Comment by mindslight

I'm right there with you. I've manually split wood with wedges when I was a kid. It was tedious. Now I just use the wedges for felling the trees. I get enough exercise from the stacking.

I've always felt the attraction to manual splitting was some idyllic vision of country life, backed up by the movie trope where characters are having "alone time" but still "being strong". I'd be interested to hear if anyone in this thread burns a significant amount of wood (say 4 cords), and actually splits it all by hand.