Shingles, shakes, bardeaux...

And lots of other names. I'm doing thousands of them at the moment and my wrists hurt. They've been traditionally used all over the world for hundreds, probably thousands of years and since there's plenty of overgrown sweet chestnut coppices around here, some of us keep'em going.

There are many techniques depending on the wood, the size of the log and the shingles and the tools available. I personnally use 3 tools (froe, mallet and axe), simple and in the end, quite efficient. And I like to split radially. It saves wood, is very satifying and looks rather good.

First, half, then quarter, 8th, 16th and one or two parallel splits.

That process takes 10mn and is highly satifying. Unfortunately, the biggest amount of work has still to come.

Hop, it opens like a flower and it takes a bit of axing each individual wooden tile to make them useable.