Hydraulic firewood splitter thoughts

[RedShirtGuy]

This evening I spied a splitter in a local franchise's catalogue for what seem like a pretty decent price (~$1550). (The same one as this ebay item.)

While I do a lot of firewood work I've only ever hired or loaned splitters and unbelievably it hasn't crossed my mind that I should have my own. Not counting any council/customer work and just for my family's wood it would go through 15-20 meters a season of some pretty hefty logs that I wouldn't want to be swinging at manually.

Does anyone have any thoughts on the unit at the link or any other tidbits of information that that I should keep in mind if I decide to pawn my kidneys and get one?

[Mr Brush]

I've used one similar to that, and its fine for exactly the kind of timber that is easy to split by hand.....straight-grained, pings apart as soon as the blocksplitter hits it, you know the kind?

However, I found it really struggles with twisty grain or particularly tough timbers.
One year I had almost a whole tree with twist through it (Brown Barrel Gum), and the timber was so hard that the manual blocksplitter literally bounced off !!

I'm only splitting wood for our own consumption, but I've found that you can hire a much heavier duty machine for around $200/day. Now, given a HUGE pile of timber logged up ready to be split, and a helper to shuffle wood around, I can split about 3 years worth of firewood in a day with the hired machine going flat out. So, that's $200 every 3 years or so in hire charges. I quickly concluded that unless a few people in our street wanted to get together to buy a splitter and share it around as needed, it just doesn't make sense to own one.