2manyrocks,
I finished preparing the
chipper - Woodland Mills WC68 - arrived a few days ago - trimmed the PTO shaft, filled with hydraulic oil, checked and rechecked everything, took it to the first of many, many brush piles, and started it up. It worked well.
I cannot compare or provide the ultimate advice on chippers as this is the only one I have ever used, but my assessment: very well made - quality is evident; manual very thorough; love the safety bar (pull out to activate roller, in for neutral, and farther in to reverse it - and you can use your upper legs to bump-shut it down quickly); very happy that I got one with a self feeder; it takes in the material faster than one person can drag stuff over and feed it so having a couple of helpers would really speed things up - there were two of us (the roller speed is adjustable and I ran it at half speed which was plenty)' it seems to work best on drier stuff; I learned that there are ways to insert the branches to make it easier, e.g., what kind of branch configurations may need to be trimmed, etc. Anyway, in about an hour and a half we chipped up a whole lot of branches.
We don't plan on chipping anything much over 2-3 inches as we like to keep that for firewood, but I did try one at about 4 inches and the roller did not seem to want to pull it in - a very short trial - likely a technique issue - I will rewatch some videos and I want to try this again but it started raining.
The way this is packaged for shipping tells me the company takes pride in their product - a steel cage - now becoming a workshop table.