Billhook

More like "Barber's Folding Hit the Deckchair!"

That is a good idea. I was interested that he seemed to need to turn the logs a certain way. Perhaps the pine is easier to split than my hardwoods but it would be cheap for me to have a go. The JCB has a lot of force when the dipper is pulled in and I have a heavy duty trenching bucket which I do not use so I could cut the back out of it and sharpen both leading edges and have a double blade! I could just try that first to see if there is enough power and then put an extra hydraulic service and build the log grab if it looked promising.

It is a combination of balance in that the dozer blade, which must weigh a couple of tons on its own, is well forward and the hitch point is well down so that there is no lift at the front when the pulling starts. Also it is a very long stroke engine and each of the four cylinders is three and a half litres which means a massive amount of torque can be fed in gently at low revs. The two tractors wheels were spinning not only because of lack of weight and lack of traction, but also because their maximum torque came in at higher rpm.

Brilliant! I have a 360 and could easily do this. I was thinking of using the Matbro teleporter to do the same by retracting the ram but it is not strong enough. Was this a home made device or are they commercially available?

The great advantage of this if it works is that I could position the log and the two halves to be split into quarters with the Matbro and then take these quarters to the log deck and Palax. No human lifting! i am not sure how ram hydraulic tonnage equates with bulldozer tonnage. All I know is that a New Holland TF46 combine had dropped a front wheel into a spring hole one harvest. The land around the spring was bone dry. The contractor had two 150 hp Masseys four wheel drive on two chains trying to pull him out backwards All eight wheels of the tractors were spinning plus the two combine wheels and there was no progress. The contractor asked if Daisy Etta could help. I said that there was only one way to find out Received quite a bit of good humoured verbal abuse from the tractor drivers. "If three hundred horsepower and eight wheels cannot do it you are wasting your time with that old heap of scrap" etc etc Put the chain on, engaged first gear slowly pulled back the clutch lever. There was a low growl from the 14litre Cat engine and not a hint of track slipping and the combine popped out like a champagne cork! One of the tractor drivers nearly lost his pipe as his mouth opened with astonishment. A mountain of torque at very low revs. Max revs on the engine is about 800.

I think I have nearly every weapon at my disposal! I have two Stihl log picks and I use the small one for picking split pieces out of the one ton box to take to the stove, for that it is excellent. The larger pick with the long handle I have hardly used and you are right and I probably should have tried it on this occasion. One implement I use a lot is the Woodchuck peavey which is not only good for rolling large logs but also for standing them up off the ground for chainsawing rings. However there are three things that I wish to build out of interest, if I can find the time. First the log splitter mounted on the Matbro back plate like the skid steer one on the previous page. I already have the length of H section with a couple of sharpened dozer blades welded and a large JCB ram Secondly I need to have another go with the cone splitter and a different hydraulic motor Thirdly for the hell of it I want to drop another dozer blade vertically in some box section that has been well concreted in the ground, put a large diameter 30 foot long log up to the blade perhaps a couple of guides to keep the log straight. Next attack from the rear with Daisy Etta, 17 tons of Caterpillar D7 C 17A Dozer. Somethings gotta give, I'm not sure quite what at the moment!

No I never heard that word whilst growing up, I meant more like "Don't be hard on granpa cos you'll be grumpy like him one day when all your joints hurt and you cannot do the things you used to do"

Yep, we are now the people our parents used to warn us about!

I think that you could use the axe to stop the lights being irritating and the saw might help with making the shower work, not sure about the usb charger though!

I think I can work that one out! The trouble is firstly how do you know which control turns the water on and off, and secondly which direction it will go, and thirdly what does the little button on top of the left control do? All these decisions to make when all I want is a simple bath at the end of a hard day's work. I do not want to think about problems, just relax! It is things like this that convert me from be just a grumpy old git, into a megagrumpanoid!

I did cut the rings into the teleporter bucket and slid them sideways onto the table with a bit of tilt, but even the one shown needed two of us to manoeuvre it into position as it was so heavy. I would not be wanting to do that all day long! With your mid height table you have still a lot of bending to pick up the split pieces unless you have a very large table. I also think that the ram on this splitter was so strong that the table needed to be on the floor to stop it bending with the strain of a difficult log.

Here is the splitter having a go at a large awkward round. Is this slow for this sort of work compared to others?

