# Screw / Cone type Splitter (PTO)



## tpmallofus (Jan 10, 2010)

New member to the forum.

I am looking at mechanical splitters for the honorary wood in Ireland and came across this this unit on YouTube, it looks simple and effective, and whats more works off little grey tractors which we have a fondness for in this part of the world; thanks to a certain Mr. Ferguson. Any comments?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Rypb1dcUE


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## Dune (Jan 10, 2010)

Ah, the new and improved extra safe version. Didn't know they still made those.


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## savageactor7 (Jan 10, 2010)

Hey that's one of the best and safest applications of that screw splitter I've ever seen. Hell I'd buy one if I didn't already have a splitter...most folks would be in for a lot of noodle cutting but so what.  I'm thinking that could be had for 350 or less. Of coarse even my closest friends swear I'm certifiable but that's beside the point...I like that splitter. Being old school we were taught NOT to wear gloves around machinery like that...just say'en.


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## Backwoods Savage (Jan 10, 2010)

I've read too many horror stories about those things and would just stay far away from it. They will certainly work on some stuff but don't think it would all be as easy as what is shown in the video. Also, with this splitter, for sure one could split faster by hand.


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## LLigetfa (Jan 10, 2010)

Dune said:
			
		

> Ah, the new and improved extra safe version...


Ja, that one looks not too bad.

I found a YouTube video of a unicorn splitter mounted on the front of a skid steer in place of the bucket.  Now that is probably the safest.  You stay in the seat and drive around stabbing everthing in sight.  I wish I could find that video again.


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## flash49 (Jan 10, 2010)

Just get yourself a Fiskars and you will be a happy man.


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## tpmallofus (Jan 11, 2010)

LLigetfa said:
			
		

> Dune said:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



I too saw this video, but splitting, to me at least, would necessitate a second man to set up & clear away or else you'd be in and out of the cab all day, furthermore no skid-steer on the property handy as they are. Also missing on YouTube is the clip of one of these units with a bar attached at the rear corner of the mounting plate/table which enabled you to feed logs onto the auger without getting hands involved, - at least initially.

To the poster who suggested a Friskars, I enjoy splitting co-operative logs as much as the next man, but wood scrounging habits leave me with a quantity of the stuff others don't want. I currently use a 6lb maul and it bounces off this stuff (Beech, Ash) wedges won't stick and bounce off too. I have to come back to it another day and generally fill a couple of wheelbarrows at a time, hence the investigation into going mechanical


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## LLigetfa (Jan 11, 2010)

Ja, I wasn't suggesting it was the best way to go, just the safest as you're never anywhere near the screw.  Looked like fun, like you were killing snakes.  Probably best suited to bust the really big stuff down to a managable size so they could be finished off with an axe.

My only experience with a PTO driven unicorn was years ago when I was still splitting with an axe.  There were a few gnarly pieces I had given up on and my neighbor offered up his unicorn.  All it managed to do was to turn the wood into some kind of stringy sculpture that we had to wrestle off the screw.  I ended up burning it out on my brush pile.  In that video they are splitting easy stuff that an axe would have no problem with.


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## raybonz (Jan 11, 2010)

Looks safe enough to me.. Hydraulic splitters aren't exactly the safest tools either.. Let's face it there is some danger in any splitting operation when being done by a person.. A coworker lost his thumb using his homebuilt splitter and even handsplitting has it's dangers.. What I like about the unicorn is the simplicity of it.. Not much that can go wrong with it.. 

Ray


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## Gomez (Jan 11, 2010)

I remember my cousin having one of the threaded-cone type of splitters you bolted onto a drive-wheel of a vehicle. The thing was downright scary and it didn't take much imagination to think of what could happen. Wonder how long they were on the market.


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## savageactor7 (Jan 11, 2010)

^believe it or not they would advertise them on TV back in the early 60's. Just the way you describe them too on a jack-up wheel of an idling car.


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## Dune (Jan 11, 2010)

Gomez said:
			
		

> I remember my cousin having one of the threaded-cone type of splitters you bolted onto a drive-wheel of a vehicle. The thing was downright scary and it didn't take much imagination to think of what could happen. Wonder how long they were on the market.



Yeah, that's what I was compainrg it to when I said safer.


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## polaris (Jan 11, 2010)

They make one that bolts on to a pto driven post hole digger and you can remain in the seat. They are for sale on ebay. I am actually thinking about looking in to one as I already have the tractor and post hole auger.
    Joe


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## karri0n (Jan 11, 2010)

**Waiting patiently for HighBeam to chime in**


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## Wood Duck (Jan 11, 2010)

For less money you could buy a chainsaw and cut the tough pieces apart. Even my cheap little chainsaw will cut right through any unsplittable piece of wood. Plus, a wood scrounger could find many other uses for a chainsaw besides splitting rounds.


