New axe design uses lever action to make splitting wood easier

I bought a Vipukirves axe early this year. I have a wood-fired pizza oven in my backyard and use small, nicely split pieces of wood in order to retain some control over the fire.<p>Before buying the axe I used a four-sided wedge (basically an elongated pyramid) and a sledgehammer for splitting.<p>So, how does this axe perform? Overall, I am very happy with it and proudly show it off at every opportunity. After spending some time learning how to use it, I can report that, for some types and conditions of wood and with the right grip on the handle, it truly does split wood in the manner shown in the video.<p>As noted in the other comments, certain types of wood are easier to split than others. After my pizza oven was finished, I somewhat foolishly bought a 1&#x2F;2 cord of apple wood from the apple-growing region of Washington state. This wood is incredibly dense and has proven difficult to split by any means, even after 3 years of seasoning. The splitting issue is made worse by the overall knottiness of the wood.<p>I also bought a 1&#x2F;2 cord of mixed wood from a local supplier. The axe is at its best on straight, dry, knot-free pine, oak, cedar, and so forth. The vertical motion is translated into horizontal motion milliseconds after the blade of the axe penetrates the wood and the split-off portion flies to the side with explosive force, often landing 8 to 10 feet away.<p>It took me an hour or two to learn to use the axe properly, with a relaxed grip to allow the head to rotate after it strikes the wood. Wearing gloves (recommended in any case) can make this even easier.<p>The blade of the axe is not razor sharp and does not require sharpening or other maintenance.

This axe looks really awesome, physics for the win.<p>Also, instead of using an old rubber tire, I highly recommend building a variable length, tensioning chain, much like this one: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrLiSMQGHvY" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=wrLiSMQGHvY</a> Makes chopping wood so much more fun.<p>And then, there is also the stikkan: <a href="http://www.stikkan.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stikkan.com&#x2F;</a> Perfect to hang it up next to your fireplace to do some more fine grained wood chopping, cutting larger pieces into smaller ones.

That has to be some of most seasoned knot free wood ever split. I wonder how many logs he had to go through to find stuff that split that well - 20 logs for every one that did that?<p>Sledge Hammer, Splitting Maul gets the job done 95% of the time. &quot;Eccentric Axe&quot; the other 5%.<p>Well - maybe, 85% Splitting Maul 12% Eccentric Axe, and 3% splitting wedge (which typically has a torsion in it to create a turning effect to split the wood.)<p>I would love to hear of an independent comparison of the Eccentric Axe versus a Splitting maul.<p>The tire is a really great idea though.

I thought it was already common knowledge among the axe-wielding cognescenti that the way you chop wood, without tiring yourself out completely, is that you add a little &#x27;twist&#x27; to your down-swing, just as the blade makes contact, that has the same leverage effect - albeit with a &#x27;normal&#x27; blade.<p>I dunno, I guess I just learned that little twist from my uncle and grandfather, and never really thought it was so magical. Not sure how I feel about the safety of a mighty wood-cutting sharp blade being off-balance on the downswing - sure, the guy in the video has a fairly safe setup, but if you don&#x27;t have the luxury (i.e. are a consumer who just bought one of these Wonder Axes) of having a safety rig, the potential for mis-direction and glancing blows from the axe being redirected towards the user seems pretty high ..

I, as well as others, have a history of strained wrists when splitting wood with a traditional axe. Clicking through to their website they recommend a loose grip when the head is about to strike, allowing for the rotation to take place. This makes sense because before you&#x27;d need a strong grip to hold onto your axe to make sure it doesn&#x27;t slip out of your hands when giving a swing strong enough to split. Since you are swinging much more gently, this may actually work! At the very least I am glad that I don&#x27;t need to split wood these days otherwise I&#x27;d give this a try in a second.

