Hard Graft

Whew I've spent most of the morning splitting the biggest log.
It just didn't want to start at one end and was spitting around with rings rather than across. (You can just see what I mean in the pic, bottom left)
The other end eventually started to split, but you can see from the pic it took an axe, sledgehammer and an old axe head used as a starting wedge to set it off.
The original end was still problematic as there were a couple of BIG knots there, so there was a fair bit of axe work to finally separate the two halves.
One half is all big knots and is just waste, the other half will be run through the bandsaw to make two quarters, there should be at least two good staves.

I've tidied up the split face with a power planer to help it run across the bandsaw table without snagging or twisting too much.

Once I've sawn it, I'll paint the ends with PVA and store it for a year.
They say a year per inch of thickness, so the more it's reduced by sawing the quicker it seasons.

You can see the good half is realtively knot free.
Theoretically it could be cut in 3, but there are a couple of old knots in the centre so I'll saw it down the middle which is much easier, it's also better to have two pieces with some spare width to work with, than 3 staves which are too narrow to be any good.