Believe it or not - most of these logs were straight. Would have been a good batch for the sawmill. Was a swell day. Please check my math but I think we did somewhere between 12-14 cords of wood in 5 hours of machine runtime. Of course that is only an estimate as I’m basing it off of us filling 6 overfilled 7x14 dump trailers. Maybe I’m way off - either way it’s quite a bit of wood. All in all it was great. Most importantly no one got hurt, no equipment damage other than a bent guard on the processor that was seemingly inevitable, and everyone had fun! One of my favorite parts of all this is that my back doesn’t hurt!!!! There are a lot of pieces that could use another split or two but at least not I can lift the darn things. We figure we’ll have the little hyd splitter setup when we’re stacking and hit a few as we go.
Yes! I can see that these units are no joke. They can process some wood! It is simply incredible how fast you can saw split load a full log. I go back to my original statement of 5 minutes!
I ran one that same model for a short time this weekend, and helped a guy who runs one almost daily. I will say these seem to sing on logs 16 inches minus. Much larger and the resplit and cycle times seem to drop. I am pretty good at running machinery and he was 2-3x faster than I, but after a few hours I could see myself bridging the gap. I certainly will never buy one, but I can run his anytime and take logs over 16 inches in diameter. My stove burns big wood, so this would be overkill for me. If you can rent one for a day or week, go for it. I would highly suggest a second person to feed logs and be a runner to keep the splits moving.
Based on my experience with our 7x12 dump trailer, you probably had 1.5+ cord on each load. Y'all probably did 10-11 cords. Your trailer stacked tight, level with sides is 1.5 cord. Still a LOT of wood for 5 hrs. This is a shade over 1 cord hand thrown on our 7x12x2 trailer.
VT a 100 years ago was all small farms, now 80% + wooded, as farmer gave up farming. As sapling take root the grow straight to sunlight.. I have seen Nebraska, that place is hard to find firewood.
Not always hard, but finding nice straight, easy wood can be a challenge. Guessing better here than some areas. My parents live in central Nebraska so not as many trees, but they are out there.