This is really cool. I&#x27;ve never split more than a couple dozen logs in my life but Ray Mears teached me to wedge the blade to the side on impact. This seems to emulate these physics. I&#x27;m not a big guy, and it&#x27;s a pretty hard motion to get in to when you&#x27;re swinging down as hard as possible.<p>This seems like a very capable survival&#x2F;bushcrafting tool for less accomplished wood cutters.<p>tl;dr I wood buy.

This is the page you need to read!<p><a href="http://www.vipukirves.fi/english/description.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vipukirves.fi&#x2F;english&#x2F;description.htm</a>

Alternative title:<p>&quot;New axe design uses lever action to make splitting wood a lot easier&quot;<p>&quot;Uses physics&quot; sounds like &quot;Stand back: I&#x27;m going to try science&quot; to me.

For me the greatest part of this innovation was putting the log into a car tire.

And for what is probably the least safe way to split wood, <a href="http://www.thestickler.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thestickler.com&#x2F;</a><p>It attaches to your car-axle and is a giant screw that splits wood.

This is an interesting idea. It&#x27;s amazing to think that a tool like the axe -- which has been around for millennia -- can still be improved.<p>[OTOH, I&#x27;ve split a fair amount of wood. And I&#x27;d have to say that anyone who thinks splitting wood with an axe is a good way to produce fuel for the primary heat source for a house, is pretty much insane. It&#x27;s exhausting work. Get a powered splitter for goodness sake. :-) ]

A picture of the axe <a href="http://www.vipukirves.fi/images/isokuva_kirves1.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vipukirves.fi&#x2F;images&#x2F;isokuva_kirves1.jpg</a>

This looks dangerous to me. I grew up in the mountains, and consider them my home. (The kind of place where the nearest walmart is an hour and a half drive away, and everyone shares their elk kills and logs and chops their own wood)<p>One of the most dangerous things an axe can do is go sideways on you on the hit, that sideways rebound or if the log falls away follow through can mean an axe in the foot or leg for someone who has been chopping for a few hours and is tired.<p>Also, proper drying of logs before splitting can&#x27;t always be done, and that log look <i>very</i> dry and doesn&#x27;t look knotty.<p>Honestly when I chop wood I keep three tools near, the normal sliceaxe, a skinny thin and fast one for easy stuff, a larger wedge with splitter arms (<a href="http://www.thehulltruth.com/attachments/dockside-chat/282042d1353172167-splitting-logs-1.jpg" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thehulltruth.com&#x2F;attachments&#x2F;dockside-chat&#x2F;282042...</a>) and a normal handless wedge and hammer for the really hard stuff.<p>Just thought I&#x27;d share a little bit of info from a guy who spent many hours in his youth chopping logs. If I was getting paid, I did sometimes cheat and use a gas powered splitter... if you have two people working it the throughput can be much higher than two people splitting normally.

A lot of folks here are claiming that the type of wood being split makes a huge difference and it&#x27;s true, however...<p>To address this the video should show him using both a conventional axe, and his version on the same wood. Apologies if he does this later in the video as I didn&#x27;t watch the entire thing.

This famous quotation kind of needs an update:<p><i>&quot;Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.&quot;</i> - Some Famous American Bloke

Knotted wood is much more challenging to split.<p>Even with a hydraulic splitter, chunks of wood with lots of branches can stall a machine pressing with tons of force. Great demo, but unrealistic unless you only chop beautiful limbless tall oaks.

That’s a typical tool one might find on Cool Tools: <a href="http://kk.org/cooltools/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;kk.org&#x2F;cooltools&#x2F;</a><p>They recently published a book wich is a lot of fun to browse through on a lazy afternoon.

if you ever tried to use an axe, the video in the article will look like sorcery.

This would hurt sooo many newbies... You&#x27;re much better off with a normal axe that won&#x27;t try to twist and jump out of your hand every single time.<p>For wood cutting, the size of the axe head matters a lot - too small and it doesn&#x27;t have enough force, too large and it gets stuck very easily.<p>The length of the handle is also important - you&#x27;ll fare much better with longer ones, but the longer it is, the harder it is to aim and control.<p>As with anything, practice is key, but I&#x27;m pretty sure you don&#x27;t want to start with this axe.

I&#x27;ve spent nearly every winter growing up swinging axes, and I cringed a bit when I saw him strike branches.<p>For the most part the axe does a wonderful job against anything, and that guy has ridiculously good aim, but anyone who have at some point been bad at chopping wood probably knows those twists to the side can do a real number on your wrists and hands. It seems to happen quite a bit.<p>It&#x27;s still an amazing innovation, and I hope to be able to pick one up as a gift. The article is sadly not very informative.

From the website, it looks like it costs $266. I think you&#x27;d have to being chopping a lot of wood for it to be worth it to get that expensive of an ax, even if it is better.

This may be an unpopular reply, but splitting fire wood sounds like you&#x27;re going to be making an open fire. Open fires are a danger to your health:<p><a href="http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-fireplace-delusion" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.samharris.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;item&#x2F;the-fireplace-delusion</a><p>&gt; &quot;The unhappy truth about burning wood has been scientifically established to a moral certainty: That nice, cozy fire in your fireplace is bad for you. It is bad for your children. It is bad for your neighbors and their children.&quot;<p><a href="http://www.epa.gov/burnwise/healtheffects.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.epa.gov&#x2F;burnwise&#x2F;healtheffects.html</a><p>&gt; &quot;Smoke is made up of a complex mixture of gases and particles produced when wood and other organic matter burn. A major health threat from smoke comes from fine particles (also called particle pollution, particulate matter, or PM). These microscopic particles can get into your eyes and respiratory system, where they can cause health problems such as burning eyes, runny nose, and illnesses such as bronchitis. In addition to particle pollution, wood smoke contains several toxic harmful air pollutants including: benzene, formaldhyde, acrolein and methane.&quot;

I am most impressed by the use of the tire to keep the wood upright and positioned.

First question of the FAQ...<p>&quot;Question 1: Can VIPUKIRVES™ be used by a woman?&quot;

This axe isn&#x27;t the only one that can deliver such a video. Good wood and a proper splitting axe allows similar results.<p>The tire trick, or a bungee cord, can allow big gains in speed.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvuibTcEdmg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gvuibTcEdmg</a>

I&#x27;m amazed how many of you have used an axe. Nothing to add, you all have said it all :)

For splitting wood from a fallen tree or cleaning up around the property a regular axe and splitting maul are fine. When I&#x27;ve had to split enough wood to burn for the winter I always just rent a hitch-mounted hydraulic splitter. 60 bucks and I can do 5 cords in day.<p>This tool could possibly take the place a of a splitting maul but a great advantage of the maul is it can be used to split knotty wood that doesn&#x27;t have straight grain. It takes a bunch of swings and force but does get the job done. With the wide head of the Vipukirv it wouldn&#x27;t be able to get down to the center of a half-split log.

25cm birch logs surely are fun to split. With any kind of axe.<p>We use to chop 1m (~3feet) logs of a lot more compact wood (oak, beech), and this looks like a toy to me. Has anyone seen it used on more serious logs?

It&#x27;s pretty easy to known who really knows how to split wood with any kind of axe. You start on the outside working your way in splitting off sections that look like they present the best chance to avoid a knot. Anything other than that is snake oil and bluster.<p>And no, I&#x27;m not buying one of these axes, a traditional splitting axe works very well. I don&#x27;t see how the featured axe could offer anything beyond the traditional since you aren&#x27;t constrained to a plumb blow as the marketing would have you to believe.

Neat idea and i&#x27;d love to try it but i&#x27;d need to see it side by side with a good maul which makes use of physics in a few ways.<p>Especially with dry lodge pole pine I can do about as well as the guy in the video does with my six pound maul and I&#x27;m our of practice though I split a lot of wood as a kid.<p>On a related note, I wonder if anyone on hacker news has a favorite wood stove...I&#x27;m really intrigued by the new efficient, low emission ones but they are costly and in depth reviews are sparse.

