Log splitter

[bunyip]

Not up for swinging a lump of metal around any more so went and bought a 30 ton hydraulic petrol unit, had a look at a few at one of our reputable dealers and found it all a bit of a mystery, the platform looks identical for most of them but they come with a B&S, Chinese or HOnda engine, a few hundred dollars difference too but the B&S or Chinese bear the name Millers Falls and the Honda powered unit Black Diamond, as I wanted something reliable I opted for the Honda which cost me AU$1830.00 less 10% as he has an online ebay store and they offer a code for a 10% discount.
Get it home and fire up and stick in a big narly lump of twisted redgum that had been defying me for about 5 years, pressure on then a bit of a stall then it just exploded into two pieces.
The dealer said he refuses to sell four way splitters as our eucalypts are just too grainy and tough and they don't work, ordinary hardwoods are OK but once you get into the box timbers they resemble grainy cast iron (red box, yellow box and grey box is what we have), nice timber, very heavy and dense and burns hot and forever.
So all is good in the land of the wild bunyip and the wood pile doesn't look quite as intimidating anymore and the Honda starts first time when you follow the instructions
I have seen US prices and I am surprised that we got a good price as generally we pay a lot more here, it cost about $500 more than the Chinese motor and was assembled before the discount, and ebay pay the discount as the dealer told me he gets the listed price paid to him not the discounted price.

 

[oosik]

Yes - for God's sake Bunyip - you may be an old and mythical animal - but be careful. I had a 28 ton hydraulic splitter - and learned in a real big hurry - watch out for the big old tough knotty chunks. When encountering a big old tough knotty chunk - my spitter "shifted down" to a slower but much more powerful mode. It was away possible that the chunk would split most violently and I could easily be hit by a half split. The half chunks would come off the splitter with extreme momentum, speed and force.

 

[bunyip]

I have spent some considerable time with tablesaws and lathes and learned a long time ago to keep out of the line of fire, it frightens me to watch youtube videos of people literally embrace a huge log to hold it on the base in vertical mode while the wedge is happily pushing through, I had a kickback on my tablesaw that propelled an 8' 2"x2" piece of timber 30' down the shed and through the wall, I was standing to the side but it certainly cured constipation.

 

[Jim Nelson]

I bought an old junker and replaced everything but the frame. I used a Yanmar clone Chinese single cylinder engine,Northern tool ram,2 stage pump, and control valve. This is a beast,I was splitting some euc. rounds and one exploded with a small chunk hitting me right in the family jewels' larger piece hit my trailer fender, about 10' away and bent it into the tire.The other half went down slope from where I was working and I just left it, great wood but not worth being hurt.
I've learned to stand away from the splitting action and stretch a little to reach the control lever.

 

[Diggin It]

it frightens me to watch ... of people literally embrace a huge log to hold it on the base in vertical mode while the wedge is happily pushing through,

Bleeped out the offensive YT reference, but I was doing just that a few hours ago. No other way to get the huge rounds in place. And they were far too heavy to fling anywhere.

 

[ericm979]

I have a bunch of Blue Gum (the most common Eucalyptus in California) to get rid of and recently bought a splitter to turn some into firewood. I ended up finding a decent used "28 ton" model with a Kohler engine. The ton rating is often inflated but since the splitters all run at about the same psi you can use the cylinder diameter as a proxy. This one's got a 4.5" cylinder. It'll split dried out blue gum rounds without much trouble. I've tried splitting that by hand and the splitting maul just bounces off.

 

[4570Man]

I’ve got a 4 way on my splitter and it saves a lot of time although it makes a bigger pile of splinters to throw away. The 4 way will take a lot of abuse with a 5” cylinder. Sometimes it’ll have to come off for a really nasty piece but it probably averages 2 pieces a cord it won’t split with the 4 way. I opted not to pay the $400 upgrade price to a Honda motor and so far the Honda knockoff has been flawless. I have two 13 hp Honda engines laying around so I planned on running the knockoff until it blew up which is going to take longer than expected and then put the Honda on.

 

[Diggin It]

I’ve got a 4 way on my splitter and it saves a lot of time although it makes a bigger pile of splinters to throw away.

Splinters make good kindling.

 

[4570Man]

My wood shop makes plenty of that. All the splinters off the splitter go to waste.

 

[deserteagle71]

Thirty some years ago I was living and working in a tiny mining town in the middle of Nevada. Very isolated - nearest town with a doctor or good grocery store or hardware store was 80 miles away. Consequently the residents learned to make do. Everyone burned wood for heat as there were huge forests nearby. And everyone built their own wood splitters out of scrounged parts - and of course, they had to brag about just how powerful their splitter was.

My neighbor two doors down was a millwright at the mine, and he decided he would build a woodsplitter to top all the others in town. The ram was a bed dump cylinder off a giant Euclid haul truck, about 3 feet long - and a foot in diameter. The engine was a 302 Ford from a pickup that one of his sons had rolled. The hydraulic pump was also a huge unit from a haul truck, and he mounted all of this on an extremely massive 14" I-beam he'd scrounged somewhere. The wedge on that thing had to be a good 18" high. I always split my wood by hand (still do!) and one day when I was taking out my frustrations on my woodpile he told me to come down and watch how wood should be split. He fired the thing up and bragged that he could split any piece of wood with that V-8 engine just running at idle. Which it did. Then to demonstrate how just how powerful the unit really was, he put a round crossways on the beam of the splitter and sure enough, it just pinched the round in half. Then he grabbed a twisted, gnarled old stump and sat it on the beam and advanced the ram. The ram entered the stump and stopped - stalled the engine. So he fired up the engine again, backed up the ram, turned up that 302 to about 3,000 rpm, and sent that ram forward into the stump one more time. And bent the end of that massive I-beam down about 45 degrees.....I have never let him forget this.