Good ones, bad ones? Mostly beetle kill spruce a lot of it up to 16" rounds or so maybe some pushing 20".

I don't know about brands but I built mine.

16 inch rounds of spruce , about anything would work

I have a Dirt Hand tools DHT 27ton with a 6.5 Kohler that has been good for me , they have good customer service the one time I needed it.
technically what I broke was my fault even if it had been poor desing of the hydraulic line to the pump , but since they had realized that after my year and changed the pump the sent me the new pump
all I paid was shipping and I was getting filters and a new hose any way.

the 27 ton slows down when it does it but it will go through some very very curly hard maple and power through knots

For the kind of wood you are talking about, I would buy a kinetic splitter as the cycle times on those are much much faster than on the hydraulic type. You really do not need anything with lots of pushing power splitting spruce and a kinetic splitter has more than you need for sure but you will get them split way faster with one of those than using any hydraulic splitter.

Same here.

I do mostly knarly stuff so I don't do kenetic , they can be fast , you also need to keep fingers clear

fast is good for cycle speed , but really right around 12 seconds is about right you can keep the ram moving all the time and grab another log , if you got down to 8 seconds with a more powerful pump and motor I think you would have more idle time and I am not sure you would get much more split.

if you have a wood yard some benches about the same height as the splitter bed work well to reduce lifting and bending

my old 2wd f150 was nearly the perfect height to split off the tail gate as the wood came out of the truck

people talk about the vertical and I used to think it was much more important than I find it to be now , my saws have 18 and 24 inch bars I rather than exhaust myself trying to load huge wood or roll the splitter to the wood I just noodle it with the saw tha goes fast and I only have to lift the weight of the saw

if you don't know what noodling is , you probably don't want to search you tube finding a video of noodling done right is difficult seems if you know how too noodle you don't take video of it and if you don't you pretend you do and video it
any way your pulling the length of the round and not across the round and you want to keep only go about 4 inches down front back with the bar this way you pull the noodle the long chip. if you get to far tip down or up you start making shorter chips and it gets less efficient
if you get all but about 3-4 inches through the round and give it a whack with the maul they split so no need to get your bar in the dirt

Good tips. I guess I've 'noodled' some wet green heavy birch, basically used the saw to rip slabs rather than try to lift and split. Sometimes sure get a pile of nice long shavings cutting with the grain that way.

Pawn shops seem to always have splitters in summer. It a fleet of pawn shop splitters. One of each type.

I haven't done much birch as they only get to around 10-12 inches in diameter here then die , but hybrid poplars , good lord they are heavy when cut and light when burnt

cottonwood is another that looses a lot of weight

with noodling vs ripping.

ripping your cutting across the end grain very short chip almost sawdust

noodling your cutting the long way with the grain like a box plane does on a long board making a curl
yes you some times have to stop and kick the massive pile of noodles out before you get the chip port down into them

your bar needs to be a touch longer than the round you're noodling ideally the sprocket is past the end of your round

I see all sorts of comments about skip vs full comp chain I have never done it with skip I just run full comp I also don't run a excessively long bar and I keep to the displacement divide by 3 ratio and I file my chains as needed to work in what I am working on so I make nice chip. most of what I cut is standing dead wood or ash that is about to be so my filing isn't excessively grabby like if I was doing all very soft green wood


cutters can only cut what they can bite off and chain speed is important , so let it bite a little less and keep chain speed up as long as your pulling nice chip/curl/noodles
think about it this way if your pulling .030 chip but bogging down the saw at 1/2 speed vs pulling .015 (just example I haven't measured my chip or curl with a caliper) running good rpm , your chain is moving , clearing chip and you cut at the same speed but don't stress the saw , over heat or get chip build up in the cut

this guy is pumping up and down , I may just be lazy but why work so hard when you go about 5 degrees nose down and let the weight of the saw take it down very little effort is needed I will rock a little from time to time
let the curl/chip and saw rpm tell you where to hold the saw if each cutter is pulling a 4-6 inch curl and your running good rpm that is about perfect.

this guy is cutting slabs and I guess that works I cut down once so I am stopping before I touch ground roll 90 degrees and go down again if it is a very big round this separates 1 of the 3/4 and the rest I can give a whack with the ax or maul and they seem to split fine then with little work
maybe he figures not rolling it is easier

my approach to noodling is do as little as I can because saw time costs more than splitter time
but do as much as I need too because back injuries cost more than either by a lot.



finally found an example that wasn't someone ripping a round and calling it noodling.

and go figure he calls it ripping

those noodles are nice in the garden also

I had a black birch 2 years ago that was so twisted only way to get the butt log split was to noodle. Save the noodles in dog food bags for fire starters.

When I left for college my dad bought a gas powered wood splitter. He told me his wood splitter had left him so he needed a replacement

I think every kid has something like that

my parents built a 3 car garage with shop after years of laying in the driveway working on everything outside

my grandmother said the year after she moved out her parents got , eclectic , a refrigerator and indoor plumbing

I wish I was close to a pawn shop like this.

Fairbanks Alaska….. short little drive for you!

Thank you very much!

Did you ever wonder who invented the portable hydraulic wood splitter?

As far as I know it was me and a couple classmates as a 1971 mechanical design project. I may just have to drag out my paper to prove it.

I guess you should have tried to patent the wood splitter.

Yip. I thought about that 20-30 years later.
At the time, it was only a project, and a bit heavy, and clunky. As a starving college kid, newly married, I was a lot more interested in a steady paycheck than trying to develop, and market a brand new product to what I thought was a very limited market.

I've got a kinetic, cycle time is about 2-3 seconds. You get used to it and after you do you can't stand how slow hydraulics are. Tho some of the newer ones, Eastonmade, are about 4-5 seconds.
Yes, there is a limit on how much of a crotch it can split. Large 3 or more way splits are tough. You have to hit them 2-3 times and it just isn't worth the effort.
Besides that I find crotch splits a pain, they don't split into a nice piece like a hunk of straight trunk does.

I split smaller stuff, nothing more than 12-14" I'd say. Stuff that is relatively easy to handle, no back breakers for me. And I split my stuff into small splits, it has to be small enough so that its easy to get a one hand grip on it. Makes use easier.
Large stuff is cut into lumber for woodworking.

My kinetic is electric, nice and quiet and I don't use it anywhere except by the lean too where I store about 4 years worth of firewood at a time so its not an issue. not for everyone tho.

Kinetic is good for its speed which shines on smaller easier to splits stuff for guys who like to split their stuff smaller. If you usually have large stuff thats tough to split and you don't mind larger splits then go with hydraulic.



Alot of woodlot owners that burn wood cut dead trees for firewood. This I feel is a mistake, they have lots of value for wildlife. I have Pileated woodpeckers nesting in my woods. They always use a dead standing tree for the nest and never the same one from year to year. Instead most woodlots could use a good thinning so I cut living trees with an eye on opening up the woods so that more grasses and forbs can grow in the ground. Makes for better wildlife habitat.