, dry wood, the right kind of wood, the correct burning temperature, etc.