Commercial Wood Chipper

[WVH1977]

Does anyone on here have a commercial grade wood chipper, like Vermeer, Rayco, etc.? I have been thinking about about maybe buying one to use on my land for pine trees that are 6 inch and under. I have 16 acres of pines and thinning them out. Thinking I can reuse the pine mulch by spreading on the ground where needed.

Has anyone done something similar? I am getting tired of burning all of it.

 

[ning]

@oosik does a ton of chipping small ponderosa pines using a 3ph unit. My guess is that your Massey and NH could easily run a chipper for that size pine, a lot cheaper than a commercial grade.

If you're set on going commercial, I'd check out the arboristsite.com forum, discussions about commercial grade chippers show up often. Search first.

 

[robstaples]

I have a Bearcat 8993 9” chipper and a Bearcat 5 “. Had the same chipper in pto but my tractor Kabota has a backhoe so conversion was a super pain. My e9” unit is super with feed controlled to maintain chipper speed. Quite the jump up in price for diesel engine. I don’t expect to wear my gas out.

 

[grsthegreat]

A commercial unit… id love to get one myself. Until i saw the $30k up prices for a decent used one….

I bought a pto unit years ago. 6” max. Works great, but slow.

 

[Hay Dude]

I would love to own a diesel 12-15” chipper. Look at used ones on FBM a lot.
10K buys you a pretty wore out chipper. 25K gets you a nice one. I use one about 5-10 times a year, so I just rent and build it into the job price for the customer. Seems to work out just fine

 

[Captain Dirty]

I bought a pto unit years ago. 6” max. Works great, but slow.

As I have aged, slow has become a virtue. I have an electric log splitter that takes over a minute to cycle; half-way through a FEL bucket of split logs, the slowness is fine with me. Oosik and I have 6" Wallenstein and Salsco PTO chippers that suit our purposes well.

 

[hayden]

In my experience, burning is much faster and easier than chipping. A bigger shipper will wear you out really fast dragging stuff and feeding it. I started feeding mine with a mini-ex and that helps a lot, but it's still much slower than burning. But everyone's situation if different, so perhaps rent one for a day or two and see how it goes. Then decide what's best for the long run.

 

[oldnslo]

I have rented a couple of commercial style chippers and I would not look at a power feed unit without two driven infeed rollers. The single roller was much harder to get branches to start feeding and seemed to have more feed problems than twin roller. I believe both similar size in 9 - 10” capacity range.

Note: Being rentals they easily could have not been maintained or setup properly causing the problem.