Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Property Projects & Construction Chipper Advice

For those of you have have chippers or chipper/shredders, I'm looking for advice.

My old chipper finally died, and am looking for a new chipper. I've looked at the DR 11.50 Premier, The Merry Mac line, and the Echo Bear Cat line. I'll primarily be using it as a chipper, as we have lot's of trimmed and fallen limbs, and will continue too as the fallout from the TX drought continues.

Anybody have any experiences with any of these brands, or have other suggestions?

Thanks, Al

Al,
Consider a PTO driven chipper if you have tractor. I have one and love it. It can be mounted on my little tractor or my bigger tractor with equal results. So far, it has eaten everything I can feed it.

I have a Kemp chipper/shredder, and when I needed it, it worked VERY well. Now I don't need it, I can push/throw them in a pile and burn them.

A friend has a PTO Frontier brand (JD) one that will take branches up to 5" dia, and has a hydraulic driven infeed roll. It works great, but again, it's quicker to push/throw in a pile and burn.

I have been looking into chippers and have pretty much settled on a Wallenstein BX42, PTO in the Orange flavor.

I don't really need one at the moment, but based on buying and renting for this future task at hand. It is hands down cheaper to buy new.

Chipper Advice:
1) don't slide into any base.
2) swing at the first strike you see.
3) if you catch a ball to your right, don't even attempt to throw to first.
4) stay healthy, we need you 40 year old butt in the line up (even though we've won about 7 in a row w/o you.

What?
Oh, I'm sorry. Never mind, carry on...

I had originally looked at PTO chippers and somehow got detoured from those. I assume most all of them hook up to the 3 point hitches and you just tote them around. Is that correct? If so, this might be perfect for leaving on my old John Deere.

I'm not real excited about another small engine to maintain, so I'll look at the PTO models again, and maybe go that route.

esshup, the piling and burning is what I'm doing now, but it just kills me to do it. It is easier, but the burn bans have forced me to let these piles sit for months at a time. I know it sounds silly, but churning out my own mulch is mentally relaxing to me. I have to think at work, and as a friend's 8 year old told me one time, "thinking is hard".

As always, thanks guys for the advice.

EDIT BY ME: Chipper Jones rocks. I hate he got old.

Al, I got the Wallenstein BX 42 also in orange and I really like it. Currently it is attached to my 2230. If you want to stop by the farm and see it in action, let me know. I'll be out there today and I'll be there for a few days.

If you have PTO power, then I would go with that solution.

Thanks highflyer. We're in town this week, but I may take you up on that offer later on.

Thanks, Al

Al,

Too bad about the burn bans, but I can understand your dilemma.

I've owned two chippers, and I wasn't happy with either one. One was very similar to the Echo Bearcat 260. I just don't remember what brand it was, but the specs look nearly identical, and the photo makes it look identical. It just wasn't big enough, and so it was slow - very slow.

My next one was a 3-point-hitch PTO driven chipper. I don't remember the exact brand, but I believe it was a Statesman, sold by Southern States Co-op. It just wasn't heavy duty enough, and I was constantly repairing it. Welds broke, or things just fell off. Even though it rested on the ground, it just shook the heck out of the tractor -- at that time, a Ford 8-N. It was faster than the chipper above, but it still took one heck of a long time to chip a moderate pile of brush and branches.

I then resorted to just piling the brush into the woods, and crushing them down as best I could. I found that they composted down pretty well. I still do a lot of that, and I turn them and re-crush them now and then.

For quite a few years I've also been digging big burn holes in the ground. My present one, and the previous one, are/were about 6-7 foot deep, and about 12 x 25 at the top, with gradually sloping sides (so I can get out if I should fall in). We typically have burn bans from March through early May, and from July or August into October. I just keep filling the hole with brush and other burnables. Whenever we don't have burn bans, I burn at least once a month.

I filled my hole up with big oak stumps that just wouldn't burn down. We finally filled it and started over.

