Question for you Drew, about your new
chipper. So I'm wondering: what did I miss in deciding to burn vs. chipping? Is it because you wanted the chips for mulch?
not for mulch, I filled my large burn pile/pit in about two years of use. I have no where to dump the ashes, which have the inevitable metal interspersed so this is a disposal problem. The
chipper can be driven right to where I cut, like I did in these pics. Limbs were falling down around the tractor, so I had to pick them up only once. Only way to do that is bring the source to you. I think.
Secondly I am ready to head for my pond after three years. And with a
chipper, I can work my way through the woods again only picking things up once usually and the chips going back into the woods will break down quickly. This back area was logged and there are great mounds of sawdust under natural growth in areas near where the path will go. Other areas are swamp like and impassable. But my pond is well known to locals before the logging made the second growth clog up the landscape. I will do my best to avoid large trees so the path will wind a little, no straight interstate here, and for sure will wind around nice trees like hollies and magnolias. Any tulip poplar or pine in the way may not be long lived.
Hopefully I won't have to cut any large pine trees because I'll have a real problem doing something with them, other than dumping them some place in the woods. I'm trying to clean up legacy messes here, not add to them. And I sure am not going to shove a 7 inch pine trunk in this
chipper no matter how slow it's going. Maybe five inches max. The rest gets logged out, someplace. And there will be way too much of it to burn.
The
chipper isn't particularly fast, as I'm running it on the slow input setting and not sure I want to go faster for awhile.
I guess when I hear it slow down I'll know when it is reaching its limit. Pretty sure I can't hurt the tractor at all. It's running at full torque
and should have no problems with this thing. Now if I hear a bang and the belts start smoking well I've practiced in my head the fastest way to get the pto turned off. This is when not having that easy to get to little yellow knob is more than just an inconvenience when I have to climb back on the tractor to turn the pto off by declutching vs just reaching in/over and flipping the knob.