Gotta agree with you there, log splitters rule. We got a little 4 ton electric one for my mom, and on some pieces it would stall. I thought, what a wimpy thing, but then hitting those pieces it wouldn't split with an axe, I realized, those were really hard to split pieces.
Just growing up in the 80s we didn't have one cause my dad didn't believe in them.
Looks like its coded by someone who has never split firewood.
The challenge is not deciding where to split, its executing the split. Like hitting the same gap if it doesn't split, deciding orientation to aoid knots, figuring out how to put it on end if it wasn't cut straight.
And some of the cuts it allowed me would hit the ax handle on another part, the shock from that damages the ax handle and is painful on the hands.
And then there's the lifting the stuck block by the axe and hitting it axe side down to finish the split instead of pulling the stuck axe out.
So the simulation handles none of the challenges of splitting wood.
I love it also, but I think the comments are pointing to an unmet need for firewood splitting simulators.
The comments are suggesting that someone could go to town adding different kinds of hatchets, mauls, axes, woods, and different swings, and people would eat it up.
Yes, but obviously this toy faces a challenge when folks who take this stuff seriously walk by. I immediately want a bungee to put around it so the wood doesn't go everywhere. I also want to split it finer than in quarters. Had to nope out.
Well, what about when you get into a piece of apple wood, and as soon as you hit it, carpenter ants boil out of it, all over your chopping block, up the handle of your axe, and you don't even realize 3 or 4 of them got up your pant-legs until suddenly your shins feel like they've been hit with white phosphorous rounds?
That would be pretty hard to simulate. Guess they had to stop somewhere
Experienced wood splitter here. All your points are valid. I had to ruin one perfectly good axe handle before I learned how to swing. However, the sim is still a lot of fun.
> I had to ruin one perfectly good axe handle before I learned how to swing.
Is it really that difficult? Maybe my memory is vague, but chopping wood in autumn/fall for the winter just took a bunch of time, and wasn't very fun, but wasn't that bad, especially compared to other things like harvesting veggies stuff where you have to be on the ground. I'm not sure how you'd manage to ruin a axe handle before understanding how to do it well-enough, takes a couple of swings at max.
I think it very much depends on the wood too, the species and how seasoned it is and how dry it is. Some chunks you can hit it almost anywhere and it will cleave across the entire block, but other woods you will hit a half inch in from the edge of the bark and the board will split under the blade and let it through, but leave a half inch near the edge unsplit that the axe handle hits with full force. Do it enough times and the front edge of the handle can get messed up.
Sometimes you will see wire or something else wrapped up near the top of the handle for that reason to help protect it a bit. But if you get enough practice you can reliably hit with the bottom half or quarter of the axe sticking out of the log so that can't happen.
I spent a summer chopping a whole bunch of wood with a steel handled 10 lb maul. Many was the evening where my hand was numb until the morning, but by the end of the summer my shoulders were ripped.
You quickly learn the differences between locust, pine, maple, oak or, god forbid, cherry.
I see a lot of people that split infrequently use mauls. But personally I think an axe works better once you get a bit of practice. The trick with the axe a lot of people miss at first is to focus on the swing speed, and not as much as delivering force and mass behind the blow. Some species the maul can work better, but 90% of the time I feel like an axe is just a bit less effort and a bit quicker.
I have a few black wattle rounds that have been sitting around for years. I have a go at them whenever I feel like I need to be humbled. There's also a fallen tree at the bottom of our property that blunts chainsaws. It's been there for years and nothing seems to eat it. I harvest what I can from it, and a good sized chunk will burn through the night.
I once took a sledgehammer to work so everyone could take a turn taking a whack at some old prototypes outside. I came to the sad realization that even hitting a particular spot with a sledgehammer is not an inate skill. If you've never done it, you miss!
My experience was a year spent working as a forester. One of our duties was to keep the wood burning stoves supplied. I remember learning that ash got its name from the fact that it burned so well, and willow left perfect charcoal.
As for the axe handle… I was told off by my boss for mashing up the handle by my constant missing. Even now, I am the same with hammers and nails - not nearly as sure with my aim as I should be. On the plus side That was also the time I learned how to replace an axe handle. also the time that
Same. I've only done it a couple times but it takes minutes to learn and you just get into a rhythm and keep going. It's like peeling potatoes.
I wonder if there's a name for the psychological phenomenon of people doing some trivial blue-collar-ish task and then dramatizing it to make themselves sound like a grizzled old hand.
You don't wear it out. You land the head long of your aim point, and splinter the handle on whatever you were trying to hit. It's certainly not hard to ruin a handle if you're learning to swing a sledge by driving steel splitting wedges.
