When wood gets cut down it doesn't just fall into nicely split boards or logs. It falls as one big log that is tree sized. That length isn't practical for much. Whatever the wood's purpose it is going to need to be trimmed down. One part of that process often includes the wood being split. Mills have big wood splitters that do it automatically. There are also smaller splitters that you can use at home for your own purposes, like cutting firewood.
When it comes to splitting wood there are really two choices. One is to use a manual splitter. The other is to use a powered splitter. These are generally powered by a gasoline engine. Both wood splitters work on the same principle.
How a splitter works is that there is a wedge that gets inserted into one end of the log. That's what causes the log to split. The difference comes in how the entire process works.
When you are splitting the wood manually you put the wedge in the end and pound on it with a big mallet until the wedge comes out the other end. It can take several hits to get the wedge all the way down, depending on the length of the wood. A log that is firewood length may only need one hit to split it neatly. A longer length of wood will need more. The drawbacks to manually splitting wood is that it really isn't practical to do long lengths and you can only split it into 2 pieces at a time.
If you are wondering how does a wood splitter work with the wedge it is very simple. The wedge gets in between the grain. Since you split wood going with the grain, the crack made by the wedge follows the grain down.
A mechanical wood splitter works pretty much the same way. A wedge is place in the end of the log. A ram pounds in. Because the ram can exert much more force than you can it generally only needs to hit the wedge once, maybe twice for the larger pieces of wood. The mechanical wood splitters come as either 3 way or 4 way splitters. The benefit to using one of the mechanical splitters is that you can split longer pieces of wood, and the logs can be split into more pieces. Of course, a mechanical splitter can split the wood much faster than you can. You will be able to get more done at a time then if you try and split wood manually.
If you are asking yourself how does a wood splitter work, then you need to know that the answer is that a wedge is put into one end and pounded down to split the wood along the grain. You can split it manually or you can do it with a mechanical splitter. The method that you choose depends on how much wood you are splitting and the length of wood that you are splitting.
