Stickler Wood Splitter Mounts On Skid Steer

Stickler Wood Splitter Mounts On Skid Steer TRACTORS Skid Steer Loaders 27-5-19 John Hathaway, Rossville, Illinois, put a screw-type wood splitter and a post hole digger together to make a skid-steer mounted wood splitting and handling tool that he says has become nearly indispensable to him. Hathaway says he and a wood-cutting buddy, Neil Paulson, were about "to take sledge and wedge" to some 3-ft. dia. chunks of oak to get pieces small enough to lift onto their horizontal hydraulic splitter. Paulson started asking one day if there wasn't something they could mount on Hathaway's Bobcat to mechanize the task. Hathaway was in the process of rebuilding an old Danuser posthole digger he'd found in a junk pile. At that point, he remembered that his brother-in-law had a Stickler wood splitter he was no longer using, He figured if he could mount the Stickler to the driveshaft on the digger, he might be able to come up with a handy new wood splitter. "The Stickler was originally designed to fit on a drive wheel of a car or pickup," Hathaway explains. "It does a great job of splitting wood, but you have to jack up the car, take off the wheel and put the Stickler on in its place before you can split anything." He reasoned that putting the Stickler onto the posthole digger would make it easier to use and more portable. Hathaway modified the 3-pt. post hole digger to fit the loader arms. He also removed the pto shaft and added a hydraulic motor. He added control valves to the skidsteer that give him forward, reverse, and speed control of the motor. He had a friend machine an adapter that allows him to mount the Stickler on the posthole digger's driveshaft. He also put in adjustable stops to limit lateral movement of the unit so it won't flop from side to side. "It works even better than I anticipated. Mostly, we use it to break big chunks into smaller pieces we can then finish splitting with our hydraulic splitter," he says. "One of the neat things I hadn't anticipated is that you can use it to move the really big chunks around. You just screw the Stickler into them until it's tight. Then you can pick it up with the skid steer and move it anywhere. All you have to do then is put it down and reverse the hydraulic motor to back the screw out." Hathaway found that sometimes the wood pieces will spin when he screws in the Stickler. To prevent this, he just tilts the forks - which he leaves in place on his loader - to catch the chunks firmly while the Stickler works. If Hathaway needs to dig a posthole, all he has to do is remove the Stickler and put the auger back in its place. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, John Hathaway, Box 86, Rossville, Ill. 60963 (ph 217 748-6319; email: hath@localline2.com).

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