The Triumphant Return Of The Homemade Log Chomper!! 

on the bright side , you have perfected a classic bolt shearer.

A shear pin is generally weaker than a shaft key, because they have less bearing surface at the point of max shear. The benefit of the pin is that it fails-to-safe in this condition. If it’s overloaded the lines shears but the shaft continues rotating thus releasing any load. A key way is far more likely to chew up your shaft and jam without releasing the energy.

Lovely to see all the different pieces coming together, the engine, the shed, the chomper and the railway.

Always fun seeing what people use fish crates for. My whole tree nursery runs on them!

Clean and polish your blades for less resistance. Grind the bevel on one side only.

Now when you going to paint the whole thing Limerick Green which is a fine color for a machine like this, way ho Tim you got a marvelous chippy chopper there!

There is the spirit of Heath Robinson about the thing but the final successful operation is a real credit to your dedication and ingenuity. Very well done indeed.

We love watching Tim Hope Sandra and Flora and Trudy are settled after their journey.Sending love and best wishes.Good luck 🍀

I see you've got a nice elevated railway section now too!

good job mr Ed and mr Sheer

You invented a bolt shearer! I am jealous of your Lister.

You know darn well that if the last bolt had failed too, you wouldn't have given up! You can't fool us,

*@Way Out West - Workshop Stuff* 6:24 You can also make the blades longer, a full rotation around, that should put MUCH less stress on the shear pin, but obviously the cutting speed is halved as well. (also puts more force on the support structure, in a radial direction)

That video was an all-around shear joy that had me welded to my seat! And the slicing commentary kept me bolt upright the whole time. It’s very enjoyable to experience such a clean-cut topic. ;-)

That rail system is keen af.

The chipper and the chomper are my two favorite of your projects. In part that's because they have such a spirit of frugality in their nature, aking it possible to use the limbs of a treet which are usually wasted. And second because they are by their nature so MANLY! The operator is obviously risking life and limb every time he uses either one. For that reason, I like the chipper best. The operator is obviously scared spitless when feeding that machine!

I think it may be possible to slap a limiter at one end so you could constantly push in the log and hit the end, stopping it and saving more time. And maybe a platform at the other so you can simply lay the log on and not hold its weight

Wow! The industrial revolution has arrived! :) ... well done!

Your wood shortener turned out to be an excellent bolt shortener also.

I love your total disregard of any safety issues and your life and limbs. Look forward to seeing if you survive to do another video 👍

Love the trestle. Hope there's a video coming up on that?

This device always makes me so nervous, I really hope you put a full guard on it just for safety, i'd hate to hear about anyone getting hurt or worse. Having a sloped chute at the output would help with loading things, and you could have it so the log touches the ceiling of it at the desired length. Just push the branch in, it stops and chops at the perfect length, then falls neatly down into the bin

In agriculture machinery a shear pin is usually high tensile steel so that it shears clean and is easily replaceable but mild steel is usually harder to get out of the shaft class wood cutter just keep your hands well clear 😎

that rail line is totally cool.👍👍👍👍

Great! Tim, Will, and your helpers, it's great to see it finally operating as intended!

The crunching sound of the wood being snapped is so satisfying.

I’m so happy you got it! You didn’t give up and you succeeded! Great job

I don't know if you're all geniuses or what, but that set of train tracks you made is absolutely amazing! I don't think you encounter problems only solutions you haven't come up with yet. Great job 👏🏽 👍🏽 👌 🙌

That new bit of railway looks cool too, nice to have it a bit higher up there! Love the progress :)

Hey! Youve raised the rails up. Very Nice

What an absolutely terrifying machine!😀

An idea. Sort out the biggest diameter branch that you can cut without breaking shear pin. Make a hole in a piece of plate 15% or so smaller in diameter than that critically sized branch. Tack the plate up where you feed the branches in. Anything that doesn’t fit in the hole gets tossed aside and batch cut once a day with a chainsaw. It probably won’t be that many pieces and it will be easier on the equipment. Also, the plate would probably work partly as a guard. Best wishes Frank

I love the trolley on the tracks I love the whole video 😎

I love how you’ve given an antique engine an actual job to do. Too many people with antique engines just run them with no useful purpose. Next you need to build a chute to catch the pieces of wood and direct them into a bin to reduce the amount of bending down to pick them up. I would also make a ramp so that the bin of wood does not need to be lifted up so high to get it on the rail car.

I saw what happens, it's like getting a chainsaw bar stuck. If you get a log in crooked as it cuts halfway the log tries to get perpendicular and squeezes the blade shearing the pins

Looks like it works the champ. Now you'll need a short conveyor to load the rail cars. Looking forward to seeing that.

Now with an elevated narrow-gauge track!

