Raytree drum mulcher

[Lineman North Florida]

Anybody have any first hand experience with one of these? I realize they are Chinese made but from all appearances they appear to be much better made than the Topcat and AGT Chinese mulchers and their current pricing is hard to beat.

 

[mikester]

Sounds like tariffs aren't high enough to make you want to buy and support local

 

[2manyrocks]

$9000 is a lot to risk if it breaks, IMPO.

 

[Lineman North Florida]

Sounds like tariffs aren't high enough to make you want to buy and support local

Sounds like tariffs aren't high enough to make you want to buy and support local

I"m not interested in spending $ 25k for a name brand mulcher while these can be had for about $6500 and seem to have pretty good reviews with a 1 year warranty. My question was does anyone have any first hand knowledge about one, do you?

 

[oldnslo]

No experience with that brand of mulcher but curious on what make or brand of hydraulic motor they use since they take a beating in that environment.

 

[Rustyiron]

I"m not interested in spending $ 25k for a name brand mulcher while these can be had for about $6500 and seem to have pretty good reviews with a 1 year warranty. My question was does anyone have any first hand knowledge about one, do you?

That's a pretty inexpensive way to "dip your toe" into the mulching business and to guage your customers interest in this service. Even if you only got a couple of hundred hours out of it. (if parts or repairs are not available)
That's $32.50/hr in mulcher costs leaving plenty of room for fuel and machine costs and profits.
I'd research the particular "tooth" and holder it takes first and make sure that you have a resource for them here in this country. They are a wear item that you will need.

 

[mikester]

I"m not interested in spending $ 25k for a name brand mulcher while these can be had for about $6500 and seem to have pretty good reviews with a 1 year warranty. My question was does anyone have any first hand knowledge about one, do you?

I rent these machines with a CTL by the week. These attachments take a LOT of abuse and beat the cr@p out of your machine operating them. You WILL break something. Good luck finding parts.

I learned my lesson buying a cheap chinesium chipper. After rebuilding and remanufacturing a lot of parts I now breakdown every hour instead of every 15 minutes. If you have a machine and fab shop you will enjoy your new hobby. Top up your life insurance if you have a wife and kids.

 

[Lineman North Florida]

I rent these machines with a CTL by the week. These attachments take a LOT of abuse and beat the cr@p out of your machine operating them. You WILL break something. Good luck finding parts.

I learned my lesson buying a cheap chinesium chipper. After rebuilding and remanufacturing a lot of parts I now breakdown every hour instead of every 15 minutes. If you have a machine and fab shop you will enjoy your new hobby. Top up your life insurance if you have a wife and kids.

I have been using a 6' forestry mower for the past 2 years with carbide teeth on the bottom of the blade carrier and it does a good job after you back drag over the material but there are jobs where the customer wants smaller mulch/debris and I can't justify $25k for this, that is the reason for looking into one of these, if I was thinking about mulching full time I wouldn't even think about one of these. As far as upgrading my life insurance I lived closer to the edge as a lineman for my work career and am now retired but I know when it's your time , it's your time, we all have designated hour to meet our maker/saviour. Out of curiosity was your's a Raytree?

 

[2manyrocks]

I would wonder if the sand content in Florida soil would be really hard on drum mulcher bearings when mulching the top layer of dirt?

When I had forestry mulching done with a drum mulcher a couple of years ago, the guy did a great job, but I still had chunks of debris which I believe was unavoidable due to the size of material he was mulching.

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[Lineman North Florida]

Well I went and picked one up today, hooked it up and greased everything, there is only one fitting that is a little aggravating to get to, it runs smoothly with no vibration but only time will tell if it holds up, it has some big shoes to fill to outdo my forestry mower, I suspect it will still be my go to.

 

[Lineman North Florida]

No experience with that brand of mulcher but curious on what make or brand of hydraulic motor they use since they take a beating in that environment.

It appears to be a Rexroth brand piston motor, don't know if that is a good brand or not.

 

[oldnslo]

If it is Rexroth they are a well known and respected product in the hydraulic world.

 

[Lineman North Florida]

If it is Rexroth they are a well known and respected product in the hydraulic world.

Well that is good to know, when I saw all the numbers and writing on it were in English I felt better, they even sent me an owners manual written in English.

