Air/Hydraulic Log Splitter


Author: Dave
Date: 05.23.11 - 9:30am



Made this a couple years ago for splitting camp fire wood:



The jack is a 20 ton Air over hydraulic jack from harborfreight.com.

The body is 3x3 1/4in thick square tubing. (2 pieces butt welded together) with a heavy duty jack base and wedge welded on. Also note the piece of 1/4in square stock banding the top of the jack to secure it.

The wedge is a pretty agressive angle. I decided on about 60deg angle for it because the jack moves pretty slow and only has a 6" travel. The down side to the agressive angle is that it can take a lot of power to keep the split going, and on dry wood and clear grain, the pieces can pop apart all at once. I have had some hard cherry literally shoot off of the splitter. Yikes.

I wish i could have found some I-Beam to use for the main body, or even one long solid piece, but the welded up body is holding. Although it can spring some on very hard or knotty pieces. Probably going to weld some angle iron to reinforce it soon,

Since i get pre split wood, and just use this to further refine it into domesticated camp fire size pieces, works great. Jack was 100, cart was 15, steel was about 30 bucks from the odds and ends bin at the local steel distributor.

One other mod not shown in the picture, the jack release. I made a 1" knurled handle drilled and slotted to fit over the release screw. This way you can release it just by reaching down instead of having to fidget trying to find the handle.


Update:

Well after 3 years of hobby use (summer campfires) i finally popped a weld when I was (ab)using it on a heavily knotted piece of cherry. The weakness was a combination of a couple things. First I had a bad weld with almost no penetration on the top side of the jack base.



Which wouldnt have mattered that much really, because the main support was a gusset on the bottom. However, the bottom section of tubing was thinner than the top (all parts gathered from drop bin at distributor) and the gusset caved in the tubing. Oops. The next pict was taken mid way through repair. I have already sliced the gusset with the torch and bent the jack base back vertical. A metal wedge has been hammered into the slice to keep the base fully forward, and a piece of metal has already been inserted underneath the base to cap the end which should stop further crushing of the tube. Not shown, is the band i put around the top of the jack, also got stretched out as the jack pryed itself away from the body.

20 tons is a lot of force lol. You never know how much abuse something can really take until you test it !



All in all shes held up reallly good so far and I didnt use preferred materials at all...I also just a design very similar to this commercially offered on ebay. its uses a 10 ton air/hydraulic jack and uses an I-beam for a body. It sells for $230 and does not have a cart. (ok it does have tiny hard plastic wheels on the bottom, but I cant imagine those are to useful)




Comments: (2)

On 02.08.13 - 11:37am Jason wrote:
Im curious if you have a video showing this thing in operation.. Im curious of how efficiently it operates. (Im wanting to build one, but not sure if I want to depending on how it performs)

On 02.08.13 - 1:45pm Dave wrote:
Hi Jason, I dont have a video on hand and the splitter is tied up against a tree under a huge pile of snow teh air/hydraulic mechanism is pretty slow and uses a good deal of air. i have a little 2gal compressor which doesnt keep up, even when teh compressor is at full pressure, the air pump on the jack only cycles at maybe once per second, which is maybe an 1/8 of ram travel. its a pretty slow process which is why i used an agressive angle on the wedge. for camp fire wood and a fun project its cool for me, but even i have been keeping my eye out for one of those little electric ones. I have a friend with one and he just loves it (and he heats his whole house with wood) I would not spend the 100+ bucks for the air/hydraulic jack if I had to do it over again, not real impressed with it. slow and it takes allot of air

 
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