i have cleaned up a good bit of the lot and now have several piles of yard waste to get rid of. I would like to chip and shred the stuff and then rototill it in to some places where the soil could use more organic matter. The closest place to dispose of yard waste is a fair ways away and if I do that I still need to do something to improve the soil.
So does anyone have plans for a well designed chipper shredder?
Dan
What am I missing here? Wouldn't it make more sense to rent one for a day than to build one from scratch that you're only going to use once?
Have Fun! Rich
I expect to use it every year. Right now I am looking at about a week and a half of shredding. But probably only two or three days a year after I get caught up.
Dan
Woody material ( which is typically what people use chippers for ) isn't going to improve the soil much by itself, you need to also add copious amounts of green stuff, and it's better to compost it all in a pile first rather than to simply till under.
In the absence of leafy greens, you can add high nitrogen fertilizer to the pile but...
Anyways, I strongly suggest rent a commercial chipper with 35+hp engine if you have several days worth of chipping to do, IOW a heavy duty trailer mounted jobbie....then take your time find something off of craigslist or nickle ads locally for future use.
As far as home-owner grade...definately pass on anything that uses a verticle shaft lawnmower type motor or you'll be sorry...
As a point of refrence, mine is a "bearcat"....it's pto drive that attaches to the 3point hitch on my tractor which has 23hp @ at 540...it is not a "planer blade" type, rather, it has a disc that's about the size of a 33-1/3 rpm lp record and 3/8 in thick with a single tooth mounted to it....
RPM is increased via Vee belt appears to be 1 to 3 ratio so the main chipper disc I would estimate runs ~2500 rpm, it is about 12 in diameter and has a single tooth about 4in long located at about 10 inches along the diameter, and is guaged to cut at a chipload of about .125 per revolution IIRC so guessing it's probably processing at ~ 6000 or so sfm.
After that, the chips fall into what is basically a hammer mill, 4 rows of with 6 flails each on a drum.... there is also a top hopper that you can use to shove small dry sticks and green shubs and that kind of shit into...goes directly to the hammermill...there is a screen under the hammermill that the finished product falls out of....it's made from 1/4in steel and has ~1in diameter holes drilled in a 1-1/2in grid pattern.
I might be able to get some pictures if your interested in the actual design details but....
--my main point is that it's still not quite as powerfull as I would like--IIRC it will run 3in diameter green woody branches at a rate of about
5 ft/ min on a good day but at that size material frequently have to stop feeding in order to keep the engine from bogging down and possibly stalling.....FWIW, I have a fairly large burn pile I'm going to torch probably tomorrow and pretty sure I haven't used the chipper in at least 5 years.
Oops--it's actually a "mighty mac"...it's probably rated ~4 x 4 in--sorry but at quick glance I din't see any model numbers.
Why not rent one and put the chips where you want - and roto-till the results into a compost pile or into the ground.
When Tree people were here to clear a line - I had two trucks dump their loads on my side yard along our long driveway. We plan on raking it out to improve the ground a bit like you. Now a year and a half, most of each hill is great looking compost. Going to be nice starter stuff. The stacks were smoking while they were cooking and decomposing. I let them smoke. Fire was not my worry.
Mart>
I use my shit shaker (compost screener) one day per year. The rest of the time it takes up about 1.5 square feet of floor space in the shed. IIRC it cost me about $5 to build it. Gerry :-)} London, Canada
Other than the burn part....
I rented a monster chipper 8 years ago. Got a free "upgrade" in size (6" to 9") since the rental place didn't have the size I reserved in working order. VW engine (1600 cc.) Miserable, but effective, at least where things had been piled specifically to get chipped. Unless they had grapevines in them, which would jam the chipper up, so those had to be removed (once you've cleared a 36" disc a few times, you learn to pull the vines ahead of feeding the branches...) Random piles took too long to disassemble to be efficient getting into the chipper.
I could use a decent hammermill for grinding up small stuff to rot faster, but haven't found one I'd care to spend money on. Bigger "stuff you might chip" mostly ends up as firewood.
So, I pile brush. If feeling moderately impatient, I pile horse manure on the brush pile. With or without manure, the brush pile will shrink over time. Either more brush gets added to the top, or the pile shrinks to nothing. The active piles are worth manuring, just to weight them down for more space to pile in the first place, and for the faster rot (and further space created by shrinkage) in the second.
