Curlycherry1
Addicted to ArboristSite
It took me a while to find a photo of this beast we built. The issue was getting a stable platform to build a massive woodsplitter onto, and have a big honking gas powered yet air cooled motor to drive the mother of all hydraulic pumps. The answer our welder friend came up with was a VW Bug!
I got him a bug with the front end that had been crunched and he built a bracket to mount the pump on the back of the motor and attach it to the main shaft. I can't remember how he did that but the pump stuck out through a hole in the car's engine hood. The tank for the oil was put intot he backseat area. The beam was cut into the dashboard so that most of it was in the passenger's seat area. Only the splitting part of the beam stuck out beyond the windshield.
The cylinder was 3" center, 7" outer cylinder and it used a lot of oil! The pump was a big monster that was common from some piece of Cat equipment. My uncle worked at Cat as the parts guy and so he said the pump was one that would move a lot of oil and was common and thus fairly cheap. It was ~8" diameter and weighed a ton.
The splitter worked great. Just drive it to where you wanted to split wood, shift it into neutral, pull a cable that would rev the engine rpms up a bit and then get out and split away. We used it for a while but then it caught on fire and burned up one night. The cycle was lightning fast (~4 seconds) and absolutely nothing stopped that ram. We used scare people by putting logs in sideways and having it shatter them into tiny pieces.
Here is the only pic I can find of it. Sorry for the quality but this was back in the days of Polorids in the mid 1970s.
I got him a bug with the front end that had been crunched and he built a bracket to mount the pump on the back of the motor and attach it to the main shaft. I can't remember how he did that but the pump stuck out through a hole in the car's engine hood. The tank for the oil was put intot he backseat area. The beam was cut into the dashboard so that most of it was in the passenger's seat area. Only the splitting part of the beam stuck out beyond the windshield.
The cylinder was 3" center, 7" outer cylinder and it used a lot of oil! The pump was a big monster that was common from some piece of Cat equipment. My uncle worked at Cat as the parts guy and so he said the pump was one that would move a lot of oil and was common and thus fairly cheap. It was ~8" diameter and weighed a ton.
The splitter worked great. Just drive it to where you wanted to split wood, shift it into neutral, pull a cable that would rev the engine rpms up a bit and then get out and split away. We used it for a while but then it caught on fire and burned up one night. The cycle was lightning fast (~4 seconds) and absolutely nothing stopped that ram. We used scare people by putting logs in sideways and having it shatter them into tiny pieces.
Here is the only pic I can find of it. Sorry for the quality but this was back in the days of Polorids in the mid 1970s.
LOL... that's pretty clever Curlycherry1 
