The message
from Andy Dingley contains these words:

Steel wedges and a 4lb bronze (or lead) maul on a long shaft. (A steel
lump hammer mushrooms the wedge).

After a long time. Our wedges are still in use, sloshed with a
sledge-hammer, and we bought them around 1965

Three wedges is about the minimum, in
case you have to work down the side of a long log. "Log burster" twisted
wedges or grenades are IMHE only good for timber that's easy to split
anyway.

The trick with oak is that it splits cleanly and easily along the radial
rays but is a pig of a job if you try and go through a ray. So start it
off with the wedge placed accurately radial and then follow the split
however it wants to go.

Splitting oak is easy.

All true.

Try elm or hornbeam if you really want to work at
it! I still need to work on my oak riving technique though as I need
to make usable timber by this method, not just firewood.

Hmmm. Most of our early work was with elms, and mostly, it split more
easily than oak. However, a knotty bit can be a pig. See one of our jobs
at:

http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/hi-fi/elm.jpg

I've never found hydraulic splitters to be worth the trouble. They need
too much care with getting the logs to identical lengths, so they're
less than ideal for randomly-sized clearance timber. Feeding them random
lengths slows them down. They're also (if hand pumped) slower to use
than a good few wedges.

My experience of them is similar.

--
Rusty
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