Just a five year Barreto Splitter update

[jotul8e2]

I split and stacked about 1/2 a cord this afternoon. This is my fifth season with the Barreto splitter I bought from a Home Depot tool rental.

The good: These are built for rental use and are made to take abuse after abuse. They are also designed to be towable at normal road speeds. Everything has performed as it should with nary a glitch. The Subaru engine is outstanding. It starts easily and runs comfortably at any throttle setting. It has split anything I have managed to wrestle over to it.

The bad: The cycle time is a bit slow, around 12 seconds. This is still faster than I am, but for someone processing a lot of wood, or who works with a partner, it would be nice to have more pump. The engine would easily handle more. It also came with an annoying safety release that requires one hand to operate while the other operates the piston, but that was not hard to remove. And moving one is not trivial - something around 700 lbs., as I recall.

They come up in Home Depot stores from time to time, as well as other rental companies. My experience could not be bettered.

 

[hedge wood]

Glad to hear the splitter is working out. I normally pickup a few splitters during the summer at garage, estate , moving sales and freshen them up and sell them in the fall to winter. The main thing I find with all of them when I run them to test before selling them is they are too slow. When you are used to using a 28GPM pump on a four inch cylinder a 11-16 GPM pump just doesn't cut it. But they still beat splitting with a axe.