Eastonmade Wood Splitter

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Panolo, I'm splitting maple, yellow birch and some white birch.

That piece that got hung up, that happened mostly because it was cut crooked.

We're getting set up now in the yard to block the logs and they will fall right to the splitter at waist height. Small improvements being done each day to smooth out the workflow.
 
Cantoo, usually its just the missus and I that are working. The neighbor likes to help out, same with my other neighbours. They will work for their next year's firewood :)

I'll be raising the pallet a foot or so off the ground (stack up a couple pallets) so that there is less bending.
 
Thanks woodchuckcanuck for posting.
Following the last couple comments...
The Kaizen mindset.
Had to look that up.
Twenty five years ago we spent a weeks vacation at a friends parents beach house on Tybee Island, near Savanna, Georgia.
After the kids were asleep we would sit on the porch and read late into the night, enjoying the ocean sea beeze, sounds, and smells. There was a book shelf that travelers could take and leave books from.
The one I found was about a guy who worked for large company that was going to shut down a plant. They gave him, one of the younger bosses, a time period to turn things around, six month, nine months or something.
He started by talking to the plant personal, the machine operators, the fork lift drivers, the janitors. Actually, he asked questions and "listened", because who better knows than the guy doing the job to trouble shoot whats really going on. The employees, not management had a wealth of hands on, day to day, experience.There were bottle necks. Old retired machines were found and dug out of storage and set up next to new machines where needed, and the bottle necks were solved. No, the bottleneck moved! People behind the bottle neck would shift to other production that went int inventory. The old purpose was to keep people "busy". He eliminated that, and lots of warehouse inventory. He fought old time top down management ideas from old timers. And he turned it around.
I was hoping the authors name was Kaizen when I read your post. But of course it wasn't.
In addition to asking myself, "What do I need?", or need to do, I often ask, " What don't I need?"or need to do.
That's how I came to running the splitter and conveyor when cutting rounds instead of using a staging table for rounds.
 
Thanks woodchuckcanuck for posting.
Following the last couple comments...

books from.
The one I found was about a guy who worked for large company that was going to shut down a plant. They g of using a staging table for rounds.

was it ‘The Goal’ by Eli (goldblatt or something)? a classic. 1980’s i think.
calling his old college physics professor and going on a hike with Boy Scouts?

One of the major points of ‘the goal’ is by ferreting out bottlenecks you move the bottleneck to somewhere else but also by focusing on the long-term larger goal what appears to be an improvement in the small local area may not be improvement or maybe irrelevant.

kaizen japanese term continuous improvement or something like that.
 
That's how I came to running the splitter and conveyor when cutting rounds instead of using a staging table for rounds.
Please can you tell us more about this? I didn't realise you'd eliminated the round-cutting table.

That story you wrote reminds me of a fellow that posts on here occasionally and was that young manager given a short time to turn a company around. In his case it was a pet food company. He went through everything with a fresh set of eyes, convinced a board to fund his plans and turned that company into I think it was the second or third biggest pet food company in the UK (or it might have even been Europe, I can't recall). For the last few years he has been focusing his attention on the firewood game and it's been a genuine privilege to see someone with the funding and frankly, gonads, take some of my advice, mix it with his own very capable thinking and create a quite special firewood venture. He'll succeed beyond anything I could ever do. He's that type to just get it done, find a solution, find a better way, and keep finding better ways. You know, he was mocked a wee bit or at least challenged by some on here when he first started posting because they couldn't get their heads around the level he was thinking on and the scale he had in mind. Now he's doing more than many if not most of the mockers combined.
 
kaizen japanese term continuous improvement or something like that.
Yes and if I'm not mistaken taught them by an American, Dr Deming, after WWII. My memory is a little hazy but I seem to recall he wasn't as revered back home for his work in this area as he became overseas.

Much like our own Arthur Lydiard who was maligned by and developed a serious disliking for, the sporting officialdom of the day here, when they simply wouldn't give him the respect he and his coaching results deserved. He had to go overseas, be wildly appreciated for his talents, before gaining an ounce of respect from many back home. Many here thought him and his methods eccentric at best while others considered him a laughing stock. But results don't lie and he proved every doubter wrong. His methods even today are still the backbone of nearly every physical conditioning program for all sorts of sports worldwide. It just took sport science a decade or so to prove in the lab what he had already proven for himself and his athletes over time.

The world needs the mavericks, the left-field thinkers just as much as it needs the regimented foot soldiers.
 
... so it could be pulled behind an ATV. ...

You are going to want a stout 4 wheeler to pull this 12-22 around. I've got a Kodiak 400 and takes much of what it has in HP to pull it up a hill. You will also need a riser hitch because on most quads the ball is low and this splitter needs good hitch height so that the bottom of the wedge does not strike the ground. And if you are going down a steep incline make sure your brakes are in good shape. This splitter is well in excess of 1,000 lbs.
 
You are going to want a stout 4 wheeler to pull this 12-22 around. I've got a Kodiak 400 and takes much of what it has in HP to pull it up a hill. You will also need a riser hitch because on most quads the ball is low and this splitter needs good hitch height so that the bottom of the wedge does not strike the ground. And if you are going down a steep incline make sure your brakes are in good shape. This splitter is well in excess of 1,000 lbs.

The PS is what I was thinking of to pull behind an atv, you're correct that the eastonmade splitters are no lightweights. As far as atv's go, I've got an AC 650 H1, generally if I can't move it in two wheel drive then I better not attempt it period.
 
How many tons is that ram? The thing I like about the box wedge is how it handles large rounds, you just pull the piece back in splitting position.
 
I would like to see an eastonmade, with unsplit wood, all ready to go, on a table chute, feeding it to the operator. And, someone else stacking. And a stopwatch running....
 
I would like to see an eastonmade, with unsplit wood, all ready to go, on a table chute, feeding it to the operator. And, someone else stacking. And a stopwatch running....

Unless your setup is like that, otherwise you'd be comparing apples to oranges. For us, our previous splitter was a SplitFire 255, which in its own right, is a quick splitter. This this one easily triples the speed, while also being at a more comfortable working height.
 
Watching the videos the splitter is the fastest part of the process. Cutting rounds can be sped up with equipment but stacking will always be manual, only way to speed that up is more hands. That's why the big guys go to conveyors with big piles or metal crates or big bags. A person could have a perfect setup but pay back would be years. With my setup I can get a lot of wood up the conveyor but there is no way that I'm stacking it. I sometimes use my loader and load 16" rounds onto the dump trailer and use the hoist to dump them onto the table. Or if I'm in a hurry I just push them up to the splitter with the loader and handbomb them onto the table. I can split two lengths at a time on that 36" splitter.
IMG_20180605_205608.jpg IMG_20180605_205647.jpg
 
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