I really wish I had a log splitter sometimes. I have a lot of dead american
elm trees on my property. They are good (not great) firewood, easy to fell,
already partly dry, generally not rotten. But you can't split the
chunks--well, you CAN, but it it is truly brutal in almost all cases. What
I am wondering is: will one of these electric 4-ton splitters (e.g., Fisch)
split a 16" elm chunk 10" in diameter, for instance? It would have to be
able to push the wedge all the way thru, and then you would still have to
hack a bit with a hatchet or something, but if it could push the wedge thru,
the piece would split. I have often driven a splitting wedge right out the
other end of the piece and still had to fight for a minute or so to separate
the halves.

The "reviews" I have been able to find look extremely bogus, and 4 tons is a
lot less than the 20 tons you get with a normal splitter, but I don't really
know what the forces involved are. A lot of what the big splitters give you
is speed, and I don't care too much about speed--it doesn't have to be fast
to beat hammering on a wedge. For normal good-splitting wood, I think I can
split it faster by hand than with most splitters, but that's not what
happens with elm (and some beech, and other stuff with spiral grain etc
etc).

So, any experience out there?