Revlac
Guru
Joined: 31/12/2016
Location: AustraliaPosts: 961 |
| Posted: 08:10am 09 Oct 2023 |
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I let a friend borrow this years ago and only recently got it back, I should have taken a photo of it back when it was built.
It looked much better back then with good paint, now it looks pretty rough as it is, done some repairs to get it going but needs more work.
It was built with scavenged parts as usual low cost and a fun very useful project, it stated with a hydraulic ram from a railway tamper machine bought at an Auction, think it was for pulling spikes.
The axe head was made from some hard steel that was left over from something and it was mounted on a piece of I beam with the pipes and valve block.
We mounted some mower wheels under the whole thing (painted yellow) so it could be powered from the tractor or something else, the tractor did not have enough oil flow, so we powered it from the remotes on the Excavator, found a weak Hydraulic hose, I was in the way of it FFS  , replaced that and had a good shower, clothes needed to be washed a dozen times before they where usable again.
It worked ok when powered from the excavator but hat too much power and could easily bend the H-Beam, so strengthened that up with steel plate each side below the axe.
Not cost effective to run in this configuration, so it didn't get as much use as needed, much time had passed and decided to add to the build, we got trailer mounted welder from an auction and used the trailer under the block splitter, the welder went onto the tractor as a tractor pack, very handy.
Additional parts acquired from Auctions, Hydraulic motor, speed control valve, conveyor etc.
The motor is an old early model (1940 orso) Hillman, old man had it sitting in the shed unused for 30 orso years, had no water pump so we use an old TP Mitsubishi Magna water pump, need to get a new belt for it, the twin Bosch Hydraulic pumps we already hand.
We run it a few times a year for a few years on petrol, I then run it on woodgas for many years after, worked very well, sometimes I run it from compressed woodgass that I had stored in several old LPG cylinders at 150 psi, was easy to start and use, but switched back to petrol for someone else to use.
Put on a new electric fuel pump and tank be for it was borrowed and apparently it failed straight away!! so they put a little lawn mower tank strapped to the hydraulic tank, they would have filled that a few times I reckon.
It can be operated by one person, but with 3 people it can be more efficient, I'm very pleased to have it back, works excellent splitting twisted Ironbark and even stumps, I was getting  tired of using an axe to TRY and split firewood, had to find the strait grain wood blocks because an ordinary axe would just bounce off the twisted Ironbark.
Cheers Aaron
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