Chipper/Shredder

Thanks,
Aj

Regards,
Aj

Regards,
Aj

However, with manual feed, and the tiny opening, I find myself wearing out real quick. Each branch needs to be chainsawed down to small pieces - no 'y' left on them or it won't feed in. These spread hardwoods just will not fit down the throat unless you cut it down to small pieces - lot & lot of chainsaw time. I found myself spending 2x as long cutting up the brush to fit the chipper, compared tot he time I spent cutting the firewood!

By the time I did that for one afternoon (my B-iL wore out in 1 hour....) the next week I had my wife come along, I drove over with my loader tractor & pallet forks. We piled up the long full brush on 10 big piles, I picked them up with the loader, & dumped them over a gulley my B-i-L has..... I think in 3-4 hours of work the week before, we had done about 1 pile's worth of chipping....

_Much_ quicker, much less work - even with the time of driving 6 miles over & back to just pile & dump.

I liked the idea of the chipper, but just way too much work for the little it could handle. I believe that is a thing that will sit inside the shed a whole lot.....

Like the others say, you need big & powerful & powerfeed unit or it really isn't worth it.

--->Paul

my backyard is 30 acres, after 3 years of screwing around with various units I finally got a used 6 inch 25hp Bandit with hydralic feed, chips serious brush, big stuff is firewood, after a windstorm I have lots of friends

if you have all the time in the world and a strong arm, hand feed is OK

if you have plenty of time, small pine branches or good sturdy loppers, 3 inch is fine

machines without a blower ted to clog the outfeed unless you keep moving the chips away

I've found it unreasonable to use the "side chute" on these things. If the limb is too big to go down the main chute, it is agonizingly slow and painful to use the side chute. Especially with dead wood, the vibrations of grinding the limb down inch by inch will numb your hands in short order. You'll need ear and eye protection and lots of patience.

Limbs up to about an inch can go down the main chute on the 8HP and up models, and if this is the bulk of what you have, it may be a worthwhile purchase.

But I find with a small chipper I still need to burn the limbs that are between 1 and 3 inches in diameter. Quite a bit of the non-firewood material is this size. By the time I seggregate that stuff out and pull into a burn pile, I might as well burn the small stuff too.

I've rented commercial arborist models, with power feeds and main chippers capable of handling stuff up to 4 inches or more. There is no comparison -- just throw the stuff into the chute and forget about it -- the big machines will grind the branches up faster than you can drag them.

Good points:
Easy to use
Chips a pile in very little time
Easy to clean screen
Have done no repairs, not even flails
3" branches are chipped easily

Problems:
Clogs on some green stuff
Hard to manhandle to each place I want to use it.

Any branches over 3" in diameter I use for firewood.