The more flutes you have on a wedge the more debris you will get. A fixed box wedge on a large processor will waste about 1 cord for every 5 produced. Crooked wood or wood that has a lot of knots tends to form mulch rather than uniform pieces. The debris becomes a problem when you are pushing 4 or 5 cords an hour as it really begins to pile up. You can send it up with the split wood into the pile but it hampers drying. If you sort it out, you can chip it and resell as woodchips or send it to a biomass plant if you have one handy. Worst part of a fix box wedge is getting something stuck in it. Once it’s stuck fast (as in 58 tons will not push it out) getting it unstuck is both time consuming and very dangerous.
Circular blades with carbide teeth will cut a long time provided you don’t hit any metal. The metal easily chips the carbide and once half or so of the teeth are chipped, you begin to lose blade speed and power in the cut. Replacing the teeth requires a little bit of silver soldering. Not too hard but kind of a pain and not cheap. Sawdust from the blade can be used or sold as it does not have bar oil in it.
You would really need to split and sell some serious firewood to justify a large processer with a circular blade and the support equipment to run it.
Thanks for this info'.
I can see how cutting cross grain on knotted/crooked logs would create more waste, not to mention put more strain on everything.
but I'm mindful of not writing it off as "waste" as there are downstream uses for it that could still more than cover the costs of removing this from the firewood stream.
To my mind, there does appear to be two distinct genre's of processors based on the type of wood one expects to feed it with; straight grained pecker pole downgrade logs day in, day out, or a serious mix of woods (I'm thinking urban tree service cast-offs and the like) some of which could be big, ugly monsters, and the diameters are changing almost every second log unless graded well before they hit the feed table.
The more I think about it, the more I do like the flexibility of the built-rite wedge setup.
Can wedges be reversed so you could try pushing stuck material back out the way it went in? I'd imagine trying to clear a wedge of stuck material given the forces involved would certainly be a challenge.
I do like the idea of some wedge edges being forward of others, so that the loads on the ram are actually lower, without one massive spike in pressure as all the wedge edges fight back at the same time.