10 ton manual wood splitter, convert to run on remotes

[pycoed]

I see you are from the UK.

Not sure what the used market over there is like. But here....I could probably put you on half a dozen 3ph splitters in the $300 range within a 50 mile radius.

At one time....you could buy a new one for $600 all day long at places like TSC or rural king here in the states. Not sure if covid has changed that.

I think a standard 3Point splitter goes for between £350-550 second hand, so I agree if you are starting from scratch to buy an RSJ, plates & angle iron, cylinder, valve & lines it makes much more sense to buy a used one.
If you have a supply of what my wife calls "scrap" & I call "stock" plus a workshop lathe/mill/welders & plenty of time (I am long retired), then perhaps it makes a little more sense. I already had a suitable cylinder & hydraulic pipes plus the little manual splitter off Ebay for £12. That works quite well by the way for the sort of stuff I usually split - (4-9" hardwood from hedgelaying - I don't think there's much hedgelaying in US - have a look online - it's quite a pleasant way to spend winter days).
However I used it in the back of my Truckster & it seemed silly not to try to use the Truckster hydraulics to power it. Same sort of thinking as the OP... but I soon realised that the jack would be more trouble than it was worth to convert to external oil pressure (though apparently some people have done it to bottle jacks on Youtube)
Anyway, I now have a useful portable splitter (plus a 2 stage jack to complement tha garage setup), not to mention the satisfaction of using a mostly home made machine.
PS Back at the house I use a larger electrohydraulic vertical splitter, which has done a LOT of splitting for me & is nice & quiet, but you of course need to be in range of a decent electricity supply.

 

[Vigo327]

I think if you understand the caveats then using a bottle jack as a single acting cylinder is alright. It may be single acting but for safety reasons you'd probably want to plumb a barb off the reservoir back to your other hydraulic remote line with a check valve on it so that if you do extend the cylinder all the way it will simply flow through the jack reservoir back to the tractor reservoir without pressurizing. The check valve would keep you from blowing it up when you use your remote lever to 'retract' it, which would actually be your tractor opening its pressure relief valve and recirculating pumped oil while the oil from the bottle jack flowed back into the tractor with the help of the return springs. Sounds incredibly inefficient but i think it would work. I think the main thing is just whether it will be strong enough to do what you need given the pressure available.