Heart of the Wood
Specializing in reproductions of 17th century furniture and woodwork

Working-up stock from the log: the Riving Process

As mentioned elsewhere in these pages, joiners, turners, coopers and other woodworking artisans working in the colonies very often produced their own lumber directly from the tree, through a process called 'riving'. 

Riving is a controlled process of splitting.   It is a method that requires very high-quality trees, in order to achieve an efficient production in terms of both the artisans time and the amount of useful stock produced.  The following images will give you an idea of the process.

The process begins with a maul and iron or wooden wedges.  The lower parts of the freshly-felled tree trunk, which must be straight grained and free of knots, are first split in half. The white oak log Rob is splitting here, while beautifully straight and clear, is about as small a log as is usable for producing furniture stock.  Most often, we look for logs considerably larger than this, from 20" to 30" in diameter.

Splitting with the wedges continues, but the sections are always split in half: the whole becomes halves; 

the halves become quarters; the quarters, eighths, etc..

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