I'm looking at these at the moment, not too much money, and specifically the Logmaster currently advertised in The Times at £199, and the Ferm from Screwfix at £99. anyone have any knowledge of either of these?
Regards and thanks in advance
Pat Macguire
The message from "Syke" contains these words:
No. We (a tree felling company) always used steel wedges and a sledge hammer.
I've used log splitters working on the back of tractors using the hydraulics from them -and they are crap. They take forever. It's OK on knotty sections but far quicker to just dump those and go at the straight grained stuff with an axe.
So do we.
Mary not a felling company but idle and stingy, therefore wanting the most efficient with little cost and no storage problem :-)
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~~~~~~~~~ For ordinary splitting a 'splitting axe' is very good. They are quite blunt, and teflon coated, but split with ease and never get stuck. They also have a very stout plastic shaft that cannot break. Not expensive. We use large quantities and also have a hydraulic splitter powered by an old tractor. This will split faster than two men can feed it and is not fazed by burrs or anything! Best Wishes Brian.
We have one of these which we work off a MF35 and it's absolutely brilliant. We have special axes and wedges etc as well but nothing is anything like as good as this thing. Don;t know about the quality or brand though, I expect it's a Makita equivalent as opposed to the Lidl version, that might well make a difference :-)
-- Holly, in France Gite to let in Dordogne, now with pool.
I have a few large lumps of oak lying about, about 9" x 12" x 18". Bit weathered on the outside, but hard as anything on the inside. I imagine they were part of the house before it was renovated in the 80s. They're just a bit too large to go in our woodburner and they laugh at my chainsaw. Is there any other way I might split them, or should I just find another use for them?
James
Aye, chopping wood warms you twice.
Once when you chop it.
And once when you sell the "value-added" firewood at a huge profit to people who won't/can't wield their own chopper, and spend the profit on some gas for the central heating and a nice curry.
Owain
My neighbour in Belgium had a marvellous hydraulic log splitter (and a concession in the local forest to go with it). Cheap ones probably will not last. Ideal way for a retired pensioner to generate logs as fuel.
Given the way British Gas intend to rip off consumers of gas and electricity it may become a growth industry.
Regards, Martin Brown
The message from James Fidell contains these words:
You can get a panel saw-shaped 'frame' which carries a hacksaw blade. It would be slow, but you'd cut them with that. (A tungsten carbide tipped saw chain would do too, but a bit expensive for a one-off job.)
Steel wedges and a 4lb bronze (or lead) maul on a long shaft. (A steel lump hammer mushrooms the wedge). Three wedges is about the minimum, in case you have to work down the side of a long log. "Log burster" twisted wedges or grenades are IMHE only good for timber that's easy to split anyway.
The trick with oak is that it splits cleanly and easily along the radial rays but is a pig of a job if you try and go through a ray. So start it off with the wedge placed accurately radial and then follow the split however it wants to go.
Splitting oak is easy. Try elm or hornbeam if you really want to work at it! I still need to work on my oak riving technique though as I need to make usable timber by this method, not just firewood.
I've never found hydraulic splitters to be worth the trouble. They need too much care with getting the logs to identical lengths, so they're less than ideal for randomly-sized clearance timber. Feeding them random lengths slows them down. They're also (if hand pumped) slower to use than a good few wedges.
The message from Andy Dingley contains these words:
After a long time. Our wedges are still in use, sloshed with a sledge-hammer, and we bought them around 1965
All true.
Hmmm. Most of our early work was with elms, and mostly, it split more easily than oak. However, a knotty bit can be a pig. See one of our jobs at:
My experience of them is similar.
Ours is tractor pumped, so not quite the same. We cut 1m ish lengths where possible for tidyness of stacking and because they are the right size for our fire, and when cut in half they are the right size for the woodburner. But since we are clearing fallen trees we have loads of logs of uneven sizes. Our splitter has no problem *at all* with this. The wedge just goes down until wherever it meets the timber and then goes down right through it. Must be a different sort of animal....
-- Holly, in France Gite to let in Dordogne, now with pool.
Sharpen your chain then. If you were trying to cut along the grain it might be a bit slower, cut into thin slices across the grain and then split it.
Oak isn't *particularly* good for burning so another use might be the way to go.
Mary
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There is no denying their power. And if you just want tostand behind a tractor all day wrapped up to the nines waiting patiently to see if you guessed a good trajectory, they are OK.
I dare say if the one I was using split long lengths, that too might have been some compensation but it just dropped a wedge onto an anvil for 2 or 3 feet.
I would have liked to rig it up to compress the tremendous amount of saw chips from the chain-saw. If it could have made doughnut blocks of some 18 to 24 inches they would have made brilliant fuel cells for a 45 gallon drum.
Couldn't work out what on earth you were on about here until I read....
Ours is not like that at all. It brings down the wedge slowly(ish) under great and constant pressure and you control the wedge coming down, or lifting up, with a lever. So you put in the log and bring down the wedge. You can adjust the log to the right position just as you see where the wedge is about to touch it. Then the wedge just keeps on going down into the log, splitting as it goes until the log cracks, at which point you send the wedge back up whilst picking up the two pieces of the log. Then, if you want to split the pieces in the other direction you turn them and put them back under as soon as the wedge gets high enough and then bring the wedge down again. Thus, when you get the hang of it and get a rhythm going, you can get the logs in and split and out again without wasting much time with the wedge travelling up and down. Helps if you have someone else bringing on the logs and others taking them away and stacking so that the person doing the splitting can just concentrate on that. It does make an uneven/rough split occasionally if it hits a big knot but mostly it splits them quickly and cleanly.
You have a point there, although I can't think of a suitable application just now! The pressure of the log splitter could well be put to some other use for compressing something one day. We have lots of oak chips from the planer/thicknesser but usually just burn them or spread them somewhere, wouldn't be worth the bother of making fuel blocks since we have so much oak to use up anyway.
-- Holly, in France Gite to let in Dordogne, now with pool.
The message from "Mary Fisher" contains these words:
Generally, we climbed down, but you could split a lot faster with a parachute.
The message from "Weatherlawyer" contains these words:
I can help there perhaps: find a friendly farmer who has cattle, (preferably dairy, 'cos they have to come in twice a day at least) and cadge a few buckets of raw muck. Mix it with the chips and slop into plastic flowerpots. Tamp down, then turn them out under cover like sand-castles and allow the 'castles' to dry out. Makes a fine fuel.
Can also be used with coal dust and slack.
Years ago, the Ole Man cleared out his coalshed and asked me if I could use seven sacks of the stuff. I mixed it with a few buckets of sh-tuff and had enough 'bricks' to last for months in a Parkray stove. The slight peaty odour was not unpleasant.
LOL! I didn't notice the parachute :-)
Mary
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