I would like to know how this force can be produced to be used in a log splitter design without the use of pumps / motors.....Is there anyway the average human could produce this without the machinery looking too cumbersome.
This much force can be created by producing partial vacuum. If we create full vacuum 10^5 N/m^2 force can be made to act on any object.
16lb sledge coming down onto the wedge would be up there at the point
If you are using this on a lof splitter, the use of a wedge is the best way to produce that force by means of a 40kg. hammer.
You could hoist a iron wedge shape device with a pulley and drop the point on the end of the log. The higher you pull the wedge up in the air the more kinetic energy it would have when striking the log (fashion it similar to a guillotine). The trouble is that it would take you to hoist a 1000 kg wedge in the air and drop it 4 meters to get 40kN force. Very cumbersome. But for logs , if your trying to compare to log splitter hydraulics, you don't need that much force. Log splitters go slow and use brute force, but if you think about Monster Mauls which are axes with a wedge head that weighs about 12 pounds has no problem splitting logs because of the speed of the impact, which in Newtons would only be about 60 N force. Think about if you had to drive a nail into a board with a hydraulic cylinder. It might take 2000 Newtons to push that nail into the board, but a simple 1 lb hammer can drive in the nail with just a few Newtons of force One other thing, a long long time ago in a far away land I made a log splitter based on a giant screw log splitter I saw I just welded a 1 diameter screw with a pointy tip(used to hold logs together) to the end of a steel cone. I then welded that steel cone to the center position of my old spare tire rim. Then you just jacked the car a few inches off the ground and put the spare tire device with the screw in the middle, right onto your axle and tighten the lug nuts. You then just rolled your log sections right up to the end of the screw and with one person sitting in the car, they put it in drive and took their foot off the brake. The screw would chew into the side of the log and then the cone would completely split it in a second or two. You didn't even hardly have to lift the logs..just roll them onto that moving screw. The ends of the log would dig into the ground a little until the log split. The person was in the car as a safety. They could just step on the brake to stop the screw