Glad you go the log chomper working as you want it. I enjoyed the process of building it, the problems you encountered and the methods of over coming. The next part of this build should be the making of safety cages for the blades and drive belts. I love the basic crude machinery that you come up with. As crude as the machinery you make is they seem to work as well if not better the store bought machinery. The best part of all this process is that since you built the equipment is you know how it was built and thus know how to repair it.

Congratulations! Marvelous!

Thanks so much for the update, Tim! Keep up the unflagging spirit of "can do"!

Just looks like a conversion of a LOT of time ,effort, machinery,and FUEL to get a measly amount of INEFFICIENT fire-wood. Thanks for the entertainment.

Have been following your channel for a while and always enjoyed watching your ingenious methods of achieving your aims, especially the field railway. Love the log chomper, however to make sure that it never becomes an arm chomper, please make a guard for the front and back, it makes me wince every time I see you chomping the branches

Really pleasing to see the whole system working!

You can get a spring loaded ratchet system mostly used in such systems where the spring gives up and the axle is separated. NO harm is done and as soon as the blockage is moved it is ready again.

7:00 I love that you put in a rail system

Well Edd worked out well in the end bro. Safe travels

Hurrah! Congratulation on your shared persistence! Nice raised rail section!

Sooooo satisfying watching is just cleanly and slowly move through those bigger branches. It must be even better in person! Cheers and keep up the amazing, and quite entertaining, work!

Alright it works very good . Thanks

OUTSTANDING SIR 👍👌😇 Hand guard and a slide on the opposite side to make the cutted wood going way from the cutting place 👌👍😇🍻

For cutting small wood up to 6in I use a circular saw. I have a little table I prop the stick on and give it a zip

Fiendish but fabulous!👍☘️

Shear bolt: *shears* Way out west: "And I took that personally"

Congratulations. Trial and error is the best way to reach the goal, while enjoying yourself at the same time. Greetings from Oviedo.

Hello from Czech republic! I've got one suggestion. thoose two "L" profiles against knifes should have som angles, wide enought, to prevent miss of bent knives and to guid them back to straight line.

Lovely machine ! I'm happy to have helped you Tim !! See you. Mathilde

now that the system is complete and able to be put into the production rotation I think it is time to do a through job of housecleaning in and around the area of operation. A tidy work site is a safe work site ... From start to finish I have greatly enjoyed watching the evolution of this project, and your ingenuity at solving each problem as they presented themselves ... I Rate this Project with 2 Big'ol thumbs up and 2 high fives. One each for you and Will ... and on a scale of 1 / 10? .. how could it be anything BUT a 10 :)

Love it!. Here in Australia we call that 'bush mechanics' making functional stuff from odd and sods!. 🙂 Nice one!. Niff said.

As long as the bolt is always weaker than the shaft is it should work. Otherwise, if you drill too big of a hole, the shaft will have too much metal removed and will become weaker than the bolt.

One of my favorite videos, and favorite projects!

the arm amputator 9000 is back in action!

3 bolts wasted, but the last one works, good to hear one of the four works. It's almost like you got logs and wood for many years for a lot of things; like campfires, maybe even Christmas decorations and other stuff. Nice video.

You should call it the Lop-Matic instant surgeon.

Simply stunning Tim. Awesome job.

Great job on the chomper, bet it works a treat for a long time coming

Hello Tim, fantastic work. Congratulation for your patience. It seems so useful ! I tend not to use all these branches size when doing firewood. But it's a lot free heat wasted really. I would also like to send you a bit of love you deserve. All those depressing comments are not helping and rude for nothing. The bloody thing works ! I didn't know there was that many viewers engineers. You nailed the r&d process and props for showing it. I guess people never experiment and fail. I'm still amazed by all the various things you acheived with success. Cheers from Brittany :)

Neat! Glad to see such a fascinating (and dangerous) machine working!

Hey look now you have two!

my god, man. if this isn't how we were meant to live, I don't know what is. good show!

Put a pivot on your shear plate with a heavy spring. That way, rather than snapping the bolt, the shear plate moves. It will snap back for the next blade that will finish the job. Also, part of the problem is the lack of mass on the spinning wheel. If you had a big heavy flywheel, its momentum would take some pressure off of the shear pin.

Living the dream! especially so, with all this love of labor and creations WoW!

Seeing how you don't need to steer the cart on the rails, a simple upright handle for people walking it along would be WAY more convenient for someone walking a load to the woodpile, unless there's a compelling reason not to have one. Maybe a simple socket at the corners of the cart, and the towbar at the front could be easily dismounted from that location, and slotted into the pocket for walking.