This will not work so well in desert climates, I suppose. Here, stuff left out will inevitably rot, and do so faster if helped along.
Not so quick as chip or burn, but a lot simpler & quieter. Just pick an out of the way spot and pile brush.
The soil here is mostly clay. In the area I cleared for a veggie garden, I trucked in about 4 pickup loads of ground woody material from the county yard waste yard and then added about five pickup loads of horse manure last fall. It still has too much clay, but is a lot better than it was.
Those are pretty much useless.
Does the tooth chip the branch and the chip goes through the disk? I had one more or less like that but then moved across country. As i remember it had multiple teeth, I think it was two teeth. One tooth might be better as far as bogging down the engine.
Most all the stuff I want to chip is smaller. More like an inch in diameter. I could live with a chipper that did not do 3 inch diameter limbs. Those I could haul to the county yard waste area.
Can not burn where I am. At least not legally.
Dan
On Jun 3, 10:18=A0pm, Ecnerwal
Me too.
I guess I am too impatient. One pile that could be in a more out of the way place has shrunk from about 6 feet high to about 4 + feet high in a year. And it has horse manure on it.
Dan
I like to build things. Where is the fun in renting?
Dan
Without the horse manure it would have been a different story.
A consumer fraud, but I digress.
Fairly often, in fact.
Yes, that's pretty much how it works--I can't remember exactly how the chip thickness is controlled but I'll try and take a look tomorrow, maybe take a photo since just recently I got a new phone that actually lets me download to my computer...
It may have more teeth, like I say, it's been a while...
If your not interested in the hammermill aspect, and are just wanting a disc type chipper then it's certainly do-able project though pretty sure OSHA might not like having your hired hands using it...
Or use as fire wood...
It's almost all but joke here where I'm at--download a "permit", print and sign it, keep it on the premesis...make sure and abide by the outdoor burning rules:
--although next county over, it's a completely different story.
Oops forgot...BTDT
1/2 to 1/4 pea gravel ( no fines ) ....a 3/4 lift on top of the beds and till to 10in appx depth.( you can do it mid season even--sort of a "mulch" to inhibit weeds...till under come fall )
The local deer population love visiting here.
Well, OK then, but I'm still a little skeptical about building one.
What does your buy vs. build chart look like so far? Want me to design one for you? ;-P
Cheers! Rich
So far my build vs buy chart looks like:
Build Buy Get to play designer Spend money Get to weld Get to go to industrial junk yards Get to tear apart and fix problems Get to use that thing I got and did not know what it was. Get sympathy when injured
Dan
In the area I cleared for a vegie garden, I dumped about four pickup loads of ground yard waste from the county yard waste disposal place and followed that with about five pickup loads of horse manure. it still is not great, but much better.
Those are pretty much useless except for shredding leaves.
Do the chips go through the disk? I had a chipper that had either two or four cutters mounted on a disk with slots in the disk that the chips went through to get to the hammer mill section. Might have been better with only one tooth. I moved across country and did not bring it with me.
I could live with one that only chipped stuff up to an inch and a half. I do not have much that is bigger than that and anything bigger I can give to my neighbor that has a outside wood burning furnace.
Can not burn here legally. Some of my neighbors do burn, but not big piles and not often.
Good advice, but I am going to ignore it right now.
Dan
By the way, regarding a fertilizer. What I find is that chicken poo works absolutely best when it comes to vegetables (technically fruits), such as tomatoes. Back when I had chickens, I had 8 foot tall tomato plants, full of tomatoes.
i
If you are much of a wrench you can probably borrow one in trade for tuning it up, changing the oil, and returning it freshly sharpened.
Good idea, but I am kind of new to the area and do not know anyone with a chipper. That is kind of the same problem with renting. i have not scoped out where the good rental places are located. I tried to rent a lawn mover, but could only find a place that rented push mowers. I will be looking at rental places. Need to rent a ditching machine to put in subsurface drains. I do not expect to need that more than once.
Dan
Dan, If you get one built and running, please share the result. I run a corn stalk chopper through the orchard to get most of the prunings. Then have the kids pull out the oversize stuff. it would be real nice to have a PTO chipper instead.
Karl
I'll second that. I get a semi load every year. I also get a semi of turkey litter, not as strong. I grow the best strawberries in the sate of MN and this is one of the secrets.
BTW, the kids are sprinkling dryed and pelletized chicken poo on the first year plants as i write this. We put a 2000
Karl
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