RORY12553 said:
I have an 8 lb maul and and a 4 pound "super splitter" that i picked up from Lowes. First off the 4 pound super splitter gets caught in oak rounds and does decently on small stuff. The 8 lb maul feels like I am bashing the wood apart. Really looking for something that is easier on the shoulders and elbows. Feel like i absorb so much shock from hittng the wood with the 8 lb maul. there has to be an easier way to split wood manually. is the fiskars really where its at? have a lot of oak rounds left along with some red oak and i believe cedar. don't mind spending money on something that will work.
Any thoughts?
I can't say anything about Fiskars, I have never had the opportunity to swing one, but I can give you a couple words of wisdom about mauls.
For one thing, an 8# maul is just too heavy for me, and by many of the comments from people hating their 8# maul and replacing it with the lighter Fiskars, I'm assuming that I am not the only one that thinks so. 6# maul is just the right weight for me.
The second thing is that all the modern mauls I have seen have a shape that is too 'blunt'. In the 'old days' the mauls were shaped properly. I'm not talking about the cutting edge itself, I have found that it doesn't matter if it's dull and I actually prefer it dull because it never gets stuck in the rounds that way. When sharpened, it sticks a lot. I am talking about the shape of the nose itself. Most of them, and the 8# are even worse about this than a 6#, have a sort of 'flare' right after the cutting edge and often a couple 'ribs' running up the sides. A lot of the time, on the first swing the maul goes THUD and does not split anything. It might crack it on the first swing, but it always takes more swings to actually split it. My old antique maul almost always splits on the first swing. So I did an experiment with a modern maul. I found a 6# Truper maul at Tractor Supply that had close to the same shape as the antique maul, but yet it had that blunt flare. Eventually I took the grinder to it and a file and I shaped it like the old maul. Now it works so well as to almost rival the splitting ability of the antique!
Here are a few pics showing what I am talking about:
This one is of my antique maul. Note the smooth and sloping shape of it. Splits first swing nearly every time:
This is of the Truper maul, before I modified it. Note that it has a very blunt flare just behind the cutting edge, it is a steep increase in thickness, followed by a couple ridges or ribs up the sides. It worked, but could not compete with the old maul:
And this is the Truper after I used the grinder and then finished it with the file, but I did not sharpen the cutting edge at all. Note how I took the steep, blunt flare off, and filed the ribs down. Now it looks even more like the antique and works very well! And I think I only paid $10-12 or so for it at Tractor Supply (the crack in the outer covering mysteriously appeared within a couple weeks after I bought it, but does not seem to be growing after 30+ cord):
