[mauvehaus]

Vertical splitters are better since the splitter comes down to ground level where your rounds already are. Much less lifting.

I'm not super quick with a maul, but I can pretty easily keep up with the hydraulic splitter I've used. The hydraulic splitter is nice for the ones that have really gnarly, interlocked grain.

[bluGill]

Until you get a log so tough, it just stalls up when you draw a splitter. Happened more than once. Usually the log is stuck so far in the wedge you can't get it off either.

[mauvehaus]

Yikes. That sounds like the kind of lesson one tries to learn secondhand, or at most once. Like the time I stalled out a tow-behind wood chipper (the kind tree services use).

It was a smaller one, and the process for getting the log out involved taking the jack off the trailer tongue and hooking it up to the feed roller springs assembly to spread the rollers far enough to pull the log out.

[bluGill]

When I was a kid Dutch Elm disease was killing all the elm trees around me so that is what everyone was heating with. An elm log that is just large enough you need to split it can stall out a wood splitter (not every time, but you will get several in a day of splitting). When splitting by hand it is common to have the handle of the maul sticking out of the log and you can't see it from the top where it went in, you just keep beating it hoping it eventually goes.

Then we got a large oak tree once, logs you couldn't even life split clean when you barely did more than blow on them.