Ok, factory was 6 bolts, 3 pet side. Here's some other pics from different didier's. Notice one has been chonda'd with a blue chonda. Looks like many didier's had to have the ram rebuilt. This one was on a farm until we bought it, and they did a decent enough farm engineering fix. I think the one I have above in the close up picture was factory. Others I've seen are like ours, or with fresh welds.
Hydraulic force is basically "liquid leverage"...the pump is moving a small amount of fluid using a small surface area (pump rotors) which is reacting against a large surface area (the cylinder piston)...change the surface area of either it changes the available power from the cylinder...go with a bigger pump, the cylinder goes faster, but will also not have as much power, unless you put a larger engine on too...go with a larger diameter cylinder, that will give you more power, but will move slower. Oh, and you will always have more power on the push stroke (out) than with the pull (retract) stroke due to the difference in piston surface area...on the push stroke you have the whole piston surface area for the oil to push against...on the return stroke the rod takes up some piston area, so it will not have as much power (but is also faster since you have to pump less fluid on the return stroke) Make sense? Now if we are talking about how "strong" the cylinder is as far as the rod bending...then yes, the closer it is to being fully retracted, the less likely it is to bend.
This Didier is only 14-15 ton. Aside from a very few pieces, it's split everything. Those few, it surely would split too, if I bothered to wrestle with those pieces any more than I have already.
I designed this gadget to help splitting elm. It allows the wedge on the ram to go completely thru the piece of wood being split. The wedge does not hit any of the metal. The last picture shows how I originally had it put together with bolts. Works much better all welded up. The last pic shows how the wedge fits into the space in the middle. That pic is at full ram extension.
Oh heck I’m breaking my DHT all the time I’d be nowhere without a welder. Had a low profile splitter like yours Horkn. Never broke anything. It was a 15 ton Agway. Always needed a sledgehammer handy to whack off any chunks it didn’t want to split. Overall not a bad machine except for the height. It split a lot of wood over the years.
Agway sold Didier splitters under the Panther name. Didier sold all over the place, Sears, Penney's, Agway, etc. Same splitter. 15 ton sounds about right, but our Didier doesn't have any tonnage listed. The low height is good for rolling the couple hundred pound rounds onto it with the use of ramps of some sort. I use splits of wood most times. Edit. Found this. See attachment. Apparently all Didier are 12.5 ton rated. Ours is a mf26 based on description.
Yep, that's because the beam and cylinder are longer. That's but a 50" long log. The mf26 can do 26" long, and the 28 does up to 38" long. Same hp, same tonnage.
I saw that...what the heck would you do with a 50" log? Too short for fence post...and most guys that are feeding OWB with fireboxes that big don't bother to split, so...
No idea. I bet the take rate on the 26" was several times more the two longer units. Maybe people wanted the longer models for use as a "Field Press"? Who knows?
