Chipper Chipper/shredder questions, exploring what I can do with them

[Bullwinkle123]

Greetings all, hope you're faring well in your coronavirus self-isolation.

So I've finally purchased a tractor (it hasn't been delivered yet). And while I was planning to put this off for a while, I'm very interested in getting a chipper/shredder and I'm trying to understand how many misconceptions I'm operating with along the lines of what I can put into it, and what I get out of it. I've read a number of threads here on the subject but didn't quite get out of them what I was looking for. I understand the basics, sharp blades on chippers, hammer-like things on the shredders. Dry wood (as opposed to green wood) might heat carbon treated knives and cause them to lose their ability to hold their edge, perhaps, I'm not sure.

So here are my various misconceptions / hopes for you to dash to the ground. Let's assume I'm talking about a combo thing like a Wallenstein *42 series chipper/shredder, though that may be too rich for my blood. I'm wondering about something used, or cheaper, but we'll see, plenty of other threads for that topic.

1. Recently fallen trees: their branches will make excellent compost additions when fed through the shredder.
2. Recently fallen trees: bigger pieces wll go through the chipper, making good chip mulch for gardens, trees, etc.
3. My forest is a mess. I'd like to chip up some of the years' old trees as well. It's all dry wood, though some of it may be closer to rotting and certainly soaked in the spring. See attached picture later. Most of this fallen stuff is pine, I won't feel bad if I have to pass on chipping harder (dry) woods like maple, I suppose. I have a lot of brush piles of small-ish dried branches I'd like to chip/shred, as they are unsightly and taller than I am.
4. I can use the chips/mulch immediately likely without too much impact for lack of nitrogen fixing, but if I let it sit in a pile to cook for a year or two that is even better.

So is any of the above true? And can I clean up the a lot of this mess that has been accumulating in my forest if I want extra chips/mulch sooner than, say, just waiting for branches from recent falls or logging? There are lots of parts of my forest that look like this the following picture.



That picture isn't representative of what I'd likely go for, it's just to give some mental clues about the New England forest. I have lots of fir, white pine, maple, birch, beech, cherry, hemlock, ash, aspen and some oak. I wouldn't chip stuff rotting on the ground, but the branches and trees "in the air" may be a bit punky, *if* they would be any kind of decent mulch/compost. Question is whether punky wood is useful.

I'd definitely be happy if I could make my mulch instead of paying to bring it in. Note that I'd save any money with a Wallenstein, but it appeals to my "locally sourced and recycled material" ethic. Right now I buy about 8 yards of mulch a year, and that doesn't even cover half the things I'd like to mulch. I'm also trying to improve my compost game, but I can't quite seem to achieve "cooking pile liftoff" because I just don't have the bulk. I'm hoping the shredder might help me with that. Of course the tractor might help too, it'll be a lot easier to stir the pile using the tractor than my back and a hand tool, I hope.

I'm pretty comfortable sharpening my various tools, I'm not sure how much I'd have to step up my game to sharpen a chipper/shredder. Roughly how often would I have to do that?

Thanks for any advice.

 

[ericm979]

Chipping dry wood won't damage the knives but it will dull them faster. On my Woodmaxx 8H I rotate the knives every 20 hours. Just like with chainsaws I prefer to keep them sharp. Let them go too long and the chips get stringy. The one time I clogged the chute was because the knives got a little too dull and the stringy chips clogged the chute. I've made an attempt to sharpen my first set (I have two sets) using an angle grinder, being careful to not overheat them. I still need to go over them with diamond 'stones'. Keeping the angle is important. Bailey's is in NorCal and will sharpen chipper knives for something like $.80 or $1/inch. If you ask around you might be able to find someone local.

Chipping big dead wood is nasty. A lot of it comes out as dust. I try to avoid it but I've chipped a lot of dead brush and limbs.

Having had both a "self feeding" or "chuck and duck" chipper and a hydraulic power feed, I would strongly recommend the hydraulic power feed. My self feeding chipper also has a shredder. After I got the 8H I have only used the shredder on fall leaves to make mulch for the garden.

The Wallenstien are surely nice but the hydraulic feed ones cost a lot compared to the Woodmaxx 8H or the 8" Woodland Mills. Those are different designs, both made in China to US or Canadian design. There's plusses and minuses of each design.

 

[oosik]

I've had experience with two chippers and one shredder. The shredder was some unnamed brand, was self propelled, didn't last long. Both chippers were/are Wallenstein. First was a BX42S - currently, BX62S. Both were/are manual feed.

