Roadiepig's Fotothing

Close-up of the bark on a persimmon tree that Codeman and I cut down a couple of weekends ago. The texture of the bark reminds me of alligator skin ;-)

The tree was dead and had been dropping major limbs for some time, so it had to be dropped. Standing in the front yard of a farmer/ co-worker friend of mine, I was hesitant to keep any of this wood for my fireplace. I read several places online that persimmon is one of the hardest woods to split. Since I do all of my firewood splitting by hand (using a monster maul), I really don't want to deal with anything too tough to take down to pieces.

We dropped this 60' tall tree, and when it hit the ground the section where the tree had died and had hollowed out split into pieces. We brought the maul with us, so Codeman took a swing at one of the log-sized section I cut off of the solid portion of the tree. It broke into 3 perfect pieces.

When we arrived at my friend's house, I planned on cutting this tree up as a favor for him, letting him haul the logs away with a tractor, and then heading to his back acreage to cut up some more desirable wood. We ended up hauling a full pickup load of the persimmon instead.

One more thing- persimmon ha two types of wood. The outer portion is light in color, and it splits very easily.

The "heartwood" is almost black in color, and THAT'S the hard-as-Hell portion of the tree to split. It was the main wood used in the manufacture of wood driver golf clubs up until the invention of metal "woods" a few years back, mainly because the wood was so dense that it gave the golfer extra distance on their swing. Luckily for me, only a small portion of the heartwood was left (the rest had rotted away, leaving the center of the tree hollow). Splitting what heartwood I ended up with was , as advertised, very hard to do....