It's been a couple years now and this thing has just been great. I glued some rubber feet to it so I can use it right on the concrete in my shop and in just a couple of minutes I can make enough kindling to light fires in my shop woodstove for the whole month.

Nah man, I just make my kids do it. They're closer to the ground. ;-)

Yep. You are officially a Dad.

We burn wood for supplemental heat most of the winter. It only takes a few sticks of kindling to get each fire started so we've only had to use the kindling splitter about once a year to make a pile of kindling that will get us through the winter. We have a 37 ton hydraulic log splitter to take care of the big rounds. I actually put some rubber pads on the bottom of the kindling splitter to keep it from walking around. I like your idea of welding a tab to it to bolt it down, but portability has proven to be a pretty nice features. We just throw it in the back of the trailer when we go camping. I'm not sure it would work in a scaled up size as a hand tool. The larger wood pieces would need an equally larger amount of force from the hammer end to get them to split. This seems to work really well on pieces that are too small to stand up on their own after you split the log with an axe. That's kind of the rule of thumb with this thing; I'll split a log until I have pieces that are too small to stand on their own and then I'll have the kids make those pieces into kindling. We get a little assembly line going like that and we can make a lot of kindling in a short amount of time. If you want to make enormous amounts of kindling there are hydraulic splitters that have multiple blades that can turn a round into multiple pieces, not just split it in half. That might be the way to go for making huge quantities of kindling. But like I said before, we can make a season's worth of kindling in about an hour with three of us doing a little assembly line.

Ah, I see your use for it now, portability. For me, it would work at the same spot always. I like the idea of 2x blades..tx for the insightful info.take care 😀

I hear ya! (But I built it for my kids to use. They are much shorter than me so it'll work out just fine!)

I wondered/worried about that when I built it, but after using it for a year, what we've found is that your hand never even gets close. When the hammer hits the wood, it drives it down and past your hand. You would have to hold the wood tight enough to carry your hand down with the wood to the blade, and that would take a LOT of grip strength when you're hitting the wood with a small sledge (body in motion, body at rest...etc.) Beyond that, the upper frame keeps the hand from going down. I was more worried about whacking my wrist on the frame, but I've never once hit my wrist or hand on the frame hard enough for me to take notice. The design really turned out to work quite well. My kids use it as a team with one holding the wood and the other using the tiny sledge. They've split a TON of kindling in the last year and not one mishap. It looks dangerous AF, but in practice it's been just about perfect... I was originally going to make a top plate with a hole just big enough for certain size pieces to be lowered in or even supported, but after using it for this long, I've found there's just no need.

Why?

@@WheeliePete I would be over more than you would like, Getting you to build me stuff! Ha!

@@charlescoker7752 Whew...I thought for a second you might be one of "those" neighbors who would call the cops for me welding outside or something. (I once had a bad neighbor who would call the city on me all the time for working on loud projects in my garage. Eventually moved out to the country to solve that problem!) :0))

@@WheeliePete some people seems to be very active, when the normal one's need silence for private life and sleep. Are you one of those?

Yes. I need six hours of sleep and have no "relax" setting.

It's low for me, but that was just a test run. It's perfect height for my kids to operate! :-)