The Wallenstein chippers are a fantastic implement. I thin my pine stands every spring. This means I chip 900-1200 small pines ever spring. They are from 1" to 6" on the butt. I feed them, butt first, into the chipper, in the round. No limbs removed.

I break this project down into smaller units. Identify and fell, drag and pile, chip. Drag and pile is a REAL pain. After I have thinned a stand, it looks just like a game of Pick Up Sticks. Small trees lying in all direction and piled over each other - hellter/skelter. Unfortunately, my tractor & grapple are of no help in any of this operation. The tractor does power the chipper.

If you will be chipping trees/limbs that are crooked - then I recommend a hydraulically controlled in-feed. Both of my Wallys were/are manual.

I've used my BX62S now for five years. Chipped roughly 4500 - 5000 small pines. I'm still operating on the same side of the chipper blades. Still produces clean sharp chips. The pines are a soft wood and I do not drag them thru the dirt/mud.

It makes a GREAT difference.

 

[oosik]

OK - I looked at your picture. If your plan is to chip those downed trees - you will need to sharpen the blades more often. How often - like ericM979 says - when the chips start getting "stringy".

I know that Wallenstein says their blades are made of superior steel. However - clean, soft wood does make a difference.

Another point. If you will be chipping hard wood - then, again, I would recommend a hydraulically controlled in-feed. I did chip four old dead, standing apple trees. The wood was hard as ebony. The manual feed BX62S is so aggressive in chipping - it was scary. The hydraulically controlled in-feed can be controlled to slow down the feed cycle. The chipper takes smaller bites - it doesn't act like its going to explode or shake itself apart.

 

[nisaacs]

OP, I am not exactly sure what you are asking. I don't have a green thumb so your uses of chips/mulch I cant help you with. The shredder is more for leaves and really small limbs, it doesn't create much volume. It will also have a gravity feed chipper, they are a lot of work. I recommend a straight chipper with twin infeed hydraulic powered rollers. They require less chainsaw prep and can pull in a fairly gnarly limb. Even a machine with one infeed powered roller is a lot of work, in the smaller pto types. It looks like you have a lot of material to chip so it makes sense to get a machine rather than buying your material.

My current machine is 7" but mostly anything 4" and above is firewood, so just the small stuff gets chipped.

 

[BrokenTrack]

My personal experience with wood chippers is that they are really a waste of money.

Size wise, their rated capacity is about half of the rated size. For instance if it is a 6 inch chipper, due to the knuckle of how wood grows, it really would be a 3 inch chipper.

Then there is time. Oh my gosh, trying to pull out brush, chip it, then haul it to where it is going is a real slow process. There is an awful lot of work done, for a very small pile of chips.

I have tried it, but I got better things to do with my time. So my suggestion is to either just rent a really big chipper when you need it, or push the brush into piles and light it with a match. When you are done use the ash for a fertilizer. It is not super strong fertilizer at 1-2-3 on the NPK scale, but it is something, and a lot faster.

 

[DMW]

For your application a shredder would not be needed. You will get better mulch by chipping larger diameter branches. Depending on the wood the shredder creates long wet stringy pieces that clump together, not very spreadable. The larger the chipper, the larger the piece you can feed into it creating chips.
I took down a maple last year, took the better part of a week to do it myself with a BXM32. It didn't look that big when I started, Trunk was 44" x 48", but when I was done, there was no cleanup, except scrapping up the chips with the loader, and 4 stove cords of fire wood split.

Hydraulic feed is pretty well a must with larger diameter pieces, they can get too heavy to feed in manually. The BXM32 limited the branches to 3", being able to feed in larger branches without having to prune them makes it a huge time saver. Look into the Woodmax or Woodland Mills. There are lots of reviews on the forum, and seem to be quality units. The BX62 is a beast with hydraulic feed, but the others seem to have a more ergonomic feed table. The BX62 looks like a manual feed they added hydraulics to, rather than being designed from the ground up as a hydraulic feed unit.

 

[oosik]

Like most any implement - if you have no good use for it or never use it............... My BX62S is rated at 6 1/2" max diameter tree trunk. I've run rock hard, dry apple wood trunks thru it. 6" in diameter. It was not fun but the chipper effectively did its work. I use my chipper for 30 to 40 days each year. Rest of the time - in the carport, safe, dry, stored. I was just out - checking it out yesterday. Greased the two bearings again, opened the hopper - no mouse nests - she is good to go. A summer pic - chipper at rest.

With my Kubota M6040 I could have powered a Wallenstein BX92S. It will take up to 9" trees. I've found that MY LIMIT is dragging a 6" pine that's about 30 feet long. I fall often enough dragging 6" pines to a pile. I don't need to try and handle 9" ones.

