Oops... forgot to post details of this splitter.
I rented this thing on a Saturday morning and used it all day and into the night. I went through almost a full 10 gallons of diesel on the skid loader. It's a JD 240. That's a fairly decent sized machine, not the biggest, but near the upper end of their line. After the first 2 or three logs, I ended up trying to split in a spot that wasn't recommended, but I thought I'd give it a try. I broke a bolt that holds the hardened tip onto the non hardened cast cone. It was just a 5/16" grade 8 bolt, 4" long. It was kinda my fault because I knew I shouldn't split it that way but thought I'd give it a shot. We actually didn't get really started till about 11 :30 am since we had to run and find more bolts in town. I did end up breaking one more bolt near the end of the night, not sure why because it was during a very easy split but oh well. I like the design of it and I could change it out in under a minute so no problem.
I really liked this splitter. I've used regular splitters before and one of the skid loader mounted ram style splitters and still liked this better. Mainly because there's no lining up on the log so it's faster. You just tip it on its edge, and start screwing it in. Of course if you have smaller logs, there's no need for something like this as you can load a regular splitter by hand. This one was great for the big stuff. I don't have many pics because I didn't get out the machine that much! I was by myself the entire day. This is definitely a one man job which I liked very much. The only time I got out was to change those 2 bolts, pee once, and eat once. My brother came over around lunchtime and asked if he could try it, I took that as a chance to eat something and let him play. Here's a shot of him at the controls:
It does take a little time to get used to. It seemed like for the first hour or two I was feeling like an idiot and it was a little slow, but then I got into a groove and it was splitting those big logs like walnuts. We both agreed that we liked this style better than the ram style and will probably attempt to build one ourselves. We took lots of measurements and notes on it. Not in a huge hurry because We split enough for a while.
Here's a shot again of what we started with:
Here's what I ended up with, this pile is about 5-6 feet high, and about 25 feet across:
Here's what my brother ended up with, we just split the split wood since the wood was actually his in the first place:
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Topic: Hands free log splitter (Read 11126 times)