Gooserider said:
My friend has split hundreds, if not thousands of cords with his SS, and when it is running does run circles around me with it. He uses it to the point where he's had to have the beam built back up with weld metal twice because it had worn down to the point where the bracket for that little bearing under the pusher was hitting the edges of the groove it had worn. A lot of his down time is scrubbing crud off the beam - he says that one of the keys is to stop and scrub the beam any time the ram fails to retract properly... I also mentioned the earlier comments about using spray lubes instead of grease, and he (kind of as I expected) asserted that the way he greases the unit is the way that SuperSplit tells him to do so...
He also feels the SS is a much more complicated machine internally than the hydraulics, and I agree 100% - a hydraulic has a cylinder (one moving part) a pump with maybe a half dozen, and a valve with one or two more. All the bearings and other crud sensitive parts in a hydraulic are inside the fluid system, where they get constant lubrication... On the SS, you have a bunch of semi-exposed bearings controlling a precision machined rack and pinion gear set, that essentially operates by slamming the gears together - much more complex mechanically... (And the parts for the Hydraulic are also far less than some of the major parts for the SS if the prices my friend was quoting at me were accurate...)
If he is truly using oil or grease to lube the beam, then I'm sure he is having a lot of very unnecessary down time as I can only imagine the amount of crud that must build up there. Using silicone or wd40 every so often works excellent and there's minimal (if any) issues with the ram getting hung up if the beam is scraped occasionally. I leave a 1" scraper sitting on the machine (wedged between the beam and the engine mount on the left side) and I scrape the beam down about once every 20 minutes or so. The process takes approximately 15 seconds. Other than this, I never have any down time. I do spray and wipe everything down with WD40, and lube the rack/pinion at the end of the day, but that's about it. Unless it was one hell of a hydraulic splitter, there's no way a typical hydraulic could keep up with the SS, even if the SS was down for several minutes each hour... the SS is just so much faster.
I suppose I can see your point that the SS is a little more complicated when you add up all the moving parts (although it's still a very simple machine), but overall I still think it's a very reliable design. The issue I have with your original statement is you make it sound like the SS is constantly down for one reason or another and that over the course of a day the hydraulic splitter will do just as much splitting... That's absolute nonsense. You're talking about an old machine with an increadible amount usage. That's like saying you have a friend with a F150 that has 1,500,000 miles on it, but you say Fords break down a lot... Very impressive feat to get to that point, but one should also obviously expect increased mechanical failures as well given the age and wear and tear it's seen over the years. The big wear item on the SS is those little bearings, but they can be bought for about $5 each and changed in a couple of minutes, and even these should last a VERY long time. The SS is pretty much built with off the shelf parts, so most of the parts that make up this machine can be bought through other avenues (such as McMaster Carr) should something actually need replacing, but you'd have to do a hell of a lot of splitting before any significant wear or rebuilding should need to be done. On the flip side, I would completely expect a hydraulic splitter would need significant upkeep and rebuilding to keep running after splitting hundreds/thousands of cords of wood as well... but that would take a very long time for one to get to that point given the speed differential. Just think about the cost of hydraulic fluid/filters and additional fuel usage alone (the SS sips gas by comparison), never mind the lines, seals, overheating, and other failures one would expect to occur over this kind of time frame with a hydraulic unit. When you look the a the big picture, not only is the SS much faster, but I would expect the SS to be cheaper to run over the life of the machine as well. If the SS wasn't faster, cheaper, and more reliable, it wouldn't be the choice of the high volume guys... which I think it's pretty much the standard for production work, short of a processor.
BTW, if your friend has split literally thousands of cords of wood with his machine, I'd say that's a damn impressive testament to the longevity of the design. Not a lot of splitters live long enough to reach that point... and that's a number the average home owner/small reseller will likely never come close to reaching in his lifetime.