There's a huge difference between say, weilding a hatchet on a camping trip, and trying to get the hang of a splitting axe, with a 3ft or longer handle, when you're a kid. Getting a long, sweeping arc that comes down in the right spot isn't easy and if the axe head's centrifugal force pulls it away from you, you clunk the handle down on the wood. I definitely recall my hands ringing and numb from those kinds of impact. I don't remember ruining a handle, but if it had been my chore, I think I could've come close.
> There's a huge difference between say, weilding a hatchet on a camping trip, and trying to get the hang of a splitting axe, with a 3ft or longer handle, when you're a kid.
Fiberglass handles are now standard on splitting mauls (for this reason).
Rotten hearts, or driving wedges. It is easy to miss a swing by an inch or two when fatigued.
Edit: I also broke my first axe handle. The sibling comments here are wild.
It's perfect because the kind of people who will enjoy it shouldn't be allowed near an axe, anyway.
As someone with a wood stove, for my first few chops I rotated the log to orient the checking. Then it dawned on me that the simulation likely wasn't that sophisticated, and I came here to meet up with you guys.
A downside of profile shift is that you get away from the pitch diameter. At the pitch diameter, there's no friction on the teeth, the further away you get, the more friction.
But any hand drill will have a gear with less than ten teeth cut into the motor's shaft to drive the first gear, and they work just fine.
Positive profile shift on the smaller gear is actually usually how you optimize for minimum sliding/friction. The smaller the number of teeth, the higher your profile shift should be to avoid bad sliding at the start of the mesh.
Pitch point is where you have no sliding or friction which is where the operating pitch diameters are tangent, not where the individual gears have their reference diameter. (Operating pitch diameter can be slightly different from reference diameter depending on the sum of the profile shift coefficients)
The bottleneck with the pointer table may be the summation.
While the fetches of elements can be parallelized, the summation can not, as the addition depends on the result of the previous addition being available.
Some experiments I have done with something that does summation showed a considerable speedup by summing odd and even values into separate bins. Although this applies only to doing something not too closely resembling signal processing algorithms, as the compiler can otherwise optimize out for that.
Part of my video titled "new computers don't speed up old code"
An interesting aspect is data dependencies. If your next statement reuses data you just computed, that can cause pipeline bubbles, as that result you want to use just isn't available yet. I dived into that topic for a video about relative performance of old PCs I just published today.
Yes, there is non-obvious structure in some algorithms solely for the purpose of turning a single logical stream of dependent instructions into multiple concurrent streams of dependent instructions running through the same pipeline. The caveat of doing this, of course, is that it typically increases register pressure.
Disappointed to see the dots around it all appear to be the same spacing. They should be at different spacing, corresponding to strobe sync with 50 and 60 hz mains and 33.33 and 45 RPM. Hence four rings with different number of dots around the perimeter.
Hmm. If the diameter of the circle that the car drives in is 14 meters, that works out as ... 54657 mph. I cannot endorse this from a safety standpoint.
Wait, no, I was working in km instead of m, it's only 54 mph. Should be fine.
I'm sure they would not have been less than £850 in whatever currency it was sold in back then, inflation adjusted. But the justification was much better than being a fidget toy.
Update it with USB so that it can take input and return results. Hook it up to a cash register for something like an antique store. Ideally one selling small items so that the customer can marvel at the display adding things up.
I also have always wanted one of those mechanical vintage cash registers, for the same reason I have always wanted a Curta. They always seemed like they would be fun to play with.
I could probably get one of those cash registers to play with for not a ton of money, but my house isn't huge and it's hard to justify the space.
I wrote the calculator for the original blackberry. Floating point won't do. I implemented decimal based floating point functions to avoid these rounding problems. This sounds harder than it was, basically, the "exponent" part wasn't how many bits to shift, but what power of two to divide by, so that 0.1, 0.001 etc can be represented exactly. Not sure if I had two or three digits of precision beyond whats on the display. 1 digit is pretty standard for 5 function calculators, scientific ones typically have two.
It was only a 5 function calculator, so not that hard, plus there was no floating point library by default so doing any floating point really ballooned the size of an app with the floating point library.
The JVM based devices came years later. This was around 1998, with the 386 based blackbery pager that could only do emails over Mobitex, no phone calls. It even looked like a pager. At the time, phones were not so dominant, data switched over mobile only existed on paper, and two-way paging looked like it had a future. So we totally killed the crude 2-way paging networks that were out there. And RIM successfully later made the transition to phone networks. Wasn't till iPhone and android that RIM ran into trouble.
Cutting away a lot with a router is a slow, noisy and dusty process. Less work to just glue together the channels out of smaller pieces of wood. Also, that way you can take individual pipes out and tweak them (called voicing).
Another thing to be wary of -- pipes too close together sometimes pull together in pitch if both are played at the same time.
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