Regards,
Ken

If a chipper is the route you wish to take, I wouldn't even consider a stand-alone unit. Get a PTO driven unit for your tractor. I've worked on just about every brand of self-powered, as well as PTO driven chippers, and in my opinion the self-powered units are little more than toys. If you intend to feed it a steady diet of anything much bigger than cornstalks, you will be disappointed. PTO is the way to go.

Thanks to all. I'll restart down the PTO road.

My sister has a Troy Built chipper/shredder. 8hp I believe, and that thing gets a really good workout every year. Gotta be at least 20+ years old, and it works great!

Burning would be a quick and simple solution for me, but doubt I could even get a permit in this Forrest location. I sure would not want to be featured on the local evening news

Burying this stuff causes problems down the road also, like sink holes.

Piling the stumps up along the property line builds a pretty solid barrier between you and that (interject expletives here) pesky neighbor.

Got a new tree guy in the area, and he only charges a hundred bucks to drop a widow maker. My nephew had him take out three so far, and he made it look easy. I have a 4ft and 6ft white oak that needs to go, along with many other smaller ones, which are not a problem. Been studying the 6 footer and took off a couple limbs. Yep, quite the seismic thud when a 2ft limb hit the ground. Pretty sure I can do this tree and esshup offered some assistance, but a hundred bucks will guarantee that our names will not be featured on the evening news

Down here, the road commissioner is of more value than the sheriff. We just had 2 60' dead trash trees cut down and hauled off by the road crew. Took 2 days to do what would have taken me 2 weeks to do.

Guys told me they're responsible for 210 miles of rural roads here in Hopkins County, and they were guessing that the next 5 years would bring the most residual tree damage in years. They said 100 year old oaks were just collapsing all over East TX. The 2011 drought was a blight to this area. I'm just hoping it was an aberration, and 2012 is better.

I'm up to 8 dead trees and counting. Kind of makes the water level drop in my lake seem tolerable.

Al, we have lost several 100 year old trees like this one - yep, makes a drought low water fish kill tolerable...

I'm seeing a lot of the same stuff. Ancient post oaks that are so dry that they can't even be used for firewood. Just no moisture left in them.

Guys I'm not trying to hijack my own thread, but this whole long term precipitation thing is starting to worry me. The loss of so many trees, is what got me thinking about another chipper to begin with.

I try to avoid the whole global warming thing, but looking at average rainfalls over the last 20 years made me realize how close we are in East TX to actually being semi-arid.



This map is for a 10 year cycle, and is 20 years old, but it was the latest 10 year average I could find.

I was lucky enough to have a tremendous watershed for my lake, but I'm still not sure it's enough. I've easily got 10 acres of watershed per surface acre, and we're still at the mercy of Spring rains. I've raised my water level a foot, and hope this will get me through the year.

I'm wondering if the whole dynamic of pond ownership is going to change, and the requirements for the watershed and the soil composition become more important that the pond itself.

I had my dirt guy remove as much dirt as he could last Winter to deepen my pool, and may continue to do it until I can hold as much water as is financially possible. It would have been far easier and cheaper to have done this originally, when the actual construction began.

I'm in the 35 to 40 range, and with the exception of 2 years in the past 10, it hasn't been enough.

I'm going to be the contrarian here. I have a three point hitch, PTO powered DR chipper. If I had to do it all over again I would spend the money on a box of matches, some lighter fluid and a lifetime supply of mulch from Wal-Mart.
Sticking sticks in a shredder is slow, loud, dusty, usually hot and generally miserable. I hate the way the sticks vibrate my hands when I'm feeding them, though I now see where DR has shredders that are advertised as automatic feeding. If I put any dimensional lumber in my shredder, like an old 2x4 it tends to shave it into a wedge which stops the wheel. It also likes to cut stuff down to a small chunk that it can't then grab hold of and it just jumps around inside.
I might also add that it takes way more sticks, logs etcetera than you would think to have a significant amount of mulch.

I agree 110%! If I had a choice between wait until the pile could be burned or run a bunch of pieces thru the chipper, I'd take the match any day of the week.