Posts Tagged ‘wood chipper’
Best Outcomes
One of my very favorite property maintenance projects is converting unsightly piles of tree branches into valuable piles of woodchips, and on Monday, we did just that.
It made a huge difference that we had previously staged a pile of limbs we had cherry-picked exclusively for their perfect size for our chipper. It kicks the level of efficiency for making useful chips way up when excluding small branches that can plug up the chipper and inevitably add long sticks to the chip pile.
It was pretty hot out, and I’d already snapped one shear bolt by the time we finished that stack of limbs, so we decided that would be enough chipping for the day. However, while I had the tractor out, I felt it would be a prime opportunity to mow the back pasture, and my time out in the heat got extended for a few more hours.
Over the past few years, we have waited well into the summer before mowing that field. We always hoped that the farmer who cuts and bales our hay field would also do the back pasture, but he’s made it obvious he doesn’t want to mess with the smaller field due to the short distances between fence lines. Since it will be up to us to mow it before weeds mature and go to seed, it’s to our benefit to do it much sooner in the growing season.
Knowing that the following day would bring rain made it that much more rewarding to have jumped on the chance to knock that chore off our list in a spur-of-the-moment decision.
The horses took great interest in my activities in their field and watched over me much of the time.
They are locked out of that pasture for a few days until the cuttings dry out, but I believe they will find the freshly trimmed grass to be a best outcome for their grazing purposes. It’s a nice reward when the end result is one that makes everyone happy.
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Successful Test
We didn’t get the downpour I was expecting would show me the improvement achieved by my rerouted gutter downspout, but the daylong drizzle yesterday produced results.
A puddle was almost forming in the grass beyond the outlet of the last stretch of the downspout. That is water that would have been soaking into the dirt along the foundation from the ineffective (broken) plastic solution that had previously been in place for years.
It must have been more than a drizzle at some point in the last 36 hours because Cyndie reported over an inch of water in the rain gauge last night.
Knowing that this kind of rain was on its way, we jumped to accomplish as much as possible on Saturday afternoon during a dry spell. I pulled out the diesel tractor, rearranged equipment, and retrieved the wood chipper from the back of the garage.
Using knowledge gained from previous failures, I detached the loader bucket to reduce weight and picked a strategic route to reach the wood chip “station” by the labyrinth without a problem.
A few years ago, I got stuck and created a muddy disaster trying to drive that tractor along the fence line of the back pasture. Saturday, the tractor tires did nothing more than leave a reasonable impression on the soft earth.
There is so much I don’t know about using heavy equipment, but in the eleven years I’ve been playing the role of Wintervale’s property manager, I have figured out how to get along at a level that serves our needs. When the shear bolt broke during the session of chipping a big pile of oak branches, I wasn’t the least bit fazed.
We used that excuse to decide we had done enough chipping for the day and I simply wrenched in a new bolt when I got back to the garage. No big deal.
Before gaining these years of experience, I would have perceived a broken bolt as a sign I had done something wrong. I saw it as a failure. Something to be avoided. Now I keep stock of spare bolts and suffer no unnecessary concern when they are needed.
A successful day of using our equipment to accomplish tasks is a good test of the knowledge I’ve gained from the school of hard knocks.
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Chippin’ Away
Little by little, day by day… We made another modicum of progress in dealing with the wealth of downed trees awaiting processing on our property on Thursday. I didn’t have a wasp get into my sleeve and painfully sting me four times when I grabbed a branch to put it in the ATV trailer. Cyndie can’t say the same thing.
Her wrist and forearm looked a bit like a hot baseball bat but that didn’t keep her from carrying on and loading branches into the chipper.
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Under the canopy of leaves that created dappled light over our chosen workspace, we made quick work of the collection of prime-sized, appropriately trimmed limbs we’ve been stockpiling for just this purpose. Once the trailer was emptied, we sought out worthy specimens scattered throughout the immediate vicinity.
That effort reaffirmed my interest in putting more time toward pre-staging the optimum branches for chipping. The brilliant chipper attachment we have can handle up to 5-inch diameter branches but too large a “Y” breakout on a limb will seize progress as it gets wedged in the narrowest point of the chute. Sticks and twigs that are small can also bog things down.
Lately, I find myself inclined toward optimizing production of the best chips for landscaping by choosing ideally sized limbs. There is a time and place for chewing up entire piles of branches, but lately, our purposes call for less shrapnel and more good chip chunks.
Our next task along these lines will be to process the remaining downed trees, trimming and sorting limbs for a future day of chipping. It will be a rewarding exercise on its own, but it is also a form of delayed gratification… if you know what I mean.
There is something really satisfying about grinding a trailer-load of arm-sized branches into a huge pile of wood chips.
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Stocking Up
Always one of my favorite projects for the dual reward, yesterday was dominated by cleaning up brush piles by turning them into wood chips. We started with our main storage location empty and finished with it filled.
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Toiling away in the remarkably summery heat in the first week of November, it was surprisingly quick work to reach that goal. The problem with that is we didn’t begin to put a dent in the number of limbs lying everywhere around our property.
Honestly, we could work on chipping downed branches every day for weeks and likely not exhaust the supply. In fact, as I was traversing one of the trails through our trees after putting away the tractor, I arrived at a freshly fallen branch that wasn’t there when I passed moments earlier.
