I waited all week long to try out my new toy. Although I wanted to cut and split some wood first thing Saturday, I postponed my gratification while I moved the dirt pile and moved the trailer. Then I got to do the stuff I was really looking forward to doing.
I hooked the log splitter onto the tractor and pulled it to the spot I would be cutting and splitting. Near the house we had a small maple and a dead oak on the ground that needed cleaning up. I also had a stack of hickory that needed splitting.
I had decided that I wanted to mix the types of wood on the pallet so I cut up into 3 pieces a pine log that was sitting beside our driveway close to the property entrance. I used my new log roller tool to roll the knotty pine log over without much effort at all. There was also a smaller log of unknown species, might be chestnut oak but I'm not sure, lying beside the pine tree that I cut in pieces. I stacked the logs on the forks and brought them home.
At the splitter I cut the logs into 18" pieces. I made a 4 1/2 foot measuring stick for cutting the logs. I've found that irregular length firewood pieces can make stacking difficult, especially if you have pieces that are fairly short. I'm not very good yet at eyeballing the lengths; that's why I made the measuring stick. The firewood veterans out there are probably rolling their eyes reading this. That's fine; my log pieces are all the same length.
After cutting up the maple, oak, pine, and other misc dead wood, I was ready to start splitting. Darkness was approaching; I really wanted to get all the newly cut logs split plus some of the existing hickory. The splitter was empty of gas so I filled it up using my government required "spill proof" gas can nozzle on the gas can. As I tried to use the nozzle which requires continuously pulling on an outside sheath with one hand while pouring gas, I succeeded in spilling gas all over the splitter and the ground. The "spill proof" nozzle is so awkward to use, it has increased 10 fold the likelyhood that I will spill gasoline. That's what you get when you have beaurocrats in an office mandating rules and regulations for equipment the beaurocrats have no personal experience using themselves.
The 27 ton Troy-Bilt splitter with a Briggs and Stratton gas engine started on the first pull. My wife took pictures as I split the first log. The splitter worked great without any issues. The splitter was easy to operate and everything was laid out in a fairly ergonomic fashion. The primary thing I would like would be a bigger cradle for catching the log pieces. When I split a log in half, one of the two pieces was very likely to fall off the cradle onto the ground. So after splitting up the first half, I would have to lift the second half off the ground onto the splitter to split it into smaller pieces.
I stacked the pallet as I split the wood. As darkness fell, I finished splitting all my new log pieces and a few pieces of the hickory. I was able to split a pallet of wood much faster and easier than I did last week when splitting by hand. Also, I was much less tired out using the log splitter. However, at the end of the day, my back still knew I was cutting and splitting wood.