No, as I said I used a tiny hatchet for that one - total weight 10oz, so it really is tiny. It was in response to someone making fun and asking just what i can split with a hatchet which looks like a child's toy. I did cheat and use a saw to cut a pole into lengths for wedges due to the tide coming in and time constraints. The broken stick on the left is the first baton which wasn't up to the job.
While such a tiny hatchet will obviously shape wedges, it does so best with narrow wedges - and better are thin but wide wedges. So with a leuku, because of the shape and wide blade I could have used it with a baton to make the cuts into the log. It would then have been better for shaping wider wedges far faster since being a knife with a long blade, it's better for slicing jobs.The wedges do need to be well shaped to pound in easily.
The short answer is that the leuku is a far more advanced woodworking tool than many would give it credit for. With any capable saw, a leuku and a baton made with the other tools, any log can be split.
The longer answer is that you sure wouldn't want to baton your leuku into a log and then get it stuck with tide coming in. No matter how your leuku is made, it will have flat sides which are concave and so a lip behind the shoulder of the cutting bevel. With its wider blade, a leuku is more work than a regular Mora, but you put a sheet of 350 grit emery on top of some dampened newspaper so things don't slip around or you get some rubber, then you just rub the FLAT (actually really concave) sides of your leuku on that until the scratches come to the middle of the flat. Now you just continue using your worn out (or finer) emery until things get shiny, and then you use some cardboard with green buffing compound until everything is as shiny as brand new. Yep it's a few hours, but it can be done without looking, so no huge imposition. Then your blade will work better and sure won't ever get stuck. Sucks to have pretty black forge scale on the sides though, and watch it go... You get over that when things work better.
So it's simply a case of, batton in a few pieces of super tough wood together? And you used the Leuku to do this? I NEED ONE!!!
Wedges work - on anything. Sometimes with that knotty piece of firewood that no-one has been able to split in a decade with anything - well they might take longer.
If you want to see fast with wooden wedges then consider that back in the old days trees were hauled in, then split with wooden wedges and the poll of the axe, before sectioning up. Using a metal axe poll removes a lot of the elasticity issues and an axe being well balanced... Well since I never bet I had to see how fast I could split a log that way. I guess it's a bit bigger, but was split in a fraction of the time, and this is seasoned driftwood.
As I recall that was my first splitting experiment, and it's a wonder that the split is so straight with so few poor wedges. Good enough for firewood, though! And with a saw and leuku I could have done a better job, if more slowly on the slightly bigger log. Or one twice or many times the diameter. The pictures are just to say that I'm not making this stuff up as I go along. With someone tossing me wedges a couple of feet long by 6" and thin and well made, that log in five to ten minutes, and better split.
All the time I learn stuff about the leuku I've faithfully carried for over a decade. In a short while I'll be using one to process the few salmon I keep. I could never have imagined a leuku used to process fish but then I was watching an old Scandi film about a boy who goes to visit his relatives at a farm with a cursed burial mound.. It took me a while to learn to use a regular Mora for fish processing, and I guess it'll take me longer to figure the leuku - but apparently it does work..
I've got a lot of knives still, but it's hard to think of a larger blade which would be so easy to carry as a leuku yet accomplish so much at so many varied tasks.
