I addressed the wedge issue on that thread, so won't do so here again.. But thanks for coming on board with your thoughts.
I made some drawings, but I need to be getting to bed here soon so I am not going to scan and post them now. They detail just how it is that you can chap smaller timbers out of a large log, if you were really good I suppose you could apply this technique to chopping out lumber as well (which I understand people did in fact do) By doing this, you have surprisingly little waste coming out of your logs.
Pretty much what you do is chop out roughly rectangular timbers by causing 2 splits to go into the log at a right angle to each other. The trick here is the control the direction of the split by cutting a well devised wedge out of the log, and then causing the split to go precisely the right depth. These timbers are a little bit bigger than the finished product, so you must hew them down to the final size.
When you do this, each log will yield several timbers and there is some odd shaped waste material that is perfect for making brace stock and boards or other such.
Another method is to split out what I might call 'quartered timbers' I invented this method when making bowstaves out of oversized trees as a method of yielding the most useable wood out of a single tree. I am sure I am not the first person to ever do this, but I came up with the idea without learning it from anyone else.
You start out by quartering the log, or otherwise sectioning it out into fractional sized pieces.
The next step is to take the quarters and split them in halves or even thirds between growth rings, so that one half contains the heart section and the other contains the sapwood.
Then oftentimes the outer split section can be spit into 2 sections as well.
It is advisable to split off the innermost wedge of the portion of the quartered log heartward, so that this wood can be used for other things.
You now have 3 rough timbers that can be hewn to size.
This of course can be modified to yield blanks of different sizes.
I came up with this method with bowstaves, allowing me to cut 3 blanks from a single wedge of wood where using other methods I would have got 1.
The first method allows you to get more useable wood out of s single timber (less waste) but the second method is far easier and faster, and is more likely to yield the desired results. So the method used is determined by what you have more of, time of material...
DLB
With this method