I am sixty five years old and it sounds as though you are nearer thirty five! " Just knock them down to size with a chainsaw" means bending down tilting them on edge, wedging them somehow so they do not move followed by more chainsawing whilst bending followed by humping the pieces into the Palax hopper. It is the bending and lifting all day long that is so hard as you age. I have the lifting and sawing machinery with the Teleporter and the Lucas Mill, neither requires any lifting. I have a few awkward logs in the yard which are not worth putting through the Lucas and I just borrowed this blacksmith built splitter to see how it performed. It was harder work than I thought and I will not be building on like it However I will have a go at building a horizontal splitter to fit on the Teleporter backplate like this one Of course he needs to split it over a box or crate!

Hook up a cattle electric fencer to the vehicle.

Look, you lot may be into Miss Whiplash and Arbdungeon pain, but I have enough of that in a day's work! All I ask for at the end of the day is a lovely relaxing soak in a Radox bath with another chapter of a book to read. I do not need more pain!

That was not the problem as it stopped turning when it was on the ground. The cone went in to the log and then there was not enough power to drive it in further, or it started to bore a hole rather than go in further to split it. I lifted it up to spin it to try and and release the log by reversing the cone. Hoping to make the log hit another log to let it lose its grip! Either a more powerful hydraulic motor, a different cone, or I need to attack the log from one end or in a different way but I had other things to do at the time and I will experiment more when the weather improves. It did split a more even, knot free log about 10 inches diameter but I can easily put that through the Palax in no time at all. I need one to split large tree trunks

There she is, armed and dangerous! Thought I would start her off on the small stuff!

Yep, that's me! So grumpy that I took this photo Go figure! No on/off, no red symbol and other markings so small that I could not read them without my glasses which of course I was not wearing

Stayed in a hotel last night and had a bath. The control identification for hot and cold were non existent and the direction for shower or bath the same. So I managed to have scalding hot water on my scalp instead of nice warm water in the bath. Venturing to the basin to clean my teeth there are no symbols on the single lever tap to identify hot and cold. You are meant to assume I suppose that all hot water is on the right side or right tap, but I stayed in Italy where it was the other way round. I see this everywhere now and in some places they have a red and blue dot. So you my turn the tap to the right in the direction of the red dot but now right in front of you is the blue dot and the red one out of vision to the side. You might think it is obvious to feel the water but in some hotels it takes ages for the hot to come through. It really is not too difficult surely to put a static line on the tap stem and a red or blue dot that lines up with the line when you move the lever. I have such a tap on my shower here at home. You would have thought with 'Elf an Safety everywhere this might be a priority. Rant over (I think!)

I'm still hurting!

I tried fitting a cone splitter on my posthole digger on the front of the Matbro but it was not successful. (I blame the driver¬) In reality I used an old track motor from another swing shovel and it may have seen better days Either the hydraulic motor was tired or the cone was not good enough. I do have a 15 ton 360 so it would still be an option as I was impressed with some youtube videos.

I did not know that until I tried it!

There will be messing around but if I can drop four 2 foot diameter logs twenty feet long with the teleporter and then load the 8x8 inch lengths again onto the teleporter to take to the Palax at least there will be no lifting on my part and I am betting it will be quicker. Yes the splitter is slow but some pieces are very knotty and even with that ex army ram powered by the Fastrac hydraulics, I can see the table bend with the strain. The Lucas would go through them like a knife through butter My Palax will only deal with 12 inch through the splitter and 10 inch through the circular saw. Again quite honestly I would not want to be loading 20 inch diameter logs into a processor hopper all day as they are bloody heavy.

Well I tried the first option and it took over two hours to fill a box 1. Cut the logs into rounds, new chain on the Stihl 340 2. Heave the weighty rounds into the teleporter bucket ( aargh! My back!) 3. Heave weighty rounds onto splitter platform. ( aaarrrgh! My back again) 4 Operate strong but slow splitter ram, bend down pick up pieces, put them on table again for second split, pick up all the pieces and chuck into teleporter bucket. ( now need painkiller) 5 tipbucket into box, two loads) the the pieces of wood are all different sizes due to the knotty nature of the wood. Fine for my Aarrow Stratford but generally unsaleable to the general public. Now looking forward to doing the remainder with the Lucas Mill and hopefully no lifting involved!

No I did mean the other one below and I thought that it was the cover release but when I undid it the cover seemed to be locked solid so I did not wish to break anything. It is probably just glued together with age. I am quite strong but by hell that saw sometimes gives me an arm wrenching kickback! I assume that it is nearly as new since I have never heard the neighbour using it. The compression seems all right anyway and it runs well. I gather that they were only made for a short time in the early 2000s so it must be about fifteen years old.