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## LLigetfa (Jan 11, 2010)

polaris said:
			
		

> They make one that bolts on to a pto driven post hole digger and you can remain in the seat. They are for sale on ebay. I am actually thinking about looking in to one as I already have the tractor and post hole auger.
> Joe


Unlike the skid steer version, a rear PTO mount would take a lot of jockeying to get the point in the right place.


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## EDGE (Jan 18, 2010)

Hey, Terence---

What do you mean by "honorary wood"? Are you implying that there are only a few trees left in Ireland and that those were spared for some special purpose? If so, that would be a shame. I've been to a site that listed the largest trees in each of the counties in Ireland and it seemed to me that trees there were able to attain great size.


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## EDGE (Jan 18, 2010)

I punched up that site and see that it is http://www.treecouncil.ie

Ireland seems able to grow trees as well as the West Coast of North America.   No forests left?


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## tcassavaugh (Jan 18, 2010)

This was an interesting little number....might be the one mentioned earlier abouot just stabbing the pieces of wood. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eugC6YXK9fQ&NR=1

cass


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## drdoct (Jan 18, 2010)

I seriously looked into one of these, but in the end I'm glad I didn't get one.  After buying a used hydraulic splitter for $500, I realized how slow splitting with the unicorn would be.  I think I remember seeing one on a backhoe too that did whole logs.  I can see where that would be useful for big trees where you could use a smaller saw to buck up the 1/4 size tree logs.  People usually spend much more and have a harder time splitting when they end up trying to cheap out of just buying a splitter.  These unicorn splitters aren't really cheap either.  If my used splitter went out and I had the choice of buying a new one and splitting by hand again.... I'd be at the store yesterday!


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## tpmallofus (Jan 18, 2010)

EDGE said:
			
		

> Hey, Terence---
> 
> What do you mean by "honorary wood"? Are you implying that there are only a few trees left in Ireland and that those were spared for some special purpose? If so, that would be a shame. I've been to a site that listed the largest trees in each of the counties in Ireland and it seemed to me that trees there were able to attain great size.



OK

Please excuse my homophone spelling error I meant to imply 'ornery wood' as in stubborn: _I can't do a thing with that ornery mule_. 

Ireland is apparently one of the least forested countries in Europe, valuable farmland being cleared for grazing and crops and bogland and upland not being great timberland. Furthermore wood was not nurtured or harvested in the same way as in North America, the idea of a 'woodlot' does not hold traction here yet. 

Following article may be of interest:
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/c...f-good-land-management-is-murder-2013072.html

Don't get me wrong there are plenty of trees, many of considerable size and I have often found my 18" bar Sthil 026 underpowered for bucking a 40" diameter ash tree. However access to those if you have taken a solemn pledge to never pay cash for wood is going to leave you with other's cast offs. These are perfectly burnable, they just need extra elbow grease, or something mechanical to set them to a manageable size. 

The You Tube post of the skid steer was exactly the one I saw and I maintain that unless (a) you already own a skidsteer and one of those powerful, but expensive looking hydraulic unicorn units and (b) some to help with setting and stacking its going to be a lot of trouble. 

I am not a commercial entity here, I am looking to split three to seven cords a year, I have the tractor, and am hoping to purchase a chipper to supplement the logs, but that is the subject of another thread.

Here is the unit that I believe is made in NI.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUWhdLFx-qo&feature=related


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## Highbeam (Jan 19, 2010)

I'm sorry it took so long to get here. I own and use a bark buster brand PTO unicorn style splitter with my 30 HP compact tractor. I have split well over twenty cords of large and small, evergreen and deciduous trees with it. I would rather own a hydraulic splitter simply due to safety concerns but if you can live with the safety risk then these splitters are great. Unless you are splitting up particularly knotted or stringy wood they are much much faster than a hydro splitter or an axe. Reason being is that you hold onto one round and screw off chunks of that round quickly. You don't need to relift or reposition the round or wait for a hydro to retract. 

With nice straight rounds of small wood it is lightning fast since you only need to barely screw the wood before it pops apart. 

Only a couple of times over those 20+ cords have I had to use an axe to split a nasty stuck piece of stringy knotted large diameter evergreen from the screw. 

I'm afraid to even sell it to someone for the sake of liability. 

I believe my sig has a link to a thread about my splitter. There should be some info on usage there.


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## tpmallofus (Jan 19, 2010)

Thanks for checking in it was worth the wait, the link which showed this discussion has been before and was enlightening. I have two questions 
1. I hope to use the cone splitter on particularly hard/knotted/crotch wood that does not readily surrender to the axe. Some of the wood will definitely not be 'smooth rounds' shown in YouTube and indeed your own pictures, will the spitting deck / table from the You Tube unit I submitted prevent or at least minimize 'spinout'?

