Guillotine Wood Splitter

Guillotine Wood Splitter WOODLOT EQUIPMENT Wood Splitters No chainsaw is needed with Darrell Inkster’s firewood “guillotine” The double-edged blade slices through whole trees cutting them into 16-in lengths and splitting them at the same time “I go through 20 cords of firewood a winter and decided to find a way to make the job easier ” says Inkster “My wife uses a Bobcat to load logs onto the feeder chain and I run the shears ” Everything about the guillotine shears is massive starting with the log feeding channel It’s a 28-ft long 14-in wide 1-in thick I-beam removed from a nearby bridge when it was rebuilt To move logs in the 14-in wide I-beam channel Inkster used combine feeder chain cutting down the cross bars to fit The cutting blade is 22 in wide by 16 in high and 1-in thick Recycled from the steel cutting edge of a Caterpillar dozer blade Inkster says he got it for almost nothing though he spent around 8 hours grinding the edge razor sharp with a disk grinder The splitter blade is a second piece of steel 6 in long and also 1- in thick One end of the wedge is welded to a 1/4-in steel plate that is bolted to the shears blade The wedge has been ground to a sharp edge The splitting wedge is mounted at the blade’s center point but about 4 in up from the blade edge While only 6 in long Inkster says it’s more than enough to split a 16-in length of log after the shears have done their job “Green wood splits clean as a whistle ” says Inkster “When the blade and wedge hit older dry wood they tend to squash the wood fiber pulverize and then split it ” To mount the blade Inkster fabricated a reinforced arch above the output end of the feeder channel He used sections of 1/4-in thick 3 by 4-in rectangular steel tubing with curved ends He welded them together at the peak to form a mount for the heavy-duty hydraulic cylinder that drives the blade “The curved arch distributes the pressure from the cylinder better than square beams would have ” says Inkster “I run the cylinder off a hydraulic pump on my truck I set the pressure at 2 100 psi which gives the blade about 40 tons of down pressure ” “We can process about two cords per hour ” says Inkster “I can cut and split a chunk every 25 seconds ” “It goes through 12-in poplar like nothing ” he says “The way it’s designed I can chainsaw logs up to 20-in diameter feed them through on end and use it like a normal splitter ” Contact: FARM SHOW Followup Darrell Inkster Box 854 Dauphin Man Canada R7N 3J5

To read the rest of this story, download this issue below or click here to register with your account number.