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A homestead runs on hand tools. Not exclusively, and not romantically, but practically. The guy who heats his home with wood, processes his own timber, manages his land, and does not want to depend on a machine for every job that a good axe can handle needs to think carefully about what goes in the tool shed and in what order. This is not a list of every axe ever made. It is a practical guide to building a homestead axe kit from scratch, starting with the first tool you should own and working through what to add as your...

Before the chainsaw existed, every tree that came down came down by hand. Men felled timber for a living with nothing but an axe and the technique to use it well. That technique was learned carefully because the consequences of getting it wrong are serious and immediate. Felling a tree with an axe is not complicated, but it is also not something you improvise. There is a specific process with specific steps in a specific order, and each one exists for a reason. This guide covers that process for small trees, which for the purpose of this article means trees...

Most people learn to split wood the same way. They watch someone do it once, or they figure it out through trial and error. They develop habits that work well enough, and over time those habits become invisible. The guy who learned to swing with a death grip on the handle keeps swinging with a death grip on the handle for twenty years because it gets the wood split and nobody told him there was a better way. There is a better way. Splitting firewood well is a skill, and the technique that experienced splitters use is faster, easier on...

The Fiskars IsoCore maul is the most purchased splitting maul in America by a wide margin. You can find it at every Home Depot, Lowe's, and hardware store in the country. It is consistently reviewed well. It has genuine engineering behind it and it works. If you own one and like it, you are not wrong. We carry the Council Tool Ol' No. 7 at Whiskey River and not the Fiskars. Here is the honest breakdown of what each tool does, where each one has the edge, and why we made the choice we did. What Fiskars Gets Right The...

Most guys who split firewood regularly never touch the edge on their maul. They figure a splitting maul is a blunt instrument, it drives wood apart by force, and keeping it sharp is for guys who do not understand how splitting works. That thinking is mostly right and partly wrong, and the partly wrong part is costing them work. Here is what sharp actually means on a splitting maul, when it matters, and how to fix the edge in ten minutes when it needs it. What a Splitting Maul Is Actually Doing A splitting maul does not cut wood. It...