The devil’s wood...... sweet gum

[Wolfmanjack]

So most of my wood that I cut last fall is full of worms, so depressing.  I watched the fire hardening dvd and saw that they made a bow from sweet gum that seemed to perform pretty damn well.  Sweet gum grows like a weed on my little piece of southwest Mississippi.  So i made a quick trip up there last night and cut a few trees this morning.  I got two decent hickory logs and 10 sweet gum logs.  I made it back home in time to start working on splitting the logs.

Sweet gum is damn near impossible to split!  I mean it’s bad.  I’m slap worn out and only got a couple split and ruined one for sure.  I’m going to try a skill saw full length up and down both sides tomorrow afternoon before I attempt to split the rest.  I got all the ends sealed up so I think I can finish this tomorrow right?

Any tips to dealing with this devil wood?

[dylanholderman]

rip it in half with a chainsaw 

[Deerhunter21]

find your local teens that are honest and give em 10 bucks to split it! 

[Hamish]

+1 for quartering it with a chainsaw.

[sleek]

Be warned, it LOVES to prop twist.

[spyder1958]

Very hard lite wood, was used for gun stocks back in the day. I have a few staves I cut a few years ago but haven't worked it yet. made a mallet some years back and it takes a beating.

[Dances with squirrels]

I have a stave of it in a corner somewhere, but never used it because it's light as a feather. Figured it wasn't much good. Anybody make any good hunting weight bows with it that weren't 3" wide?

[Eric Krewson]

I learned long ago, a big log of anything wasn't worth my time or the wear and the tear on my old beat up body to split, I get my chainsaw out.

I had a brother-in-law with MS that burned wood for heat, people would drop off firewood lengths of trunks for him to burn, I ended up splitting all of it.

One day someone dropped of a load of sweet gum. I spent half a day trying to split this stuff and only got through a few pieces. I abandoned that project, that wood was probably still there when he died.

I watched the fire hardened bow video as well, I have a nice sweet gum picked out near my house to cut. A wedge will never touch the trunk, only my chainsaw and later my bandsaw.

I always halve a log with my chainsaw now, you will lose a little wood occasionally by not following the grain on osage, not so on hickory most of the time. I have so much wood at my disposal a little loss is a good trade off for the economy of effort.  I have beat on dozens of large osage logs in my younger days but have no interest in doing the same now. The halves are relatively easy to split the conventional way.

Here is how I split hickory staves.

[Eric Krewson]

I cut my hickory staves 2 1/2" wide so I have a little wiggle room if there's a snake in the grain.

Here is another example, this cedar log is too big for me to get on my 4 wheeler, a chalk line and my chainsaw make it more manageable. As you can see, I have already halved the top log. Most of this log went to making tillering gizmos I got a few clear staves out of it. This stuff has been on the ground for at least 30 years but is very sound. My first bow attempt was hickory backed, the hickory failed, my next will be bamboo backed.

[Wolfmanjack]

The devil doesn’t give up his skin easily.  So I was advised cut your bow wood in the spring.  The bark will slip right off the wood.  While this seems to be the case with hickory it is certainly not the case with devil wood. 

Running a skill saw up and down the log sure makes it a lot easier to split though.