When you begin using the 4 and six way wedges, all thoughts about cycle time will go away. You will be spending time managing all the splits on the table as the ram retracts. I believe that, beyond a certain point, all the agitation over cycle time is wasted energy. Nice machine, nice features. Now you just need a young man to run it for you!
Depending on your setup, that's true. But with the right setup, and some good help, a slow splitter is definitely the choke point. If you have time to check your texts before the splitter is ready for the next piece, it might be too slow
That's a great looking machine. Nothing wrong with a single wedge, actually makes nicer wood. If your working by yourself, it's just the right speed, especially stacking on the table. We do that when stacking in totes. We use 4 way, but not always. With a conveyor, multi-wedge is the way to go.
I've gotten by with just using a single wedge for the last 16 years, so it will be fun experimenting with the with the wedges at some point. You make a great point though about making 'nicer' wood. Since a lot of my stacks require cribbing on the ends, using the single wedge allows me more control in shaping splits for stable cribbing. I feel the 4 and 6-way wedges would result in more 'you get what you get' pieces. And honestly, the driving force towards getting this new splitter was the hydraulic lift. That was the necessity.
100% I had the 4 way and my Yard max is 35 ton as well. (Depending on the wood), most of the time it wasn't worth a S#!T. I split single splits, I'm in no hurry and there's plenty of so, It is what it is!
If splitting nice straight woods grown trees a 4/6 way wedge will work a lot better than most of the stuff I get, which would be candidate for bLowes lumber!
Ran a couple tanks through the chipper yesterday cleaning up that brush pile and then ran the new splitter for a while today working on cleaning up some red oak I've had in the staging area for a while. Largest round was about 20" in diameter. Should have gotten a splitter with a hydraulic lift a long time ago. Now to get all this stacked and clean the area up before it snows tomorrow.
Very nice looking wood! My stuff I get "never" looks that good. Around here though, I gotta get what's available. Lots of blow overs, usually Maple. My tree buddies occasionally drop off a nice Oak when they don't feel like paying the dumping fees. I gotta a Hackberry lined up next week that's coming down in a neighbors yard. Not the prettiest wood, but burns fine.
Hackberry is some decent wood… like that stuff, catches fires easily…. EODMSgt … good looking setup you have there…. Keep it up…
Trust me, I can completely understand 'you get what you can get' when it comes to firewood. Up until the last few years, the majority of my firewood was what I scrounged, and any oak in my stacks was pretty much non-existent. It's only recently that I've had an abundance of oak, and that's strictly because of the caterpillar apocalypse of 21/22. Going back to 2009, when I had the wood stove installed, I would pretty much burn any hardwood I could scrounge using a National Forest Service dead & down permit, or clearing my property of any blowdowns or standing dead trees (I saw no reason to cut any live trees on my property). Burned a lot of subpar wood in the early years, but it kept the house warm. It wasn't until I had built my hoard up to 3+ years that I started being more selective in what I was scrounging. It took a while before I could pass up on a subpar blowdown because I was so used to grabbing any scroungeable hardwood I could find (I wasn't used to being a wood snob). All this oak is helping me rebuild my hoard again (the only bright side to losing so many of my oaks). Burned a lot of silver maple, red maple, and white birch over the years since that's what was readily available, but my saving grace was that I knew where there were some great beech groves, and with the winds coming off the mountains (what, Mt. Washington has high winds?), there were always beech trees coming down. Beech is still my favorite wood to burn. Looking at some of my pictures from the early scrounging days. Hauled a lot of trees out, piece by piece, and usually they were not right next to the road. For a few years, I had access to some property that I could drive to with the four-wheeler. Scrounged a lot of blowdowns from there (at the time, the property owner was a complete wood snob and for the most part, would cut down healthy oak and ash trees because he "likes cutting trees down") despite having tons of blowdowns on the property. Still, I was very appreciative for the opportunity to have access. The last pictures were during the height of my scrounging. Miss being able to do that (and I also miss the Power Wagons I had with the hidden winch).
