Here is a link to my post on adding an adjustable wedge to my splitter and a run down on the splitter.
I recently added a hydraulically adjustable 4 way wedge to my home built wood splitter. I bought the splitter many years ago for around $200.00 and over the years I have replaced everything but the I beam, basic chassis, and the oil tank. I added a 13 HP HF engine, high flow pump, auto return...
www.tractorbynet.com
I also prefer large rounds and having a log loader on the splitter allows me to wrangle them fairly easily. Of course I really don't have much choice since that seems to be what we end up cutting when we are rounding up wood.
The tractor part of the equation is my L 4060 HSTC equipped with pallet forks and a home made grapple to lift the logs.
I live in an ex-urb area where most folks built their homes on a wooded lot with most of the trees left standing around the house. The trees are now dying so my wood cutting buddy and I end up with some pretty good sized standing oaks, some of which are 30 inches or more at the stump. If they are away from the house we drop them; if they are too close the homeowner pays a tree service to drop them and we clean them up. We have also benefitted from a couple of storms that dropped quite a few oaks in the neighborhood over the past couple of years. We buck them up into 10 foot logs (or shorter if the Kubota cannot pick them up) and load them into a dump trailer to go to the wood lot where we buck and split them when the weather turns cold.
Our efforts keep three families in wood and we usually split 10 to 15 cords a year. As a side benefit we get the neighbor's teenagers to help out which instills a sense of community and teaches them about how working together benefits everyone. With all three families working together we get the wood done in a couple of weekends.