Log splitter questions

[Jim]

I own a 7 year old East Coast 6-ton mini-splitter.

The unit worked as advertised, be that slow but effective. Today I managed to break the return spring for the pump handle. Can these be replaced? Without that foot lever returning to the up position pumping becomes a matter of frustration

Also curious if anyone has modified one of these to be electro-hydraulic or pneumatic-hydraulic?

A final alternative might be to replace the existing bottle jack with a faster action and higher ton capacity unit. Might anyone here have tried that already?

[Jeff The Drunk]

Just buy another spring. Take the pieces of the broken spring to a hardware store or a farming supplier and you should find something that will work. That bottle jack doesn't look special either.

You'd be foolish to try to conver that thing to powered hydraulics.

[Tony]

Faster action and higher ton capacity are sort of opposites. When one goes up, the other goes down. Unless you get a two stage hydraulic jack, like on the car jack I recently bought. With no load the jack goes up fast. With no load it takes two strokes to go all the way up. In normal use it takes less than one stroke until it hits the frame, then it changes to the slower but stronger stage. If it were one stage going up fast, when it hits the log you would need to gain a couple hundred pounds to push the lever for it to split.