Evil wood chippers!

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Slow1

Slow1

Minister of Fire
Nov 26, 2008
2,677
Eastern MA
I'm beginning to develop a love/hate relationship to the sound of a wood chipper. The only love comes from the fact that I can hear one from a mile away and when I do I know there is a chance of finding a tree service doing work and thus perhaps a score to be made. However, the hate is greater.

This morning I chased the sound down to a tree service cleaning up after taking out what appeared to be a healthy oak. they were happily tossing in 10-12" rounds as I pulled up. ARG! The good news is I was able to rescue a bit of wood to be properly disposed of (perhaps 1/3 of my truck bed) but I can only guess how much was wasted before I got there.

Whoever invented chippers that can eat up 12" plus diameter healthy oak doesn't get my vote for nice guy of the year. Humph.

I did give them my number and ask that they let me know next time they are in the area... have yet to get a call from doing this, but perhaps some day it will pay off.
 
Wow thats some chipper
 
You should see what gets dropped into the city's chipper that is a vertical drum the size of a semi trailer. With the amount of free mulch around the corner from the office, I often wonder if I would be better off buying the equipment to process and burn it than scrounging firewood.
 
Perhaps I'm overestimating the diameter. I'll have to measure them when I get home and update. But they are clearly too large to be chipped up in any case!
 
SolarAndWood said:
You should see what gets dropped into the city's chipper that is a vertical drum the size of a semi trailer. With the amount of free mulch around the corner from the office, I often wonder if I would be better off buying the equipment to process and burn it than scrounging firewood.
Click to expand...

the chepiest way I have found is look for a tree service without chipper and let them dump for free and then sell the firewood got another big load this A.M. and three more should be there before Wednesday afternoon
 
Our chipper (diesel powered) will take a 12" log and it's not a larger chipper when it comes to commercial units. Some of the bigger ones are monsters! It always drives me nuts when I see guys throwing whole trees in the chipper... :mad: I try to salvage everything larger than 3" or so.
 
smokinjay said:
the chepiest way I have found is look for a tree service without chipper and let them dump for free and then sell the firewood
Click to expand...

I need a better splitting solution and a probably bigger processing area before I do that. I already have about 10 cord waiting to be split. And there is still 5+ cord on the heap from this spring that needs to get stacked before I start splitting again.
 
A few years ago the neighbors brought in a crew and they cut off a big part of their woods. Almost all of it was chipped. Naturally I had to go watch the operation and what an operation it was! All the way from the cutting of the trees to the final product was amazing. But the chipper was really a dandy. It took some big stuff like it was nothing. I watched one day while they chipped and loaded a semi. I believe the trailer was 45' and they filled that thing in somewhere around 1/2 hour. I was amazed.

I may be getting that crew in here to do some chipping of some pine and popple. If so, I'll get pictures.
 
Given how many chippers I have seen - I have yet to see a tree service working without one - I think they must not be too expensive compared to the rest of the tree service operation. Must be one of those "do we buy a chipper or a truck that can haul logs and then find a place to dump logs" decisions that then falls to the chipper. The area I live in is fairly settled so not a lot of places to dump without driving some distance. I imagine chips take up a lot less space than the logs so it saves them trips.. now where exactly they take them is still a mystery to me but I'm quite certain it is nowhere near as useful (to me) as my woodpile!
 
All of my wood lately has come from a small property maintenance company that also does some trees as a side thing I think. He takes the brush and leaves anything 8" and bigger for me to pick up. I met them scrounging some pine at the mulch pile on a Sunday evening this spring.
 
Around here they have no problem getting rid of chips. Just this week we have another crew in trimming along power lines. They are working just along the roadsides and are chipping. I see one neighbor had taken a load already early Monday morning.

Sportsman's clubs can be good places to get rid of wood chips too. I was a member of one that took many loads of chips. We then spread the chips along every path of the archery course. That was much better than sinking in the clay after a rain.
 
Slow1 said:
Whoever invented chippers that can eat up 12" plus diameter healthy oak doesn't get my vote for nice guy of the year. Humph.
Click to expand...

I'd say that's rather an understatement. If a chipper can chew up a large tree limb, it can also purty much chew up a person.

If you Google "wood chipper accidents" you get pages and pages. Lots of duplicates, of course, but overall a lot of incidents. One article in the L.A. Times (http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-woodchipper9nov09,1,4287685.story) stated "Thirty-one people were killed in wood-chipper accidents between 1992 and 2002, according to a 2005 report by the Journal of the American Medical Assn." I assume that statistic only covers U.S. accidents or maybe U.S. and Canada; the Google hits include several in Australia, I also came across references for accidents in Britian and I suspect there might be even more such accidents in the rest of the world.

Peace,
- Sequoia
 
When they cleared the lot to build 6 McMansions next door they brought in a huge front end loader with a saw claw on the front on Monday and cut down 8 acres of trees. Tuesday they put a grapple on the front end loader which then picked up those whole trees one at a time and fed them into a chipper that blew the chips into a long box tractor trailer on Tuesday. Two loads. Wednesday they packed back up and left.

