No, it did not fail. As i said, I did very little research. It was kind of an impulse buy. When I did do the research I did not like the internet chatter I was hearing. So, I actually returned it. Look, I know there are probably tens of thousands of these units out there and serve there owners well and the likelyhood of one failing is very small. The bottom line is I did not want the worry and was still in the window that I could return it, so I did.
Well, if you ask me, you probably did the right thing. Like I said before, the chances of it happening to your splitter is probably slight. The biggest problem that I see in this whole idea is that IF it happens to your splitter, the end result is a catastrophic failure that makes the splitter not only useless, but your chances of serious injury is great. When you take into account that if the event happens, you are likely to have 27 tons of force suddenly turned loose in your face. Its not like a hose that breaks (which can of coarse be dangerous as well) where the physical part being mostly rubber and metal mesh, but instead you have a loose trunnion being popped out directly out of the cylinder.Although fluid can not be compressed, there still is a great deal of energy stored in a cylinder that is suddenly being released.I myself would prefer to avoid even the mere chance of an event like that happening directly in my face. After all, that cylinder is mounted right at waist level and the event seems to happen at when full force is applied to the cylinder.
Some folks have compared the TB splitter to a vehicle, asking if you had heard that a certain model of Ford had a few engines blown, would you quite buying Fords? Well, in my mind if the event happened in a manner that each and every engine blew only when you opened the hood to take a peek, and waited until you had stuck your head under the hood to check the oil, then yeah my answer would be "hell no, I aint buying no more Fords."
Sure, Ford has blown some engines.Chevy and Dodge has too. But as far as I know, none of them have waited until you stuck your head under the hood, and instead blew them while under heavy throttle, pulling heavy loads, or in general pushing the vehicle beyond its established RPM limit.And, if you exclude race vehicles, I have never heard of anyone being killed by a blown engine. The chances of someone being seriously injured by a TB splitter busting a cylinder while under full pressure grows percentage wise as each unit gets a little older and fatigue sets in. I can tell you from first hand experience that when that cylinder turned loose, it went off like a gunshot.
One more thing I would like to add. When my cylinder blew, it came at a bad time for me financially. Our home had just gotten ruined by a busted pipe, and I was forced to consider repairing the splitter until a better unit more suited to the volume that I do could be purchased. A google search revealed several outfits that sell an aftermarket cylinder built to factory OEM specs. A phone call to one of those places netted me a nice guy who was open to a bit of a chat. He told me he sells
20-35 of these cylinders a month. In conversation with the guy, he told me that 90 percent of these cylinders are bought off of his website, and he had no direct conversation with the purchasers.However, when the sale resulted from a conversation on the phone with the customer,
each and every cylinder was being bought to replace a cylinder that had blown out in the same manner as mine.
Now think about those odds. If just one guy on the internet sells 20-35 of these cylinders a month to folks who have had it break just like mine, just how many of these are failing and nobody hears anything about it?
I well tell you one thing. I dont condone lawsuits most of the time.Most lawsuits are nothing more than a chance for a guy to reach into a corporations pockets and pull out a wad of cash, driven by fee hungry attorneys. But I can tell you with 100 percent certainty the day I hear of someone dying in front of a TB splitter because that trunnion went through his forehead, I personally will show up with bells on to testify for the poor guys widow.
I will say one thing more, then I am going to shut the hell up. If you own a TB splitter, the chances of it happening are slim. But because I love every one of you guys to death, do me a favor and add an inspection of the welds around the trunnion and the surrounding mount to your maintenance schedule. Any cracks in the paint around the weld, take it out of service. Any widening of the mount at all, and I mean ANY, take it out of service. Drop a chunk of wood in the splitter, run the ram forward, and after pressure has built up let go of the lever and step to the rear of the splitter. Examine the cylinder and ram, is the cylinder in perfect alignment with the beam? If its even a slight bit off, take it out of service and find out why.
You owe it to yourself, wife, husband, girlfriend, smurf friend, midget under your bed, children, or anybody else that matters in your life to keep an eye on that TB splitter.
Yeah,and you owe it to me too. I would feel pretty bad if something happened to any of you.