The key here is that the axe splits the wood rather than forcefully gets into the wood. Not sure how this is different? Try turning the wood on its side and see how the axe works then. By striking it parallel to the wood structure, it separates the wood from the point of impact. If one were to strike it orthogonal to the wood structure, this would be pretty pointless.

This makes me want to instrument my wood splitting. I suspect that I will find that improving the fast splitting is less important than avoiding or improving the outcomes for the toughest pieces to split.<p>A bit like finding that a faster cache that doesn&#x27;t reduce cache misses or the cost of cache misses can disappoint when measuring overall performance.

You can get the same effect using an angled strike with a regular axe, here&#x27;s some Russian dude demoing it with a big fresh pine log: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&amp;v=OsVvCQLx5QI#t=304" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?feature=player_detailpage&amp;v=Os...</a>

Is it just me or does it really look like an incisor?<p>I wonder if similar physical principles are at work in making their appearance similar.

This is one of those inventions, like the hot-air baloon, for which we had all the prerequisite technology for <i>ages</i>.

Looks like this is more primitive knowledge being rediscovered. Note how cavemen axes were stones tied to the side of a stick. <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/evidence-uncovered-of-worlds-oldest-violent-argument/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbsnews.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;evidence-uncovered-of-worlds-old...</a>

Accurate axeman, but with that kind of neat log I guess you can have the same results with a regular axe and a good technique.<p>It&#x27;s very hard to improve something that has been around for the past 35,000 years, I guess. Maybe they&#x27;re better of working on that car tire so that it can accomodate logs of different diameters.

there&#x27;s nothing new or innovative here. people have been doing this for years... it really depends on the KIND of wood you&#x27;re chopping. this guy has it down to an art: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vThcK-idm0" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=2vThcK-idm0</a>

<p><pre><code> Leveraxe is faster than a hydraulic splitter. </code></pre> Faster than a small one, maybe. The larger ones are pretty damn quick, as you&#x27;d want them to, for the price: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knZkc_vzGUE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=knZkc_vzGUE</a>

Off topic perhaps, but I switched from oil&#x2F;steam to gas forced hot air last year. Between the 96% efficient furnace and new gas hot water heater (compared with the 75% oil &#x2F; steam with super inefficient continuous hot water attachment) and the fracking boom, I can report that gas is much, much cheaper: for me $3500 -&gt; $700 &#x2F; year for a 1100 sq&#x2F;ft apartment near Boston.<p><a href="http://theenergycollective.com/lindsay-wilson/307486/heating-cost-comparison-oil-heat-vs-gas-heat-vs-electric-heat-prices" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theenergycollective.com&#x2F;lindsay-wilson&#x2F;307486&#x2F;heating...</a><p>A heat pump with ground heat-sink may be a better long term option, but it&#x27;s much more expensive. Also I&#x27;m pretty sure the gas is more efficient when considering the power plant and transmission line losses.<p>Even better would be a home gas co-generation plant. Honda has such a thing, but again not cheap:<p><a href="http://world.honda.com/powerproducts-technology/cogeneration/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;world.honda.com&#x2F;powerproducts-technology&#x2F;cogeneration...</a>

You know what really annoys me? People are now so used to gas starters or starter logs, that they don&#x27;t split their wood at all. Just pile up the whole pieces and try to start a fire. Then fight it for three hours and end up with smoke a bunch of half burnt wood.

Interesting cross between an axe and a froe. Gives you the levering action of a froe in one motion.

I needed to break up a bunch of concrete back in the day, so I bought a medium duty jackhammer. Later, I discovered the joy of easily splitting wood.

As a left-handed person: great, another lethal tool optimised for right-handed people and therefore more unwieldy and dangerous for us.

After awhile your hands will hurt. For few choppings per day maybe not bad, but price...

cool axe. FWIW, an easier&#x2F;more efficient way of keeping the wood together while spiting it is a bungie cord. Using a tire only works if you have a relatively big logs.

Such beauty in the simplicity of this concept!

Archimedes would approve.