Any of you guys happy with your wood chipper?

[GadDummit]

I'm looking for a new (or used, really) wood chipper that can take 5" or more with a tow behind hitch. Not a PTO, but a stand alone gas model. Anyone have one they're overjoyed with and can recommend? I bought the DR Power leaf vac and chipper combo for $2200 bucks and was so disappointed with the chipping (pathetic) and the leaf suction (dismal) that I sent it back.

 

[schwaggly]

I bought a HF chipper. I bought it for short money on a coupon. It jams often but overall worth the price.

 

[paulnlee]

I had a MacKissic that worked very well.

 

[SpaceBus]

If you are looking at chipping material larger than 5" then you will want a hydraulic infeed unit. My Wallenstein PTO unit is 4" max material and is "gravity" feed and it can be a bear on larger items or items with lots of twigs, branches, etc. Hydraulic roller feed would make it all easy.

No matter what, a chipper/shredder will be a lot of work to operate, it's not fun.

 

[sloeffle]

No matter what, a chipper/shredder will be a lot of work to operate, it's not fun.

I have a hydraulically fed PTO unit and it is a breeze to operate. Shove the branch / tree into the chipper and walk away. I bought a unit with hydraulic feed because I read about so many folks having issues with manual feed chippers.

 

[SpaceBus]

I have a hydraulically fed PTO unit and it is a breeze to operate. Shove the branch / tree into the chipper and walk away. I bought a unit with hydraulic feed because I read about so many folks having issues with manual feed chippers.

Hauling all the brush is the tiring part. We mostly deal with very full evergreens with lots of limbs and they often get tangled and are difficult to deal with. Usually I dump everything in the shredder hopper since it's mostly 2" and less diameter and quite bushy. If there was a hydraulic feed pto chipper with shredder hopper I would have gone for it. I bet a good fabricator could make a hydraulic feed setup for my unit since I have the tractor hydraulics to support it.

 

[xman23]

It takes a serious machine chip to do what your talking about. Chippers are all on the verge of self destructing. If your planning on doing this commercially it's a different story. What worked for me was accumulating a huge, 75' long branch pile. Called a tree guy with big chipper. He would't chip any dead wood. It dulls the blades. A few hundred and it it was all mulch in the yard, and a few guys did all the work. Since then I now haul all the branches far out back in the woods where I can't see the pile. In a few years it breaks down and disappears.

 

[sloeffle]

Hauling all the brush is the tiring part. We mostly deal with very full evergreens with lots of limbs and they often get tangled and are difficult to deal with. Usually I dump everything in the shredder hopper since it's mostly 2" and less diameter and quite bushy. If there was a hydraulic feed pto chipper with shredder hopper I would have gone for it. I bet a good fabricator could make a hydraulic feed setup for my unit since I have the tractor hydraulics to support it.

Ahhhhh, yeah no evergreens here. That does sound like a PITA though. Lots of dead ash trees here. With small ash trees, I can cut them down and shove the whole tree into the chipper because the top has usually blown out of it before I can get to it.

Back on topic. To the OP, do you have enough brush to justify buying a stand alone machine ? When I looked at them you needed to pretty much get into a commercial type machine to get anything half way decent. Most of them were >5k easy. That is why I went the PTO route since they were more affordable and I already had a tractor. As @xman23 said you might be better off just renting a chipper once or twice a year, having a tree guy come out once a year, or trying to stack it somewhere until rots.

 

[Bad LP]

I bought a used manual feed Salsco 6" PTO chipper that was in great shape for 3K. Getting rid of the grade 5 shear bolt replacing it with an 8 made a huge difference.
I had a bunch of trees taken down by my garage over the winter and chipped the tops and branches in Sept. This was a combination of spruce, fir, moosewood, and other saplings.

Sure it was a lot of work but it's done. I can get a hydro bolt on feed for it from Salsco but it would be pretty hard to justify the cost to myself.

 

[mustash29]

I have 1/2 acre of lawn in the middle of 2 acres of oak, maple, birch & pines, so after every wind, wet heavy snow or ice storm there is a lot of crap to deal with. I used to rely on my back door neighbor to help me out with his hyd self feed chipper on the back of his 35 hp tractor, but over the years I felt like I was always pestering him (and making trips to the package store for 30 packs of Bud for payment) so I went searching.....

I got a killer deal on a 90's vintage Troy-Bilt Super Tomahawk Pro 47044 off Craigslist for about 300 bucks. It's rated for 4" but I typically only feed it 2.5" and below and use the bigger stuff for kindling. It's got a 12 hp Techmuseh self feed with a belt drive clutch and slip clutch that drives a 45 lb drum flywheel with 2 sets of cutters. No complaints, as long as you are feeding it relatively straight pieces of material with minimal crotches and side branches. I have fed it 20' long pieces of pine branches that were 2.5-3" at the base with all of the side branches still attached and it kicks a55. It struggles a little bit on dry hard oak and black birch (ironwood) but it still gets the job done. It could probably benefit from a new set of cutter blades.

It needs a bit of help since it is not hydraulically self feeding but for a "manual feed" it works well. I've even fed the 5-6' living room xmas tree into it the last few years, just so I could torment my significant other and play "Grinch" for a few minutes, LOL.

Because it has the solid wheels instead of "wheel barrow tires" I think this is the smaller version of mine.

DR makes some nice self feeding disk style chippers for about 2K as well as Wood Maxx.

WoodMaxx DC-1260 Gas Powered Wood Chipper

WoodMaxx ? DC-1260 (ONLY $1,799.00 with Free shipping) is a 4" CAPACITY SELF-FEEDING WOOD CHIPPER13.5 hp 420cc OHV GAS ENGINE POWERED | WoodMaxx is north Americas #1 wood chipper supplier | Call 855-966-3629 in stock

www.woodmaxx.com

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[Mick-Fish]

I have a hydraulically fed PTO unit and it is a breeze to operate. Shove the branch / tree into the chipper and walk away. I bought a unit with hydraulic feed because I read about so many folks having issues with manual feed chippers.

I have a 18 hp DR chipper Have had it for about 10 years.Works great up to about 4 in.