A quick fun project for a hobbyist fabricator is to make a little fire wood splitter. It will be perfect for chopping up kindling for both the wood stove and your campfires. To build this firewood splitter we just need a few simple materials. Most importantly you’ll need at least a half inch thick piece of steel that you’ll be able to grind down and form your cutting edge from. We then need another piece of steel plate to form our base and then some rod and tube to create the support frame.
First you’re going to put the 12-inch disc sander through a workout roughing in a cutting edge. Once the general shape is in the metal you want to hard face it with weld. For this process we used the Elite MP200i. Make sure you lay weld beads on both sides and then you can come back and do your final sanding. That process is going to leave us with a hardened steel edge that’s going to hold its shape and resists any bending or warpage.
Next you need to make the base. We used the benchtop band saw to cut our raw materials to length. With all your pieces you can begin to weld everything together. Because we’re welding dissimilar thickness metals you want to make sure that you focus the weld primarily on the thicker steel plate so the heat goes into the thick plate and you’ll get good penetration while also not warping too much of the thin plate at the bottom.
Next you want to make an 8inch by 10 inch frame. Start by doing all of your forming before you cut everything to size. By doing it this way you leave some extra material on the ends that may be needed for the bend radii.
Once all of the tubing is bent and everything is assembled you can put a quick coat of 2K Chassis Black paint on everything. In the end you have a wood splitter that’s very easy to use. You just put a piece of wood on top hit it with a heavy hammer and it splits the wodod and it stays right there for you to be able to pick up. In the end it’s definitely safer, quicker, and easier!