Souped up RuggedMade Log Splitter Takes on Woodpile

Welcome back to RuggedMade. I'm Jared. Hey, I'm Joe. So, you guys know Joe. He runs our social media and we're over at his house because he's got this pile of wood. Where'd this come from? We cleared some land and took down about 15 trees, so now I have this giant pile of wood that we need to take care of. So, it's mid-April here. It's a beautiful day today, so we figured we'd come over here with a 322, get some splitting done, and as long as we were here, we had some R&D ideas that we wanted to try out as well.

So, this is a 322, and if you're familiar with the 300-Series RuggedMade log splitter, you know it's usually available with either a 6.5-horse, powering an 11-gallon-per-minute, two-stage pump or the 10-horsepower engine, powering a 13-gallon-per-minute pump. Well, we talked to a lot of customers and we've got a survey going and one consistent theme we hear is, “I like them to go fast. I want a quick cycle time.” Whether we're talking to a homeowner or someone who sells firewood, time is money. It's also more time you can spend on your boat fishing. Whatever the reason, people like fast splitters. And, so, what we've got here is a 420cc Raven engine. That's the standard engine on our 700-Series [log splitters] and it's normally hooked up to a 22-gallon-per-minute, two-stage pump. That's a pretty standard package. The alternative to that would be a Honda GX390 turning the same 22-gallon-per-minute pump. Well, as many of you may know, the next level up from that is a 28-gallon-per-minute, two-stage pump. Normally, to power that pump, you’ve got to bump up to usually a V-Twin. Honda has them on the GX630, that series, Briggs, Vanguard. Anyway, the bigger engines you're talking 16, 18-horsepower minimum and that's pretty much what you need to turn the big pump so that it doesn't bog down.

We've hooked that 28-gallon-per-minute pump up to Honda GX390s in the past and it just really can't handle it under certain circumstances when it's really loaded down splitting a log or even sometimes just the high flow running a log lift up and down. Well, a lot of people have told us that they're buying the 28-gallon-per-minute pump and they're hooking it up to the 420 because that extra 30cc of displacement seems to be enough power to close the gap so it can run that 28-gallon-per-minute pump. So, that's what we're out here to do.

We've got the Raven 420 here but that is a 28-gallon-per-minute, two-stage pump. So, we're going to fire it up, we're going to split a bunch of wood, and we're going to see what we get for cycle times. I mean, the 322 has already got a large-diameter rod and that makes it pretty fast, particularly on the return, but let's see what happens when we soup it up with this big engine and big pump.

So, what are we going to be splitting today? Most of the trees were oak or pine, so we have a good amount of that. There's a little bit of red cedar mixed in but that's pretty much it for those three species. All right, so there's going to be some easy-to-split stuff where we should see the best-case out-and-back cycle time. It’s certainly going to get bogged down on some of this heavier stuff but that's the real world. There's knots and things. And, that's what we're going to see how it handles. Well, let's get splitting. All right, sounds good.

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Well, that was fun. Yeah, that was fast. It was a blast, too. We got a lot done. Pretty excited about it. So, the idea today see just how fast can we run a 322 if we're moving that much fluid through it. So, we were getting just a hair over 6 seconds out-and-back cycle times. About 6.2 seconds on average. Yeah, I was kind of hoping you were going to bring over a 700 so we could get through this a little faster but the 300, the power today and the speed today, was awesome. We got through a ton. I mean, this took us roughly what, 15-20 minutes to get through this stuff right here? Yeah, I mean, we ran into just a couple of knots that we had to tackle a couple different ways. Everything else went through no problem. A lot of this stuff was pretty easy to split so that's where we really saw consistent 6, 6.2-second out-and-back cycle times. And, even the harder ones to split, a lot of that time savings is on the retract because that's when both stages of the pump are pumping and that's also when that large-diameter rod is saving a lot of time.

So, let us know in the comments because there is more that we can do to soup that thing up even more. And, people tell us that they want it fast. And, yeah, they need enough power to split the type of stuff that people get for wood but we can make it go even faster. Let us know what you're looking for in terms of speed versus power and whether you run a bigger engine like that to get that really quick cycle time. Right, this is homeowner stuff, basically, and I'm going to use it for campfires and whatnot. It was fast. We got it done quickly and we didn't have an issue with power at all, so it was great. Yeah. So, thanks for watching and be sure to check us out in the next video.