Trego's Mountain Ear

I have been splitting wood with my Monster Maul for the better part of fifty years.  It’s solid, still works good, and I don’t think they make them anymore – at least the new similar units I see online have shorter handles.  Mine looks like this: 

Like I said, it works fine.  It’s just that, at 75, I don’t.  A bit of arthritis at the base of the thumbs leaves me feeling like I have two sprained wrists when I swing it.  The neuropathy that came along with surviving cancer means I have to swing it 8 or 10 times before it splits the stove wood.  So I finally gave in and bought a powered wood splitter.

My wife helped with the market research – but I didn’t get one with all the bells and whistles.  Just your basic, everyday, run of the mill, imported from China wood splitter – it looks something like this:

That’s the photo on the website where it’s advertised.  7 horsepower, 10 tons of force, and now that the power is coming from a gasoline engine, with no arthritis or neuropathy, I’m splitting logs into smaller pieces again.  I didn’t realize that with the physical decline I was accepting bigger pieces that made feeding the stove more – much more – challenging.

Somehow, my chainsaws got harder to start.  Years ago, I picked up a little Stihl Easy2Start – it’s too small to be a serious chainsaw, but it is easy to start.  Jed picked me up a Harbor Fright battery saw – and it’s not bad, but two batteries are good for somewhere around a half of a pickup load of firewood.  I think it’s the same problem that electric pickups have – it just takes too much weight in batteries to get all the work I want it to do done.  My grammar checker doesn’t like that phrase, but I’m writing about tools that make it easier to get tasks completed.

A full description of Stihl’s Easy2Start feature is at STIHL Easy2Start™ Product Technology & Features – I’m not sure I understand everything that makes it work, but I suspect all I need to know is that it works for me.

Since I’d liked my Stihl 250 before the compression got stronger than my arm, I stopped by Eureka Hardware to see if they had anything like that in an EZ start version.  They did.  I brought this little darling home:

It’s a MS251 CB-E – same power as my old 250, slightly larger displacement, and the big E stands for Easy2Start.  I’m on my fifth tank of gas, and it has been great to be able to start a chainsaw again (I have to bring my old 250 in alongside the woodstove and warm it up, and take two ibuprofens to get it to start . . . sometimes)  It takes better tools to make up for the infirmities of old age – but it’s a wonderful world where those tools are available.