2. Rural N.Ireland has one of the highest density of tractor fanatics in the world (particularly for vintage material) I do not believe it difficult to find an engineering company to manufacture a steel unicorn, but what of the pitch and depth of the screw? should it be fine or coarse, steep or narrow?


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## Highbeam (Jan 19, 2010)

"Spinout" is not a problem so long as your rounds are long enough and you place the screw tip properly, by spinout I assume you mean the round spins with the screw and not the loss of bite from the screw threads. When the round starts spinning then you should get your arms and head back to avoid breakage. The single bar parallel to the axis of the screw's rotation is all that is needed and placing a table beneath the screw would prevent the splits from falling away from the screw. I wouldn't use a table. What happens when the screw fails is that the screw threads itself into the round and the round doesn't pop apart which stalls the tractor engine. If the round doesn't split and the engine doesn't stall then you can get a situation where the screw threads slip and in these cases you can easily pull the round off of the split and try again at a different place. 

I wouldn't save the nasty stuff for this splitter. It is ideal in good wood. 

2) I can measure the screw but I find the taper to be fairly slow, the threads very coarse, and the threads shallow. The tip of my screw is steel and the threads appear to be deeper, the remainder is an alloy with shallower threads. Almost an ACME thread. I'm not a machinist, this is something I'd buy.


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## tpmallofus (Jan 19, 2010)

Thanks,
Looking more closely at your photo it looks like you lean the logs on the steel bar while feeding them onto the unicorn, rotation holding them in place, is this correct?
Have you rigged up some pipe arrangement to your ROPS which enables you to operate the clutch from the rear of the tractor.

Below is the link to the UK producer, I have yet to track down the NI manufacturer. I like the inclusion of the wedge under the unicorn.
http://www.hycrack.co.uk/index.htm
still pricy at over $1200 + delivery


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## Highbeam (Jan 19, 2010)

Ah, that wedge is because of the goofy table setup. In the states we use long wood and in that UK shot they are running the short round into the screw vertically so that the wedge will align with the split. There is no reason, in fact it is inferior, to include a wedge anywhere near the screw on the bark buster design. I even wonder what happens when you try and put a 4" diameter round into that hycrack. Watch your fingers! That round could easily slap down clockwise into the table. 

You are correct that on my splitter the log is leaned into the steel bar to prevent rotation. The round slides along the bar as it is sucked into the screw. You'll also notice the bar has a bend at the end to protect the operator from feeding his crotch into the screw. 

That length of electrical conduit lashed to the ROPS is attached to the PTO lever to disengage the PTO. It works, it works fast, but you actually need to pull the conduit instead of the more natural push. I have used it when a short round has slipped off of the screw and begins to spin at PTO rpm. 

Oh, in operation the screw is turning much slower than PTO540, the screw runs at about 1/2 speed or 270RPM and the engine gurgles along at half of pto speed.


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## Bigg_Redd (Jan 19, 2010)

flash49 said:
			
		

> Just get yourself a Fiskars and you will be a happy man.



Agreed.

Me and my Pro Splitter are much faster.


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## tpmallofus (Jan 21, 2010)

What is this 'Friskars'?

I cheked up and it appears lighter than my current maul and its sharpness appears that it would only get buried in the wood, like some ax. Is there really some 'Friskars' difference


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## LLigetfa (Jan 21, 2010)

Terence said:
			
		

> What is this 'Friskars'?


LOL

Is that like BR's "dolmer"?


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## firefighterjake (Jan 22, 2010)

LLigetfa said:
			
		

> Terence said:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



And let us know forget the very rare and endangered California "Condor" stove top and probe-style thermometer.


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## tpmallofus (Jan 22, 2010)

RRRRight Fiskars / Friskars slip of the hand, better on the keyboard than at the woodpile, where the short handle of the Fiskars looks as if it could cause problems. Convince me!


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## LLigetfa (Jan 22, 2010)

Terence said:
			
		

> Convince me!


Ask the guy that put a dent in his forehead and had to go get stitched up.  Can't blame that on the straightness of the handle, only the "short" aspect of it.


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## Mr A (Mar 23, 2012)

This one looks safe, and pricey too.

A lot of videos from Eastern Europe using the spiral. I am healthy enough to swing an ax, but get some knarled, knotted old rounds that need to be dealt with. Looks like it makes easy work of it if you have to do it all day long, everyday. I haven't seen any dealing with difficult wood. I have seen them mounted on post hole auger attachment for the PTO, you could probably get rough with it then. This type of splitter on a drill press type of configuration, like a vertical splitter might be ideal.


