Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/12/11/lincoln-parenting.html
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Looks safer than the axe I used to use.
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This is my favorite (kid friendly) tool for splitting wood:
An amazing story of a young girl designing a tool that has been very successful commercially. I can’t recommend the tool enough. She designed it with safety in mind. There’s now two sizes to choose from.
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if you show them something that grabs their attention and you like like their skills it goes a whole new distance but comes with plenty of old objectivity
Interesting; I taught my kids wedge’n’sledge when they were too little to use a splitting maul or axe.
The only problem I see here is the limited size of log it will take… Most of the stuff I’m breaking up for fuel is bigger than that.
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I totally advocate for letting kids do things with some risk to it because as mentioned, it allows them to test their boundaries and limits, but also spurs creative problem solving. As a kid i spent a lot of time with my friends thinking up clever ways to do DYI forts, gadgets, traps, pranks, board games, etc.
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Photo courtesy of John Baldessari
As a child, I lived in Log Lady Country (quite literally). We used the wedge and sledge method as well. The hardwood Madrone was very popular as a quarter of a log would burn hard for hours. It is a twisty wood that routinely swallows wedges slammed in all the way to their head. More than once, I had to brush hot sparks out of my hair after a mighty slam of the sledgehammer would heat up the wedge.
Since these activities were conducted in a bathrobe in the dead of winter, frustration was common. Those holes punched in the wall of the garage were deliberate. That’s what you get for giving a kid a sledgehammer. This rig is a marked improvement over that and a future that childhood me could get behind.
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I support anything that makes children more productive. It’s time these pudgy freeloaders worked for their juice boxes and Pokemon.
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Children work together to rotate a ring, which acts as a lever, to slowly drive down a spring loaded axe into a log.
Now where’s the fun in that? If I was a kid I would want something more like a guillotine. Maybe with some lightning rods on top.
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I’m totally down with risky play being good for children, but since when is a log splitter designed to be safe for small children “risky”?
…or “play”, for that matter?
(Looks more like training for some factory treadmill job to me.)
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