Aha! Energy again. When two people hoist a bin of logs onto an elevated railway, they are storing potential energy in that bin of logs. There has arisen (hah hah) the possibility that the potential energy is sufficient to propel the bin from the loading bay (the chomper) to the unloading bay (the wood shed). If at the wood shed, the rails can be elevated by ratcheting up using a person's step-on step-off weight, then the trolley can return by gravity. By itself. This suggests that the wagons could run without a person (or machine) being assigned to drag them back and forth. I noticed in both videos that a log was being chomped always by the same blade, that is, that one blade was unused; this was noticed too in a comment below. Maybe a sloping feed mechanism that gave enough time for a branch to fall into the chomping chamber would allow you to speed up the process. Safety, too, having no human arm/hand feeding the branch in would save your YouTribe a great deal of stress and anxiety. Maintaining the "ch" theme, carry on - Tim, you are a CHampion! CHeers, CHris.

I love it when a plan comes together!

I'm sure you're thought of this, but it seems like you could use a chute or even a flat plate on the outfeed side of the chomper. Love seeing all these projects working together.

better than a chain saw - that's when I finally understood why you're doing this. It still looks like make-work to me, but that's only because I'm clueless. And yet I adore these videos. Onwards!

I would love to see a conveyor belt in-between the cut wood drop area and the cart that goes to the wood shed. Just a thought! Love the video, and I love how you use as much scrap and recycle to make these machines. It's a wonderful use of brain!

This might sound absolutely ridiculous, but do you have a few scraps of cast iron? Try making a pin out of it. I know steel is much tougher, but cast iron has some pretty remarkable properties when it comes to harmonics, it is much more rigid than even tool steel in this regard. There's no proof, but there's a lot of evidence that the rhythm of harmonics is particularly deleterious to machinery. Even breaking that into something tachycardic seems to make all machines quite a bit happier. I build a sawmill many many years ago they kept breaking sheer pins. They were brass, so not surprising, but we just could not locate the villain. It ended up being the very rhythmic harmonics traveling through the rails. When we switched the brass for cast iron, we did not have access to round bar. We were forced to use cut pieces of plate, nowhere near as strong as the round brass. It completely solves our problem for several years now. I'm only sharing all this because in the demonstration, it seems to be working excellently and safely. I would hate for you to move away from this design because you believe the sheer pin represents failure of unknown cause

Why does the narrator's voice give me visions of Winnie the Pooh's adventures? When do we see a video of everyone around a fire sipping black beer that's at "cellar temperature"?

I love this show, one of the best on RU-vid

I think that was very wise to bolt them in a sandwich instead of welding. The harrow discs are likely to be excellent steel, it would be ideal to avoid messing with the temper

Seems what you have made is a log actuated bolt shear. Very effective!!

that there is a beautiful log chomper n' rails.

hardened S45C or VCN steel for the blades and gaps will work nicely, sharpened it a bit... maybe a shield to cover that vanbelt

That's one mean machine. Marvelous job!

Always fun and fascinating to watch your engaging and ever growing efforts in the development of this railway/tramway and the workings of a charcoal factory. I have learned more from watching the step by step processes of your place that I learned in all the years I worked at a narrow gauge railway museum. I have also had more fun watching and learning than I ever did at school. Love it! Would a weighted roller on an arm, lying on the top of the belt be a useful tensioner? If the arm is long enough it would possibly auto adjust tension to suit each log as it is being cut and the work gets either slightly more or less of a strain on the blades. Just an idea from a non engineer.

"wake up babe! the new Way Out West - Workshop Stuff video just released"

Keep on making great things fella.

Good to see you putting suggestions to work, and still room for improvement if desired. Could add some angled plate to make a funnel/chute for the input side of the stationary jaws. That way, you won't have to pick up and reset the branch for at least most cuts - given the material can pass through the throat/cutting area. You should be able to just push, and as the blade shears then moves out of the way, you feed material in, and cut. No wasted movements or wear on your part.

If you would have counter sunk the shear pin hole where it meets the shaft, you could have reduced the stress on the bolt since there are no sharp edges.

Well that looks familiar. Glad you got it going!

I think a narrow gauge steam loco that is only the size of a narrow gauge ''trolley'' which would work perfectly to have at that garden to keep the controls easier.

Man U got a nice little railway goin from the blades of death, to the wood storage area. 3 sets of points, nice little junction/different areas to come from.

Excellent!

Looks like the distance to the cutting center was the crucial part. Like a small cog wheel against a bigger makes it stronger. Great project to follow!

The torque at the center of a shaft is enormous. I would consider a splined shaft and hub. Look up the design of hydraulic stump planer shafts.

My man, you have built a wonderful machine, that helps the work, and I’m really impressed you pulled this off. But as great this chopper is, I beg you, please paint the parts, it hurts my eyes, and it takes minutes to get a well functioning machine beautiful too

I would add a longer blade guard which arches up from the top and encloses the tip of the blade until it's below the "log-holder". This way there's no chance that the tip of the blade wobbles outside the log-holder again. Worst case scenaro would be that the blade tip scratches the enclosure.

TIM - like Gnu a recursive definition: _T_im's _I_ncredible _M_achine, or, Tim's incredible arm chopper! :-D

Adding weight to the rotating surface will give stored energy which will help cut through harder wood