If I had known they were going to chew up all the trees for chips I would have cut down the bigger oaks and dragged them onto my property for firewood. No one would have known nor cared.

That chipper made a racket.

Poor gun shy dog next door wouldn't go outside after the first tree went through. :)
 
It's easy for us to say that they shouldn't chip up and waste those logs. The tree service is paid to remove that tree and make it clean. They will have a chipper on site for the branches anyway. Time is money and I am very certain that they are money ahead to throw the whole tree in the chipper than they are to hope for someone to come along and take the wood for free. The scroungers are then part of their "crew" as far as the homeowner is concerned and the tree company becomes liable for injury, property damage, and left over wood on the job.

I see a lot of negatives and very few positives there for the tree company to save a tree.

Now if you can make a deal with the homeowner you will likely save them some money if the logs can be left on site.
 
Where I work, we have a huge biomass boiler that burns long B-train truckloads that are dumped by standing them on their end.

truckdumper01.gif
 
LLigetfa said:
Where I work, we have a huge biomass boiler that burns long B-train truckloads that are dumped by standing them on their end.

truckdumper01.gif
Click to expand...

must be one hudge place
 
My best friend owns a tree service and worked for him for several years. Chipping trees is definitely a business decision. He has a few brush bandit 250's and a 1250. All of them have live hydraulics so he can run a monster winch on them without having to engage the chipper wheel. With the combination of his crane, one of those chippers, and a few chip trucks we can have some monster trees down in a couple hours. If my memory serves me correctly his chippers will take 18 inch material. We used to pull up to a large tree choke off entire limbs the size of trees, have a climber make a cut at the base of the limb and then boom over to the chipper. We would then run the winch cable from the chipper out to the cut end of the limb and winch it right onto the loading gate. The crane operator would help maneuver the pick if needed. All that was needed from there was to make some 3/4 cuts at some of the crotches of the pick to so the pick would fold up like an umbrella as it went into the chipper. The most impressive thing though is when you have brand new knives on the chipper disc. Those things are razor sharp when new and if you were to open the hydraulic feeder wheels that control how much wood the disc can chip, the chipper would stall itself because it is trying to take too much wood. Kind of like filing off the rakers on a chain then cutting with it without coming to a stop. Those chippers are so frickin violent, he routinely wears out the pintle hitches on either them or the truck because the chippers jump around so much when taking in material.

Reminds me of how much I miss playing Tonka Trucks everyday
 
Lots of wood tree chipping around here because of the demand of a biomass plant in Lyons Falls. Bad for the wood burners that use to get free tops for years.
 
The local high school that was just built has a dual boiler -- heats with oil and wood chips . . . the fire department went up a few weeks back to take a look at the school and bio boiler -- pretty neat contraption.
 
x2 on the business decision. I'm involved in clear-cutting as the property owner.
Most of the clear cutters will select cut for lumber first, but their has to be a reasonable quantity.
A 2 man crew can cut, chip, and load about 6 tractor trailer loads of chips a day.
Around here there is lots of demand for chips, they know they can sell them. The log market goes up & down, they don't know if they can sell the logs.
 
Slow1 said:
I'm beginning to develop a love/hate relationship to the sound of a wood chipper. The only love comes from the fact that I can hear one from a mile away and when I do I know there is a chance of finding a tree service doing work and thus perhaps a score to be made. However, the hate is greater.

This morning I chased the sound down to a tree service cleaning up after taking out what appeared to be a healthy oak. they were happily tossing in 10-12" rounds as I pulled up. ARG! The good news is I was able to rescue a bit of wood to be properly disposed of (perhaps 1/3 of my truck bed) but I can only guess how much was wasted before I got there.

Whoever invented chippers that can eat up 12" plus diameter healthy oak doesn't get my vote for nice guy of the year. Humph.

I did give them my number and ask that they let me know next time they are in the area... have yet to get a call from doing this, but perhaps some day it will pay off.
Click to expand...

I ran a bobcat high-flow chipper for 2 days and a rental stump grinder for another 2 days.

I'm pretty sure I'm more deaf than I was 5 days ago.

It gets fed everything in the course of a job. By my estimates they burn up about 2800$ of hard wood a year.

I'm going to convince my bosses to buy a bucket truck and I'll try to scrounge the good stuff. I can seel the crap to OWB's for a couple extra bucks. If I get my way we'll have nothing to chip. kinda like recycling because if they chip it they shoot it straight into a dumpster.
 
What annoyed me yesterday (or was it the day before...) was I chased another chipper down and asked if I could have the wood being chipped. The boy (had to be in his teens) said I'd have to ask his brother who "would be back in a few minutes" I tried to be polite and conversational (hard to do in the noise of course) and asked what the did with the chips - they dump them he said. So I asked if I could just toss some of the pieces in his pile into my truck and save him the trouble of chipping. Nope. Had to wait for his brother. 20 minutes later, no brother, pile chipping away in front of me. I finally left my number and asked that he have his brother give me a call. Call never came (I wonder if the card went into the chipper).

Now where is the sense in that one eh?
 
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