I wouldn’t doubt it. It’s not fun running it through my underpowered box wedge. By the same token maple has always been the hardest wood to split around here,,,,except for one red maple which broke up nice. I’d rather split hickory than maple.
Looks like silver maple to me? Appears to have some twist to to it so it wont make nice loaves coming out of the splitter. I've had SM make nice splits and twisty ones. Any pics of the splits Joe? Gum would shred more than split.
Nope didn’t take any pics of the splits. Not too many pretty loaves hahaha. Next time I get out I’ll run one more through and take a pic. That did happen to be the biggest, ugliest log. Just happened to be on the top. If it turns out to be silver maple you’re welcome to it if you’re interested. I dragged quite a bit of roadside silver maple into the woods. Even the 28t DHT with single wedge didn’t like it. Figured these were smaller, straighter trees they might split up nice.
Could be Silver Maple but the bark doesn’t look flaky enough & generally the heart wood is brownish. They only experience I have with gum is the chewing kind.
Oh I’ve had silver or swamp the 28 ton refused to even cut through. Stopped it dead, then sledgehammer the the chunk off the wedge. I struggled through half The tree before coming to the conclusion it’s a waste of time and machinery. Dumped the rest in the swamp.
Don’t know if these will help. I see a little of that flecking on the outer edges that usually indicate maple. These are the nice splits. There were a few “elephant toothbrushes” that came out too.
Yup maple.! Elephant toothbrushes??? That's a new one. Never heard it on here before. Hafta put it in the FHC dictionary.
Red maple? Did it naturally want to split between the dark heartwood and the lighter sapwood? That's a good sign its red maple.
Don’t know, ran it through the box wedge. That’s about as far as you can get from natural splitting without a saw blade
So I ran a sugar maple through the splitter. That went a good bit easier. Think it was down to the twist of the grain in the other log. At this point I’ll mention some mods I did to the splitter that had both a good and bad effect. I installed channels after the wedge to keep the splits running straight down the Grizzly bars. Originally I did one just in the center with some metal I had kicking around. It worked well so I went to the scrap metal store and found some six inch flats. Didn’t expect to ever see those there, never had before. Added those two flats. Working even better. The part that’s not working so well is the two outer channels. They have always had an issue. Don’t think I did enough angle on the cutters. Plan on redoing those outer cutters,,,,,,maybe do away with the cutter altogether and just make a wider channel. The wood is running nice down the grizzlies now. Just gotta fine tune those outer channels a bit. Getting close to finishing this pen,,,,,,it’s been awhile. Brad I took a cruise on the Ct river. Found a barge we can buy. Festoon it with winches, sails and cannonry and we can plunder Black Locust Island