View attachment 646016

 

[Bullwinkle123]

Thanks for the replies so far, good input.

On the output of the shredder, and understanding it's for finer input materials, I was hoping the finer output materials would be good for my _compost_ heap (stringy or not). Unlike the chips that I would use for _mulching_, my goal for my compost heap is to turn small organic debris back into potting/planting soil. So I deliberately keep the size of stuff in the compost heap small for fastest decomposition, try to balance my green/brown ratio, and so on. I get a little nice material from it, but not enough for my hobbies, so I'm hoping I can improve the process with output from the shredder.

Looking at 'nisaacs' post though, his chipper output seems very fine and totally good enough for the compost heap. Not sure what he was chipping there, looks like white pine, there's barely a chip in the output.

With respect to the piles of old punky wood in my forest, would the result of chipping that make for any kind of bad mulch? Or is it all good? Would the the wet old wood (like it is now, after winter), gum up the machine?

 

[Bullwinkle123]

OP, I am not exactly sure what you are asking. I don't have a green thumb so your uses of chips/mulch I cant help you with. The shredder is more for leaves and really small limbs, it doesn't create much volume. It will also have a gravity feed chipper, they are a lot of work. I recommend a straight chipper with twin infeed hydraulic powered rollers. They require less chainsaw prep and can pull in a fairly gnarly limb. Even a machine with one infeed powered roller is a lot of work, in the smaller pto types. It looks like you have a lot of material to chip so it makes sense to get a machine rather than buying your material.

My current machine is 7" but mostly anything 4" and above is firewood, so just the small stuff gets chipped.

That looks like really fine stuff. What kind of chipper is that? Is that white pine you were chipping?

 

[Bullwinkle123]

My personal experience with wood chippers is that they are really a waste of money.

Size wise, their rated capacity is about half of the rated size. For instance if it is a 6 inch chipper, due to the knuckle of how wood grows, it really would be a 3 inch chipper.

Then there is time. Oh my gosh, trying to pull out brush, chip it, then haul it to where it is going is a real slow process. There is an awful lot of work done, for a very small pile of chips.

I have tried it, but I got better things to do with my time. So my suggestion is to either just rent a really big chipper when you need it, or push the brush into piles and light it with a match. When you are done use the ash for a fertilizer. It is not super strong fertilizer at 1-2-3 on the NPK scale, but it is something, and a lot faster.

To be sure, maybe I have a limit on how much time I'll spend at it. Still, beats what I've been doing now, which is moving brush by hand to a burn pile without the aid of a tractor or atv. Big upgrades for me this year

I've been trying to figure out how I would use the chipper with respect to ... travel logistics. My preference would be to haul the chipper to the mess to clean up, chip into a cart (dump trailer), and haul the chips to where I want them. However I haven't figured out how I'd pull a cart _and_ a chipper, do all the necessary decoupling, and so on. Plus, commercial dump trailers cost a fortune.

The plan I've hatched for now is slightly smaller scale. I plan to build a box/carry-all for my pallet fork. So I go out into the woods with the box/fork on the front, chipper on the rear. I detach the quickattach fork/box and chip into the box. When I've filled the box, I quick attach back to the loader and drive off the chips to where I want them.

Definitely open to better plans. Kudos to the guy in some forum that gave me the idea for this, I didn't come up with it on my own.

Maybe the box would be too small, I don't know. On the plus side it's very affordable since I'll have the (48") pallet forks already. On the down side, it's more driving back and forth than with a big dump trailer. I haven't quite figured out how I'll build the box and whether I can make it dumping-efficient when it's sitting on pallet fork/frame. (Anybody got a good design?)

 

[DMW]

nisaacs is spot in on IMO. The chipper/shredder would be a lot more labour intensive for little benefit. It may be fine now, but 10 years down the road do you still want to be lifting everything up to the chute.
Wood chips are great for the compost pile. They produce a lot of heat that speeds up the breakdown of the material.

 

[mikester]

I致e run large commercial chippers down to small self feed units. I own a chinesium 8 inch PTO chipper with power feed.

