Neil: Neil from Messick's here to share a little bit of my personal work here with you. I have a ton of firewood to do. I have some huge rounds that need to be split and cleaned up and stacked on my firewood pile. I realized here the other day I can do most of this work without even leaving the seat of a machine by doing all of the splitting from the seat of this skid steer in my air-conditioned and heated comfort using the Baumalight piece here that has a splitting cone here on the front or from the seat of my tracker to go around and grab those rounds, move them around, position them for the machine. I can do all this work without manhandling firewood, which is great. Come along with me here today.
I'm going to tell you about these two pieces.
Neil: Before we get started here, a little bit about our attachment. There's a lot of things here that you would see that are a lot in common with a hydraulic auger. Any kind of, say, Hydraulic Auger that you're going to put on the front of a skid steer or an excavator that you're going to drive that hex shaft in order to turn a dirt auger into the ground. You've got that same hydraulic motor set up here on the inside. This, though, is geared a little bit differently. This is made to turn slow and to have a lot of torque while it's turning.
While you can put that planer bit or this splitting cone on the end of other things, because this is a standard hex drive shaft like you find on a lot of those other augers, it may not turn with the same amount of power that this purpose-built machine does. Another thing here to consider, too, is the mounts that are on this. When you're pushing this bit against things, you're often putting weird torsional loads and stuff onto the attachment. This has large isolation plates here and bolts and stuff that really will help that to not bust up your implement when you're pushing it into weird places. We'll get two things out of the way here first. This is my younger son. [laughs]
When you make videos at home, sometimes it's challenging to do things without the kids being involved, so here he is. Also, the windshield. You'll notice that I broke it. I broke it with this. That's a whole another video. We'll put the link here in the description or up here in the corner somewhere.
Son: It's in the description below. It's below about 6 or 7 [crosstalk]
Neil: If you want the story on the windshield, I'll tell you that. Today we're talking about the splitter here. I've got a large log in front of me here. Now, the best way that I found to use this is to drive over to this dump and place the bit not right in the middle of the log but somewhere towards the side a little bit. Then when you start this thing turning, you're just going to put a little bit of down pressure on it. You'll notice I don't have it spinning super fast. We're just going to run that bit down in and pop. You see that side pop out there, right? Then we're going to back it back up. We're going to go to the next spot on the log and do the same thing.
Now, you notice there as I was starting to push that down, that my piece of wood there starts to spin, that is the Achilles heel on this thing. You're spinning your way into the log, and it wants to spin. Now, I'm on soft, muddy ground. In my experience here, this is about the worst place for this thing in terms of how quickly that thing wants to spin. I did a bunch of other work out here on about a 10-degree day when the ground was good and frozen. I'll tell you, I love that. You want to go out and split firewood? I'm sitting in my heated cab and my skid steer before I block the window out. Just happy as a lark out here splitting wood without freezing my tail off. It was pretty great.
With the ground being frozen, it wasn't nearly as up to spin as what it is out here in this muddier softer dirt. You see how this works. I just wiggle the machine a little bit, find a new place in order to split that machine, start the stuck bit turning, and it doesn't need to go in there but maybe about an inch or so before it pops the thing apart. Now, you notice if you take a look at the resulting pieces here as I do this, these do not look like split pieces coming off of a traditional hydraulic log splitter. When you have that flat mall, it gives you a certain predictable, clean split that this just doesn't do. It's going to split wherever the wood is the weakest. Sometimes you end up with funny-shaped pieces.
If you're somebody who is selling firewood, I don't know what response you would necessarily get from your customer with what some of this looks like. I've also had to take a bunch of these pieces here. If I wanted to take some of these flats right here and split them down smaller, it's almost easier just to whack them with an ax than it is to try to line this thing up, and it may or may not split properly. Another thing that you can do here, if we take this big flat piece right here that's already laid over, you can split these things with them laid over on their side. You don't have to go with the grain from the end. When you do it, it tends to take more time.
If you watch here, it's going to take more revolutions than me working my way into this. There it goes before it splits on the side. If you've had pieces fall over, it's not like you need to try to stand them back up again. You could just find a place to bury this thing in here and start going, and it'll pop apart. It's a good example there. This is a little head that's sitting longer, and you see how rather than splitting it clean, it pulverizes it. Nice hardwood seems to work better. I didn't have any issues with stuff that was stringy.
You just keep on drilling and push the bit down into it, when the wood starts to string, that bit crashing down through the log after it splits open, seems to push all the stringiness and stuff right out of the way. Here this one's laid over. I could just use the bit back up and stay on my log backup. Look at that. Using a big machine like this and a 75-horse diesel in all the split logs is probably not the most practical thing. Man, is it fun? [unintelligible 00:06:33] certain work is just satisfying to do. This is definitely like that for me.
I don't know what else to equate it to, but it is therapeutic to sit here and just move the machine around, split the wood, move the machine, split the wood, just watch the work get done right in front of your eyes as you go. It's relaxing. Couple of things out here that I've been using the grapple for. Obviously, it is instrumental in picking up down trees and carrying them over here to the area that I cut and split all this wood. I've also really liked it today in going through and cleaning up all these rounds. I can use the rake on the bottom of the grapple to sweep through the pieces that I've split and push them over to the pile.
Now, using these two attachments, I get more dirt on this wood than I might want, but I can get in there, grab things and then manipulate them without having to get off and manhandle each piece. There's some good things about this grapple when it comes to moving those logs. There's also some things here with this particular design from Artilion that doesn't allow the grapples to close around the logs all the time. I never get as big of a bite as I want there. I suspect I could do a little bit better with a brush-style grapple, but it's been really helpful out here with me today. I'll show you some of the things I've been doing with it.
Now, after I've gone with the skid loader here and split these pieces apart, I could sweep through my pile here with my grapple rake down a little bit and push the pieces forward. The one thing I like about doing this is that after you've split firewood, it doesn't necessarily all fall apart. Sometimes you find yourself manually going through and pulling the pieces apart. This will break those logs up as I sweep them in.
Now, you could probably do this same thing with a dirt bucket. Now, I could also use the grapple here to grab rounds. As I pull up to this here, you'll see I could close that lid and squeeze that piece of firewood right there to carry it where I needed to go. I got mixed feelings here on the iron fist-style grapple. It does allow me to reach out and grab over a wide area as that lid closes around.
I do find that it lacks a little bit in clamping force. I've got to hold the Hydraulics on. The serrated teeth do hold onto the logs, but I've lost them every once in a while. At times I feel like I shouldn't be. A brush-style grapple might work a little bit better here in that regard than what this does. It is great for loose material. I could drive into loose piles, and the way that that grapple comes around really crunches down. It uses that fist action to crunch the loose material, and I like it for that. I found a handful of shortcomings here when it comes to firewood. That's a little bit on this Baumalight attachment. I've got five or six hours now on this thing, probably now in total. I've done a lot of cool work with it.
If you're shopping for something like this, we're able to ship a lot of this equipment nationwide. Give us a call at Messick's, we're glad to help. If you need any parts needs for your machine, if you've broken your skid loader window out like I have, we've got it set on the shelf.
