Log Splitters for Dummies

Gas-powered hydraulic log splitter

If you visit the kid's book section at your local independent bookstore, you'll find a series of books with titles like The Way Things Work. David Macaulay, who wrote the original of the series thirty years ago, does a pretty good job of describing the combinations of simple machines that make up everyday objects along with the scientific principles that power them. Sadly for people who google "How Does a Log Splitter Work?"¹ they don't go to Macaulay. Instead, they go to eHow.com and Grant D. McKenzie...

Oh, McKenzie managed to find a video of a log splitter in operation and, perhaps, looked at a hardware website or two. That's how he managed to come up with the names of the two parts of a splitter, the ram and the wedge. Whoopee for Grant... The closest our freelancing buddy (who claims a BS in aeronautical engineering) comes to actually answering the question, however, is this:

"The ram forces the log section into a wedge, which is mounted onto the frame of the log splitter. The force applied to the log causes it to split along the grain against the wedge." Cool: that's what a log splitter does, but the question is how it works; and Grant didn't answer that. It confuses us to no end that someone who claims an engineering background couldn't manage to spit out a discussion of the hydraulic principle, i.e, Pascal's Law. You know, liquids are incompressible, so,

"When there is an increase in pressure at any point in a confined fluid, there is an equal increase at every other point in the container..."

... which is how hydraulic systems work, regardless of whether they're human-powered or "driven by either electric- or gasoline-powered motors." Duh. Oh, yeah, and he never even bothered to mention what the wedge does... simple machines rule, Grant!
Instead of even brushing up against Pascal's Law and the principles behind a hydraulic ram, McKenzie uses nearly half his post (143 words of 310) explaining "Safely Operating a Log Splitter." We think that's not what the OQ wanted to know and, more to the point, since he has an engineering degree Grant should have known that. In other words, while his information is correct, he carefully avoided answering the actual question – a classic Dumbass of the Day move.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how-does_4743523_log-splitter-work.html

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