Another Firewood Processor

[Wild Bill the 2nd]

Good to see an update, I was wondering if you guys had scrapped the idea and taken up golf or ping pong. LOL.

No, most extra curricular activities have ceased over the last couple months. Focused on the build. Looking forwart to playing some Stump after this is up and running. We have quite a crew that wants to come up and see this thing work. None as much as us though.

Got some pictures of the progress at the end of the day today.

At this point we are pretty much just waiting on hoses to try this bad boy out. A little disappointed that it is taking 10 days between order and receipt of the hoses from Surplus Center. But I guess it is a fairly big order and if I were in the warehouse I'd want to keep putting "that order" on the bottom of the pile too.


Valves are all mounted. Some of the tight hoses we had custom made rather than dealing with extra hose and finding a place for it.
-Auto-cycle splitter valve is all the way on the left with the 2 handles. Pull them both down to detent. THe cylinder will run to the end of its stroke and one lever will release. The cylinder will return and then the second will release.
-2nd from the left is the saw motor valve.
-In the first bank of 3 valves we have the saw actuation, the log clamp, and the infeed advance.
-In the second bank of 3 valves we have the multi-wedge lift, the infeed table log stop, and the infeed table lift.


A lot more stuff going on a bit further down the machine.


Got an enclosure to hold all of the electrical. Tach/hour meters to the left of the key switches. We placed a digital hydraulic oil gauge in the display window of the panel. We still need to get longer choke and throttle control cables for the splitter engine.


Bar oil tank in the upper left. 4 PSI/30GPH 12 volt fuel pump to pump the bar oil. After the pump it goes through a needle valve and then a check valve/ball valve before the line runs over to the saw.


Here you see the saw valve


In this closeup of the saw valve the saw is off. You see that we have a switch that will turn on the fuel pump when the saw valve is actuated. When you push the lever down to turn the saw on it pushes the spool up. This releases the switch which turns the pump on. We installed a triangular stop that prevents the lever from being pulled up (extending the spool down) and putting the saw into reverse.


Closeup of the saw valve in the run position.


Here is a pic of the oil cooler circuit. It is a bit difficult to see since there are bags that cover the open gauge ports obscuring the view. In my hydraulic thread someone advised against this and to purchase a larger cooler that has a minimum of 1-1/4" ports to take the full flow. The group decided that this was cost prohibitive since we are not a commercial operation. We will try this and see if it works for us.

The supply to the cooler is on the right. After that there is a ball valve in the main 1-1/2" return line. After the ball valve there is the return from the cooler. We will adjust the large ball valve in the middle to achieve a 10 PSI pressure drop through the chiller. I will get you a better picture after Tuesday when the gauges come in.


Here is a pic of the suction and return from the tank. The tank is filled with fluid and is not leaking. phew!


Pusher plate (which is 20-1/2" tall including the plates at the bottom) has its roof on it. This will allow us to simultaneously split and cut. If a cut is finished before the ram is fully retracted the log will rest on the roof and drop off into the splitter once fully retracted. It works in my mind, we'll have to see how it works in reality...


Pusher plate has grab hooks welded on either side in case we need to pull a log back out of the wedge.


Video of the two engines running. That makes us happy! Although only one of them starts. The saw engine has toasted 2 starter solenoids. Need to find out what is going on there. Not sure what it could be, the other engine starts just fine.

That is more or less it for the progress. We have a polycarbonate window to put in over the splitter and saw valves. We ran into an issue with our saw plate. We need to recess the motor into the back side of the plate further so that we have more of the shaft to grab onto on the sprocket side.

Hoping to see things start moving on Tuesday or Wednesday at the latest.

 

[CDN Farm Boy]

Thanks for the updates. Looks like progress and the end is near.

Have you got some sort of bottom stop built in that the saw can't hit the top of the push block?

 

[Wild Bill the 2nd]

Yes, it only travels to horizontal. A good distance above the pusher. Should be 4+ inches above.

 

[murphy1244]

Very impressive Bill!!! My Mrs wants to know how much something like that costs so she can buy me one:thumbsup:. I told her it would be cheaper to just buy presplit wood.:laughing:

 

[Wild Bill the 2nd]

You can tell her that we have $11,691.66 into it at this moment. A bit more than the $8000 upper end that I was initially thinking.
All of those little things really tend to add up! As for purchasing one with these capabilities you are looking at least $30,000 to $40,000

I believe you can find smaller ones that start around $10,000 though. In the end even that is a lot of firewood when you consider the upcharge for buying cut/split/delivered...

 

[murphy1244]

You can tell her that we have $11,691.66 into it at this moment. A bit more than the $8000 upper end that I was initially thinking.
All of those little things really tend to add up! As for purchasing one with these capabilities you are looking at least $30,000 to $40,000

I believe you can find smaller ones that start around $10,000 though. In the end even that is a lot of firewood when you consider the upcharge for buying cut/split/delivered...

Wood her is now going for 350 to 500 a cord so that's still alot of wood.

 

[Wild Bill the 2nd]

ITS ALIVE!!!!

Got the last of the lines installed tonight and fired it up. Had two leaks that were easy to fix. The oil filter and a fitting that wasn't tightened. Not bad at all.

We got the bar oil pump primed late so we did not put the chain on. Motor at least spins though. Looks like we will may take the needle valve and the check valve out of the line for the bar oil. Seems to have a nearly perfect flow without them in the loop.

Our biggest issue is that the I-beam bends way too much! With the splitter valve relief set at 2000 psi we saw both ends of the beam flex and we saw the beam twist near the rear mount. Not good at less than 20 tons, really it was pretty scary! We are going to box the beam in on both sides. Probably with 3/8" so that it looks like this

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Next biggest issues are slightly embarrassing, but hey, I'm a beginner at this hydraulics stuff.
-First, My initial plan was to run some additional hydraulics off of the power beyond from the log splitter valve. I ended routing those items to a different pump but still ended up purchasing the calve with power beyond. So is there any way to convert this so the power beyond flow goes out the out port or do I need to plumb the power beyond to the return manifold? Could I just tee into the current line running from the out port or will I have an issue backfeeding something?
-Second, Looking into power beyond. I have 2 valve bodies each with 3 directional valves. I just plumbed the out from the first into the second. Am I OK doing this if I only ever want to use one function at a time or do I put too much pressure on the output of the first valve somehow? I could convert the first valve in the series to power beyond. We'd just need to cut and re-weld the mounting plate since the location would change.
-Last hydraulic issue, I see that my log clamp pressure bleeds down. Is it a lock valve that I would want to prevent this?

22HP engine seems to be bogging down easily under what I would consider to be light pressures. 1500 PSI on the 6.5 GPM Pump. Tomorrow we will try to see how it works when running the saw with the 17.4 GPM pump. That will be the acid test...

 

[SpringHollow]

I looked into getting an auto-cycle valve but I have been hesitant to do so. When I was reading the manual for the, the retract set point had to be a few hundred psi higher than the extend set point and also a few hundred psi lower than the pressure relief valve So I would lose a fair amount of splitting pressure by using one. At least that is how I read it.

Ken

 

[Wild Bill the 2nd]

Put the first log through the processor this evening. Made no adjustments to any valves as of yet. Still have a rats nest of hoses. Waiting to see how things come off the wedge before we build the splitter outfeed grates.
How'd it run? Not too shabby...

 

[ferrari99]

Good job. Seems to work pretty well definitely faster than a chainsaw a splitter. :thumbsup: