I love it. My paralyzed uncle has one and in his younger days would split wood with his AMC wagon. I have one that runs on a briggs engine.
I have one that is PTO driven. It's very fast in easy splitting wood but in stringy stuff, the ~3.5" cone will go through one end of the wood and the strings will still have the two halves stuck together. Once I got hydraulics, I never hooked it back up. Also search "bark buster" for more info.
Yeah, "only in America", with an Australian vehicle. Lol. Those things just look like a trip to the ER.
WOW. Last time I remember them being advertised was in the late 70's - early 80's.Really thought OSHA had outlawed them by now. You wont get me near one of the damm things.
I want to see the part when one gets stuck, takes off an arm, knocks the car off the jack stands, and all hell breaks loose.
Back in the 70's, before we had a hydraulic, Dad actually made one. he took a gear set out of an old transmission and used up a bunch of junk welding rod and weld together. The used a metal cutting blade and cut a spiral in it. Probably had more in electric and blades than one cost back then! Welded that to an axle shaft and bolted to the below car in the barn. He at least had the frame sitting on wood blocks and a pipe moving the exhaust to the outside of the building. He also had a string to the throttle. The pic is of when we were moving the car out and putting the tires back on. If you look close you can see some dents around the wheelwells where some started spinning around. They work but not something I'd recommend. I'd really love listening to the rattle can exhaust all day with this guys set up.
I owned the barkbuster pto driven version and split at least 30 cords with it. It was harder work and not faster than the huskee 22 hydro splitter that I replaced it with. Sure it was fast on the ideal 6" straight grained round but on bigger, tougher, stringer rounds it would be much slower. Less precise too since you sort of aim it vs. splitting off chunks. Oh yeah, it was dangerous as hell though I never got hurt with it. I was always scared. Here is mine. I gave it away to a scrapper. I was also scared to sell it for fear of liability.
I have one. Used it many years ago. I modified a car rear end so I could run it with my tractor PTO. Threads are in wrong direction to direct drive from PTO. Its no more dangerous than using a chainsaw. It worked great on straight grained wood, not so much on crotches or stringy pieces. What I didn't like about it was the bending down to feed the rounds into the screw. After I moved to hydraulics I gave it a new purpose, splitting larger logs. I mounted it on my post hole digger. http://firewoodhoardersclub.com/forums/data/attachments/4/4537-e19220a81a77805bd2a1ce832fc73cd6.jpg