 

[Lineman North Florida]

I didn't have a lot of time today to mess with it but I did spend about 10 or 15 minutes cleaning a section of field edge that had small scrub trees and really thick vines and it seemed to do a good job, I will post a picture of the mulch size. The only downfall that I have found was the bottom of the SSQA plate cutouts for the locking pins were to large which allowed it to be sloppy, but that got solved yesterday by adding some 5/16th's steel to help close the gap, now it's not sloppy.

 

[Lineman North Florida]

I thought I would update this thread now that I have used this mulcher on a couple of jobs, it has done a really good job so far, the one thing I have learned is don't take to big of a bite on larger logs/trees or you will hang it up and shutdown your progress but I am learning and am pretty pleased so far. It had one grease fitting that required removing a cover with 8 bolts to access the fitting so I added a remote fitting and hose so I don't have to do that anymore, for the money I would recommend these Raytree mulchers to someone looking to do some mulching and not spend $25k plus especially if not mulching commercially or daily.

 

[Rustyiron]

Mulching, brush mowing to me is so incredibly satisfying. The before and after could not be more dramatic and it's like your making real estate!

 

[Btw88]

Just picked one up today after looking for months. I've had a few of these Chinese attachments and I will say that raytree is the better brand of the Chinese attachments. I have yet to run it however I have done some pretty impressive things with my 60" agt disc Mulcher and am looking forward to using this drum. Have you ran into any issues? I had a grease issue on my disc Mulcher so I may have over done it on this one but I pumped and pumped until I got tired

 

[Lineman North Florida]

Just picked one up today after looking for months. I've had a few of these Chinese attachments and I will say that raytree is the better brand of the Chinese attachments. I have yet to run it however I have done some pretty impressive things with my 60" agt disc Mulcher and am looking forward to using this drum. Have you ran into any issues? I had a grease issue on my disc Mulcher so I may have over done it on this one but I pumped and pumped until I got tired

Did you get the low flow model or the hi-flow model? I have a Kubota SVL-75-2 with hi-flow but HF on this model is only right at 30 GPM which is 5 GPM short of the minimum requirement for the HF model so I figured I would be better off with the low flow model. So far no real complaints other than what I documented in this thread, the pin plates on the bottom were to large and needed to be filled in to make it stable and not sloppy and I added a remote grease fitting hose to the one grease fitting that required removing 8 bolts and a plate to grease both were easy to do and were needed.

 

[Btw88]

I'm running the low flow on a 75-3, my pin plates are sloppy as well, mine came from the factory with the grade zerks outside of the cases so you don't have to pull them to grease it. I will they would have done that to the one under the cover on the top. Only problem I've had is getting material wedges between the adjustable plate on the rear and the drum. Which is probably just a learning curve for me. I check the teeth for tightness every couple of hours and grease it once a day, I pumped it slam full with a tube of grease and it never stopped taking grease so I'm not sure exactly how much it needs, my topcat mower blew apart due to a lack of grease so I take that pretty serious after having to rebuild it with 20 minutes of run time. I'm looking at picking up some planer teeth from extreme wear parts to see if it would increases productivity or decrease the size of the mulch. Other than all that I'm very happy with it so far

 

[Lineman North Florida]

I'm running the low flow on a 75-3, my pin plates are sloppy as well, mine came from the factory with the grade zerks outside of the cases so you don't have to pull them to grease it. I will they would have done that to the one under the cover on the top. Only problem I've had is getting material wedges between the adjustable plate on the rear and the drum. Which is probably just a learning curve for me. I check the teeth for tightness every couple of hours and grease it once a day, I pumped it slam full with a tube of grease and it never stopped taking grease so I'm not sure exactly how much it needs, my topcat mower blew apart due to a lack of grease so I take that pretty serious after having to rebuild it with 20 minutes of run time. I'm looking at picking up some planer teeth from extreme wear parts to see if it would increases productivity or decrease the size of the mulch. Other than all that I'm very happy with it so far

Let me know how the other teeth work out for you. Mine also had the 2 grease fittings on each end of the drum outside and accessible, not sure why they didn't do the same with the third on the top bearing, but it's much better now since I relocated it by adding a remote grease hose.