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## Pallet Pete (Mar 23, 2012)

My old neighbor used one since the 70's and never had a problem then one day he had a round stick ! It flailed around and flew off hit him in the right side of his face. 22 stitches later and 2 weeks off work he could see again ! Those things are scary especially without a safety shut off near by. That said this one looks like a major improvement and much safer over the old bolt on loose a lim style.


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## Mr A (Mar 23, 2012)

these guys got it down.


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## LLigetfa (Mar 24, 2012)

Mr A said:


> I have seen them mounted on post hole auger attachment for the PTO, you could probably get rough with it then. This type of splitter on a drill press type of configuration, like a vertical splitter might be ideal.


The slickest video I saw was of one on the front of a skid-steer Bobcat.  It was just driving around stabbing rounds where they laid.


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## ScotO (Mar 24, 2012)

This subject has been posted on here many times before.  I personally think it is a very dangerous way to split firewood, imagine your t-shirt or shorts (or glove) getting grabbed by that screw.  GAME OVER.  Anytime you have unshielded rotating equipment with no immediate way to shut it down or stop the rotation, you are just asking for an accident.  May not ever happen, but you have a good chance that it can and WILL happen.  Just my .02 cents on the issue.


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## Mr A (Mar 24, 2012)

You got a good point ScottyO. A lot of videos from Europe using the screw, homemade devices. It sure makes the work look easy, and quick. I especially like the electric operatiion, quiet.


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## ScotO (Mar 24, 2012)

I think it would be OK if used in a 3-point setup where you were splitting rounds or logs that were not in the vicinity of a human being.  The ones set up to do an entire log in one screw are cool and have their place.  There is also the screw splitter in this video, now that is impressive!


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## BrianK (Mar 24, 2012)

There is an ad currently running in our local Trader's Guide:



> LOG splitter, Bark Buster, spiral type, w/gas motor, VGC, $750
> http://www.recycler.com/details/-37126669/log-splitter-bark-buster-spiral-type-w-gas--


 
I'm tempted to go look at it and see it run, just for kicks.


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## ScotO (Mar 24, 2012)

BrianK said:


> There's is an ad currently running in our local Trader's Guide:
> 
> 
> 
> I'm tempted to go look at it and see it run, just for kicks.


 That's not far from me at all, Brian......where are you at in PA?


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## BrianK (Mar 24, 2012)

Scotty Overkill said:


> That's not far from me at all, Brian......where are you at in PA?


 
I'm in Johnstown, grew up in Hollidaysburg.


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## BrianK (Mar 24, 2012)

BrianK said:


> There's is an ad currently running in our local Trader's Guide:
> 
> 
> 
> I'm tempted to go look at it and see it run, just for kicks.


 
I'm wondering if placing the table under it decreases any of the dangerous aspects of the screw type splitters? Here's one I found in an image search:


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## ScotO (Mar 24, 2012)

The table helps stabilize the wood, but the real safety concern is the screw.  If it grabbed you or your clothing while its spinning  you're in trouble!


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## Mr A (Mar 25, 2012)

It's been a while, wonder if the original poster from Ireland found what he was looking for? I found the screw selling on ebay under auger type log splitter, about $300 with shipping from Poland. I would like to devise one that runs on a slide pushing into the round, rather than pushing the log into the screw, for safety reasons. I found a old heavy duty drill press stand on CL. Maybe a vertical press type splitter with the screw coming down on the round. For the original poster, the device on the YouTube video you posted is sold on Ebay, ships from UK http://www.ebay.com/itm/Screw-Type-...quipment_RL&hash=item256a9a32fc#ht_500wt_1054


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## Mr A (Mar 25, 2012)

Scotty Overkill said:


> The table helps stabilize the wood, but the real safety concern is the screw. If it grabbed you or your clothing while its spinning you're in trouble!


According to this, the nanny state outlawed the BarkBuster in 1991, over 4 accidents. These things really do look effective, and all for safety, but not idiot proofing everything.
http://ezinearticles.com/?Bark-Buster-Wood-Splitter&id=2264600
Then there is the "Stickler" made in Washington State, mounts to your jacked up drive wheel of your vehicle. No recall? Guess not, it sells for $350. http://www.ebay.com/itm/STICKLER-SC...ultDomain_0&hash=item20c402ec12#ht_630wt_1139. I am fascinated by this. It is a wedge, but instead of pounding it in, it screws itself into the wood. The rotation taking the place of the impact force. There are some crazy splitters out there, like this guy  
and some smarter ones too, like this guy, the Firewood god, damn, what a machine!- 

a lot of the YouTube videos are from East Europe, not in English.


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## MasterMech (Mar 26, 2012)

on the homemade processor, that thing sure does keep the Operator busy!


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