How Fast Can Our Souped Up Log Splitter Fill a Tote?

Welcome back to RuggedMade. I'm Jared, I'm Nick. So this is sort of episode two of what's become a series on this souped-up 322 splitter. If you saw the first episode, all we really did was take a splitter, the 322 that normally comes with either a 6.5 horsepower engine hooked up to a 13-gallon-per-minute two-stage pump or a 10-horse engine hooked up to a 16-gallon-per-minute two-stage pump, and we bolted on the bigger 420cc 15-horsepower engine that comes from our 700-series splitter and powers a 28-gallon-per-minute pump because people are always asking us if there's something bigger and faster. So we figured we'd put this oversized engine on this thing and see how fast it goes, and the cycle times that we got last time were really fast.

We did make one little improvement in the shop that Nick helped out with. The original hose was one inch in diameter, and with the larger pump, it was an inch-and-a-quarter barb. To be quick and dirty, we just shoved the hose onto the inch-and-a-quarter barb. So last week, we finally ordered the correct parts and made the whole suction line inch-and-a-quarter all the way down.

Because the bung and the original fitting on this smaller eight-gallon tank, which is definitely undersized for this size pump, just couldn't take the same fitting that we use on the 700-series tank, which has a bigger pump. So we got that sorted out, and again, this smaller tank is just temporary. We're just having fun. We're not running this for hours and hours and letting that oil get hot.

So the goal today is just to take this little pile of wood. We're just going to see how long it takes us to fill this tote. We're just going to loosely drop it in. We're not going to do a neat stacking. So obviously, you would fit more in if you stacked it and just see how long that takes. Let's get started. Sounds good.

[Engine running]

All right, well, that went pretty fast. Yeah, it did. Took just a hair under 20 minutes to fill this tote. And we had kind of a … we didn't really prep the wood very well. There was short stuff and long stuff. So we weren't using the stroke restrictor to just have a 20-inch stroke. We took the four-way blade off a whole bunch of times to split some of the bigger, crotchy rounds. It was just kind of a realistic little mini splitting session to see how fast this thing would go. And it goes pretty fast. It sure does. Yeah.

So keep in mind, this was really just about trying to get some more speed out of this machine. It's the same power as it would be with a smaller pump, same pressure coming out of the pump, and that four-inch inner diameter cylinder on the 322. But we do hear people asking, you know, how do I make my splitter go faster? Well, a bigger pump and a bigger engine to drive it, that's one way.

So if you guys are interested, let us know in the comments. We can do more episodes on this. One of the things that Nick and I talked about doing is, we already mentioned the suction hose, which now is the right size hose and fittings. But the high-pressure hoses going from the pump to the valves and from the valves to the cylinder are still a little undersized for this 28-gallon per minute pump. They're the standard half-inch ID hoses from the 322. So, you know, what else can we put on there? We can upgrade the hoses to three-quarter inch hoses from the 737. Yeah, and then we'd get, again, not more power, but freer-flowing fluid. So we might see a little bit of a speed increase, and it would certainly help with keeping the temperatures down. And that's another thing that we could also do if you guys want to see it is adapt a bigger tank to this, you know, more realistically the size tank that you would need for this pump, just like our 700-series has a bigger tank. So those are all fun things that we love to do for you. Let us know. Thanks for watching, and stay tuned.