Full beam vs half beam splitters

I agree 100%. Obviously no experience with a bad back.

 

Yeah I’m in agreement with Backwoods Savage on this one also. Sounds like typical marketing, written up by a sales person with no practical experience in the matter. That’s the world we live in unfortunately.

 

I love splitting wood, but if I had to do it in that position...id be done in a very short amount of time. That would be handy for larger rounds, though.
Lower the beam when needed.

 

I did consider a 3pt splitter but in the end I decided against it for a few reasons. The lack of speed on a tractor like mine, the price is as high or higher than a stand alone splitter, and wear and tear on the tractor. I’d rather put all those hours on a little machine that costs 1k to replace than rack up the hour meter on the tractor for a task like that. Costs a lot more to fix or replace than a gas splitter.

 

Hey Maina, I agree, but why change out the wood splitter, just change out the engine on the wood splitter for a few hundred bucks. You can get some pretty cheap engines at Harbor Freight, and while I don't expect a buy-it-for-life engine, you could buy a lot of them for what a farm tractor engine rebuild would cost.

I did not want to buy the powerpack for my log trailer, but Katie convinced me to buy it, and am I ever glad she did. A 6.5 HP engine to replace the one that is on it costs $99 at Harbor Freight. That is cheap considering the hours it saves going onto my farm tractor.

Disclaimer: I do have a PTO power wood splitter, but then again I seldom use it due to the size of the wood I burn. Also it's design is such that it just makes sense.

 

I have to agree though with Timberwolf Equipment on the horizontal and vertical splitting thoughts.

I have split hundreds and hundreds of cords of wood, and used both vertical and horizontal wood splitters. The rule of thumb was to split all but the biggest pieces in a horizontal position because it was faster and easier on my back, and yes I have a very bad back (see part about hundreds and hundreds of cords of firewood). Rolling rounds over to a vertical wood splitter is time consuming, and even to carry the mid-sized pieces and place them under the splitter is awkward. In contrast is the horizontal method where a person picks a round up for a second, and then is standing like a human for the rest of the wood splitting sequence.

On bigger pieces, rolling them under a vertical splitter makes sense, but as the TimberWolf person says, mechanical lifts in that arena just makes even more sense (or just don't process big wood into firewood in the first place and send it to a paper mill or saw it into lumber).

The real work in wood splitter for me is throwing the wood into a truck or trailer. That is where a conveyor really takes the work out of the job.

Everyone has their method for sure, and everyone likes to justify their way of doing something, and that is understandable, but 90% of the people that split wood would probably agree that in all but the biggest pieces which are problematic to heft up onto a horizontal splitter; horizontal splitting is faster and easier on the body.

 

Oh I agree! All the components on a gas powered splitter are much less than tractor parts. I wouldn’t replace the whole splitter. Sorry if I gave that impression.

 

To this I say that not every back injury is the same, or as severe. I can do things others I know with bad backs can’t, and vice versa. Bending down and picking up anything over a few lbs is not something I can do so a horizontal splitter wears me out in minutes where I can sit in front of one and pull rounds in and lift or maneuver them with my elbows on my knees without straining my back. I can even turn like that as long as I don’t twist in the middle too much. I’ve spent more time than I’d like in a wheelchair, but I’m on my way back.

 

All you have to do is raise the point hitch to a comfortable height.

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How much wood do you split? I bet you wouldn't put 10 hours a year on the tractor splitting. It would have a 10.9 second retract and a 12 second extend time. That might not sound like much but it splits both ways. Also unlike a gas powered splitter with a 2 stage pump, those are going to be the split speeds. A gas powered splitter has 2 stage pump and will slow down when it hits wood. You can drop the 3 point down low like in the video and sit and split.

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I'm 6 foot 6 and I'm not into splitting vertically. I did it the first year for the big rounds and it's a positive to not have to lift big rounds. Still have to muscle them into place though. I found that a piece of plywood by the foot of the splitter helped to slide the rounds around for the final positioning.

I solved the issue by mounting a winch with log tongs overhead in a tree. No more bending or lifting for me.

 

How can you claim a certain speed on my tractor? Every manufacturer site I looked at said it depends on the tractor and there’s a wide variation. Smaller tractors like mine are the slowest, getting more power and speed as you increase hydraulic capacity, and that makes more sense to me than a sales pitch.
It still makes a lot more sense to save the hours on the tractor for tasks that can’t be achieved with less expensive equipment.
Sorry, you’re not convincing me at all.

 

I looked up the GPM of your tractor (5.1 GPM) then the specs of the cylinder and punched the numbers into a hydraulics calculator.

Hydraulic Cylinder  Speed Calculator

Spitfire 3203 is commercial grade. Any stand alone splitter in its price range is going to be homeowner grade.

The tractor will use less fuel than the splitter too. You never said how much wood you split in a year. Splitting a little wood a year is a drop in the bucket for a machine that will last 6000 or more hours. I'm not trying to talk you into something you don't want.

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I’m only going to be splitting a little when I feel up to it, but I have family who with be doing a lot more with it and I’m not really comfortable with them using the 3pt. A stand alone splitter is less complicated and potentially less deadly imo. Another reason I ruled it out is I want the tractor available to put wood into as its split to save a step in the process. That would mean walking every piece to the front of the tractor as you split it. I may build a carryall for the 3pt as well so I can load both ends.

 

An early version of the splitter I built was powered by the tractor. I found the tractor was much more useful being available to "nurse" the splitter (feed & remove wood) than powering the splitter. Every one's splitting needs are a little different, from comfortable operating position, budget, wood size, cord count, etc. It's all good, "git er done"

 

Okay, maybe this is a woodsplitter we can all agree on: vertical, but also horizontal. Fourway, but with an unlimited stroke. Convenient working height (no milk crate needed), with less back stress. It even comes with a moisture reduction feature automatically...

 

We had a 3 point hitch woodsplitter that ran off the remote hydraulics for many, many years and it split a lot of wood. However, we realized a lot better production when we reconfigured it. We turned the woodsplitter sideways so that it was mounted in the hitch of a manure spreader. On that, we removed the beater bars in the back, but kept the live-bed chain, however we uncoupled it from the rear axle and instead put a ratcheting bar on it.

This took a lot of the work of firewood out of the equation.

Not only could we still adjust the height to anything we wanted, once the round was split, we simply tossed it in back of the manure spreader bead. Once we had a load, we just drove down to the house, backed up to the woodshed and offloaded. Instead of moving forward as the load of firewood was removed, we instead cranked the firewood back to the end of the trailer where we could directly pile it up. This saved us a lot of extra steps in the firewood process.

I have few photos of those days, and this one is not a great one, but you can see how it is mounted just barely in the photo (it is a homemade woodsplitter). This is being powered by a Prince PTO pump. We no longer have it in this configuration because we have since fabricated it as an upside down woodsplitter further reducing teh number of steps required to produce firewood, but everyone has seen those photos.

 

Only speaking for myself, but will never split vertical again, will use a maul before doing that again. When I first built my splitter it had no lift, but could do vert. or horiz. Vertical killed my back manhandeling them on the ground trying to get them on the foot. Went back to the drawing board and made me a lift. Roll them with a picaroon close enough to splitter to slide tongs over and put on beam. Hardly no bending over anymore.

 

Me Neither!