1. If I had a huge amount of chip work to do I would recommend renting a large commercial self powered unit.
2. I would only recommend hydraulic powered infeed with a minimum 2 powered rollers. Single roller units suck less than non powered infeed units.
3. If you have arms like Popeye and enjoy slinging chainsaws for 12 hours at a time and you think carpal tunnel is the name of your fishing spot then get a small chipper/shredder without power infeed.
4. If you buy your own unit DO NOT feed dirt, rocks, roots etc. Try to alternate between green and dry stuff regularly. Also try and alternate between evergreen and deciduous as tree sap gums things up nicely.
5. Chippers are dangerous, noisy, dusty, and in general bad for your health. They scare me. They should scare you too.
6. Wood chips are great for mulch and gardens etc. I highly recommend it.
7. AVOID cheap chipper shredders, especially chinesium junk. You will spend more time fixing and modding the equipment than chipping wood. You get what you pay for. Remember you are buying equipment by the pound weight. The less it weighs, the less it痴 worth.
8. If you are clever you will separate your materials chipped. I chip cedar for mulch around the house. It looks and smells great. Hardwood like maple apple and oak are my second choice. Be aware if you are chipping green stuff with green leaves the mulch generates a lot of heat in the pile. Pine and junk soft woods are my all purpose mulch and I dont use it near the house.

 

[Bullwinkle123]

Pine and junk soft woods are my all purpose mulch and I dont use it near the house.

Why is it that you don't use it near the house? Insects that survive the chipping?

 

[mikester]

Why is it that you don't use it near the house? Insects that survive the chipping?

cedar just looks and smells better!

 

[hosspuller]

I have a 8 inch hydro infeed chipper. Best use is chipping branches as trimmed. Anything over 3 inches is firewood. The chipper saves much labor since I avoid trimming to length, moving & loading on to forks. In the OP's case, I would cut down the leaning wood for ground contact instead of chipping. Once on the ground wood degrades very quickly.

 

[s219]

I have a Wallenstein (BX-42) that has been great. But I find myself often deciding when a job is big enough to justify hooking it up and running it -- both because of time/resources and because having it on the back of the tractor takes away from other tractor capabilities. If I am clearing a section or doing 3+ trees, it's worth bringing out. Anything less than that and I am likely to just dump the brush into a pile somewhere. You may also want to factor in access, and how close you can get the chipper to the brush and limbs.

If I have a use for the chips somewhere different than I am chipping, I will do this:



I've also done this right into the back of the RTV (dump bed!) or pickup truck. It makes a huge difference to be able to move the chips to where they are needed. If you have to manually put them into the tractor bucket with pitchfork, productivity goes down (don't count on scooping them from a pile with the loader, it's not always efficient). So I am either chipping on site where the chips are needed, chipping into another vehicle/trailer to move the chips, or chipping and fanning out piles to leave the chips where they lay.

Green wood lubricates the knives and keeps them cool. Dry wood will not, and I've even seen dry wood smoke while chipping. No question, in my experience the green wood chips better -- smoother, quieter, cleaner.

The wood I chip the most is loblolly pine. These are trees 40-80' tall. The chipper eats it up like crazy. I can get all the limbs in, and the entire top of the tree (anything less than 4"). These trees tend to be straight, and the limbs are straight,

I also chip assorted hardwoods. The only trees that really cause grief are the beech trees, since their limbs are insanely irregular, with a lot of bends and twists. A limb might only be 1" diameter but impossible to feed because it has a wierd dogleg or bend in it. And keep in mind the chute on the Wallenstein is fairly wide and the throat is 4" by 10". When you can't get a 1" limb into a wide chute and rectangular throat, that tells you something...

 

[Gem99ultra]

To be sure, maybe I have a limit on how much time I'll spend at it. Still, beats what I've been doing now, which is moving brush by hand to a burn pile without the aid of a tractor or atv. Big upgrades for me this year

I've been trying to figure out how I would use the chipper with respect to ... travel logistics. My preference would be to haul the chipper to the mess to clean up, chip into a cart (dump trailer), and haul the chips to where I want them. However I haven't figured out how I'd pull a cart _and_ a chipper, do all the necessary decoupling, and so on. Plus, commercial dump trailers cost a fortune.

The plan I've hatched for now is slightly smaller scale. I plan to build a box/carry-all for my pallet fork. So I go out into the woods with the box/fork on the front, chipper on the rear. I detach the quickattach fork/box and chip into the box. When I've filled the box, I quick attach back to the loader and drive off the chips to where I want them.

Definitely open to better plans. Kudos to the guy in some forum that gave me the idea for this, I didn't come up with it on my own.

Maybe the box would be too small, I don't know. On the plus side it's very affordable since I'll have the (48") pallet forks already. On the down side, it's more driving back and forth than with a big dump trailer. I haven't quite figured out how I'll build the box and whether I can make it dumping-efficient when it's sitting on pallet fork/frame. (Anybody got a good design?)

============================================================
I can relate to your dilemma. No way to pull the chipper AND a trailer? I solved that by welding a 2 inch receiver on the back of my chipper. The 2 inch receiver is most handy for various size trailer hitches or other accessories that I might want to take such as a man-lift, receiver mounted vice, etc.

