1 Mar., 1899.] QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. 181 
In the evening he told me he had run out 47. Next day I showed him 
how to go to work properly, and the result was over 260 by teatime. After 
that he did still better. As with shingles, so with palings. ‘They may be run 
off on the halving principle or singly. I once had a fancy for stringy-bark 
palings, so I dropped a fine big stringy-bark tree near my house, and worked at 
it from daylight to dark. It was a splendid running tree, and I took off the 
palings one by one, and rarely spoilt one. All were beautifully straight and 
thin. It was almost as quick as getting shingles, and they made a beautiful 
fence. Once the billets were split, there was really no hard work about it; but 
it was hard to get the neighbours to believe the quantity I turned out in a 
long day. Ishall not state here how many I averaged daily ; I should be set 
down as a second de Rougemont. 
STAVES. 
Staves are usually got from the silky oak (G@revillea robusta). No 
adequate idea can be formed of the silky oak by looking at the specimens 
growing round about the city on the poor shaly soil of most of our gardens. 
Even in the Botanic Gardens the specimens are gnarled and knotted, and 
would be quite useless for the splitter’s purpose. But in the dense scrubs 
they present a good, clean trunk, devoid of knots and branches for many feet. 
Unlike the bard woods, they are generally easy to burst. Staves, of course, 
are of varying lengths—there is no rule as to that. The cooper states what 
length he wants. But they must be of good thickness to allow for a liberal 
use of the spokeshave or dressing-knife. Two inches 1s a fair average thickness, 
They are not run out like rails, palings, &c., but are taken the bursting way. 
The reason for this is that, when a cask is made, the bilge will not flake off, as 
it would do if they were split with the grain. There is a tough timber in our 
serubs called “hickory,” but it is not at all like the American hickory. A. 
cooper in Brisbane many years ago asked me to get him 200 hickory staves. 
The order was completed, and I subsequently saw several good-looking 
hogsheads made from these staves. No further order, however, was given for 
hickory staves. Some two years later I had occasion to buy several casks for 
molasses. ‘he casks duly arrived. When they were filled it was found that 
the staves peeled off, and the casks looked ragged and broken. They were the 
identical casks made from my hickory staves. No wonder that cooper did not 
want to make any more experiments. 
SPOKES. 
There is little to be said about splitting spokes. They are burst off in the 
same way as staves, but they may also be run out. A mate of minein Victoria 
got an order for spokes, and we cruised about the bush looking for a suitable 
tree. We found a magnificent ironbark which promised to be hollow, so we 
dropped the tree, and found it to be so hollow that there were only about 7 or 
8 inches of solid wood clear of sap. It was a great windfall. We simply 
placed the blocks on end, and with a single wedge burst off spoke after spoke ; 
when we had worked up the whole tree, which was about 50 feet from the 
ground to the first limb, we ran the sap and heart off each, leaving a lot of 
neat spokes from 4: to 5 inches square. Such luck, however, does not always 
happen. 
MORTICING. 
For cutting the oblong holes in posts for the reception of rails, an instru- 
ment called a morticing axe is used. ‘This is a narrow implement about 15 
inches long and 14 inches broad, with a stout eye into which is fixed a short; 
straight handle. The post to be morticed is laid across two logs, or on a heap 
of other posts. The work is begun by cutting out a piece transversely 
at one end of the proposed hole, 2 inches, wide and about 6 inches from the top 
of the post. A similar piece is taken ont at the other end of the hole, 4 or 5 
inches from the first cut. Now, if the axe is driven straight into the post 
