How much juice would a small conveyor need?

[KiwiBro]

Only need about 5' of lift into bags like the Dino bags.
Wondering instead of small engine, maybe a wee motor and truck battery but not sure if it would work or last a full day. Anyone done or seen such a small firewood conveyor before?

 

[hanniedog]

1hp or less motor should do it but you really need 110 to run it.

 

[cantoo]

Truck battery will not last long. Running off your splitter is your best bet. Electric motor and small generator is your 2nd best bet. I use a hay elevator for mine but it's about 30' long and will go at least 15' high. I use line power and 150' of cord most of the time and generator if away from line.

 

[ChoppyChoppy]

We run a 30ft long one of a $100 5hp engine. It can go up maybe 2oft or so.

 

[KiwiBro]

Hmm. Thanks for the replies. Now trying to do some calculations. It's at risk of going from a 'buy a cheap treadmill, stretch it, swap out the motor to a 12/24v truck windshield wiper motor and grab a truck battery' sort of slapped together project to an industrial scale overbuilt tank that I can't lift and carry by myself. The reason is I may also need it not just off the back of my super split but I am looking at a 16-way box-wedge splitter running off the back of my tractor. I could make a largish hopper but would still need a good belt speed and enough torque to not just lift the pieces up that 5' height, but allow paddles to break through the pile of splits in the hopper if I get into large timber that uses all of the 16-way wedge each split.

Need more research...and coffee.


...Or...
because it only has to exit 5' up, how about forgetting the conveyor idea, fold up a hopper with the volume of one of those dino bags. Because there is not much table height to work with, make the hopper/bin fairly long and funnelling down to narrower than the bag opening. Then a stand I could set up over it and attach a hand winch to raise one end and dump into the bag. Not sure if that is making any sense or sounds like a terrible idea.

 

[Oldman47]

If you are running a tractor why not consider a hydraulic motor like you might use for a grain auger? Your tractor dealer will have hydraulic motors that you could use to drive your belt.

 

[ponyexpress976]

The main problem I see with the "fill a tray and hoist" method is splits don't like to flow like sand. Now if you could set up in an area that had a grade to it or tiers/terraces.....

 

[KiwiBro]

Well, it has morphed into a slightly different kind of hopper and hoist idea. The local sweets shop when I was a wee kid used to sell white paper bags of sweets for $2. We could choose from different shiny silver trays of sweets and the man behind the counter would place a metal scoop on the open end of a paper bag and then take scoops from our selected sweat trays until the bag was full. A bit like how they fill the punnet of fries at McD's.

So, tray of hopper goes from splitter table into the firewood bag at a big enough decline to ensure can capture enough wood either in the bag or the hopper to fill the bag when it is stood back up. Will need to experiment to check can get enough:

• decline into the bag opening
  
• volume to fill a bag before it starts overflowing the hopper
  
• leverage on the splitter end of the hopper/tray for one weakling working alone to raise the bag back to upright position

then whether can easily slide the tray/hopper out of the erect bag and rinse and repeat.

Not sure if I am explaining it right, but it's hard to tell at this stage whether or not the idea has enough or too much crazy in it to work.