I do, however, only pull a small trailer, one that I can roll around by hand when full. Once full I can either use my tractor/chipper rig, SxS or golf cart to take it to where I want to place my chips. I'm chipping mostly 6 inch or less pine, but do have some oak and sweet gum. I'm using all of it so far as trail covering. That's working out great for me. My chipper does not shred well. Leaves, pine needles, etc. mostly just blow right on through the chipper.

Burning for me is a real downer. I have a real fear of catching the woods on fire. That can happen faster than you can blink an eye, and it has happened to me before. No thanks - I'm not prepared to burn up some else' house, woods, and who knows what else. If I have trees too large to chip, I simply cut it enough to put it on the ground, and let Mother Nature take care of it. Besides, as others have mentioned, me being near 80, I'm not big on hauling huge trees to a chipper.

 

[RalphVa]

I've used a shredder/chipper since about 1994. A Troybilt Tomahawk came with the 2.2 acres in Baton Rouge parish. Moved to central Va after retirement and got a MacKissic TPH-122 for my JD 4010 tractor in 2004. Still have the Mac. Have replaced the hammer assembly after rotating the hammers to wear all 4 corners (they get rounded and won't drag stuff in very well) about a year ago and wore out the 2 chipper blades (one spare, swapping back and forth) last year, too. Recently bought a spare chipper blade because we're doing A LOT of chipping with our war on autumn olives, oriental bittersweet, grape vines and down trees.

Used to shred up about 100 bags of leaves, but that source has dried up. The tree/limb shreddings (with leaves) are THE BEST for mulch/compost but plain limbs are a little too woody. Save your kitchen compost (non meat stuff) and add it to your shreddings to get some more "green" into it for composting. I'm not really missing the leaves, as I'm getting way more than I need for my mulch/compost pile from what we're doing now.

I recommend the Mac way over the Tomahawk. Maintaining the Tomahawk was a beastly affair, yet they seem to be so similar in the way they're made, but the Tomahawk spacers between the hammers get smashed up, and the shafts they're on won't come out without a lot of pounding. By comparison, the Mac's spacers stay their shape, and you just push the shafts through with your fingers after removing the shredder hopper. Like a 15 minute job to rotate or to replace the hammers. I did take to using just cotter pins on the ends of the hammer shafts though, as the drive-in pins kept coming out.

I store my kitchen compost in an old garbage can (plastic from about 1970 in NJ) and dump it in the middle of the mulch pile when it's full.

Urine is also a good source of Nitrogen for your mulch to help turn it into compost. The mulch actually becomes compost somewhere around 6 months or so. If you can get some sawdust, you can turn it into compost VERY quickly by adding some N (urine) and a tiny bit of soil and water. Mix it all up, and you'll have compost within a month.

If you have much stuff that is very irregular like autumn olives, a self feeder would be preferable. I've affixed slit heater hoses around the tops of both hoppers on the Mac as protection to ME, but the hammer hopper is really bad about jerking things and can slam your arm against the sides of the hopper. Saw my heart doctor yesterday. Said he had one patient who took a finger and thumb off when it got dragged into the hammers. Then it got infected.

Both the chipper and the hammer hoppers will drag stuff nicely into them when everything is sharp. When the hammers quit this, you can rotate them to get another sharp leading edge. Replace the chipper blade when it quits dragging stuff in. Eventually, it'll get too skinny to provide enough clearance where it is bolted in place and have to be replaced (after maybe 6 or 8 sharpenings). I find it safer to run like autumn olives completely through the skinny chipper hopper because of that grabbing effect when the tops are put into the hammer hopper.

Ralph

 

[nisaacs]

That looks like really fine stuff. What kind of chipper is that? Is that white pine you were chipping?

Bull, most chippers you can adjust the bed plate/knife clearance to chip any size. I have mine set fine because I sell the chips and most people want small stuff. Nova Tractor sells the chipper. It seems to be a good one. I had a small Troy-bilt chipper/shredder, Jinima chipper and a Wood Max wm8m, they were all too much work and high maintenance. This one will chip circles around them. Most of the trees around here are Juniper, they have a loose shaggy bark that collects dirt when the wind blows, very hard on chainsaw chain and chipper knives. I use to burn my trimmings but that is such a waste, I chip everything now that wont make firewood.

Do your research on chippers, they are not all created equal. Just for your info, here is a roller bearing/roller frame comparison, note light duty v/s heavy duty. Also be sure and get the clam shell type flywheel housing, way easier to change knives then going through an inspection cover.

When I do a large chipping session I use my dump trailer and with a small area with a lot of moving I chip into my Bobcat loader bucket.