Our stock of chips is full and our stock of branches awaiting future chipping is even fuller.
Plenty of fodder to allow us to get two things done at once when that next becomes the project we choose.
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Simplest Solution
I don’t know how many times I am going to face this lesson before I comprehend it well enough to no longer be fooled. It’s batteries. Apparently, I know just enough to fall prey to a key misperception. My understanding of electronics is deeper than many others, having attended years of technical school and working in high tech firms with engineers for most of my career, but batteries seem to be a repeating weak point for me.
The problem preventing the diesel tractor from starting which I had come to suspect was related to a missing safety interlock signal turned out to be the most obvious and likely cause of a bad battery.
Sure, the “fully charged” light came on when I connected a charger to the battery. Sure, the instruments on the dash lit up deceivingly bright when I turned the key.
It was all a facade. There was no “oomph” behind that initial twelve volts that allowed my ‘too smart for its own good’ brain to wander off after several much less likely possible component failures.
With essential assistance from Cyndie, who rose to the occasion to provide tenacious problem-solving brainpower and impressive muscle, we extracted the heavy battery from the very difficult to access front end of the tractor.
I’m particularly pleased with our simultaneous insight to use blocks of wood tucked under the unwieldy battery after lifting it just inches at a time in order to get it up where we could finally muscle it clear of the multiple obstructions.
After reversing that process to drop in the new battery, starting the tractor was easy. The afternoon project of chipping branches turned the area beside Cyndie’s new gardens into a lumberjack camp of cut branches, sawed logs, and flying woodchips.
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Turning logs into split firewood and branches into woodchips are two processes I find most rewarding for getting greater value out of the material left over after the initial project of needing to remove trees.
It isn’t necessarily a simple solution, but it is a wonderful achievement of making full use of our resources.
I can only hope that I will now find it easy to recognize future occasions of weak batteries being the simplest solution in my troubleshooting of equipment failing to start.
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Another One
We have been very lucky recently that the most violent of the stormy weather passing through our region has been missing us. Instead of 4 or 5 inches of rain, we have had 1.75 inches. Despite the wild panic Delilah has demonstrated over rumbles of thunder that occurred, no lightning strikes have hit nearby. Most worrisome for me over the weekend were reports of 70 and 80 mph wind gusts combined with golfball to baseball-sized hailstones crashing down.
That never materialized here. Still, for some strange reason, we continue to experience falling trees. On Saturday, I posted about the tree that fell on Friday, even though I wasn’t aware we had experienced any storm. By the end of that same day, there was another even bigger busted tree hanging across that same trail.
We didn’t hear that one, either.
It’s becoming an obstacle course to navigate that trail through the woods. Cyndie was away all weekend, so I respected our agreement to avoid using the chain saw when I’m alone and left the three downed trees across the path for the time being.
It’s probably only marginally safer to use the wood chipper, but I elected to work with that yesterday morning while I waited for the overnight dew to evaporate from the really long lawn grass. Mowing the lawn became the afternoon project.
The professional crew we hired to bring down that big oak that toppled, cut it up and left everything lay right where it was, which saved us a lot of money. Now I’m having second thoughts about those savings. Wrestling the branches to get them into and down the chute of the chipper is a real chore if the “Y” junctions aren’t trimmed.
It is a “pay me now or pay me later” process. I don’t want to spend time cutting every last branch, so I spend the time instead, trying to force the branches far enough down the chute to where the chipper will grab and break them.
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Most of the cut logs are so big I can’t lift them. They will get rolled downhill to where I can get them in the ATV trailer to be moved up by the woodshed for splitting.
The chickens seem to like scratching through the pile of wood chips. I have no idea what they were finding in there.
I will be very surprised if I don’t end up with a poison ivy reaction after that exercise. Right where I stood to feed the chipper, there was a known patch of poison ivy. I expect it was getting on the branches I was grabbing, it was probably getting atomized by the chipper, I was likely breathing it, and wiping sweat off my face with gloves that handled it.
I washed down thoroughly afterward, but time will tell whether I was being stupidly careless, or that my previous recent exposures with sequentially reduced reactions were an indication that my sensitivity is fading. I should know in a day or two.
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Twice Happy
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, there is no project around here that is as satisfying as chipping a pile of branches. The ability to accomplish two things at once is very rewarding. The unending accumulation of downed branches get piled up for removal and we have an unending need for wood chips on our trails and gardens.
In comes the most useful purchase I have made in our time on this land.
I pulled out the diesel tractor for the first time in months and attached the big blue chipper for a session of munching branches. By the time I finished, I had reduced two tangled piles into a filled wood chip station down by the labyrinth.
The only thing that would have made it easier would be an ATV trailer to move the second pile of branches over to the chipper. I had to make several trips to haul them by hand because I’ve yet to replace the trailer Cyndie mistakenly sold at her barn sale.
I don’t remember paying over $200 for shipping when I bought the first one, and I balked when shopping for the replacement. There is an imitation trailer that I can buy locally to save a lot of cash, but I am wary of the quality. It very much looks like a version of “you get what you pay for” in this case.
I’m waiting around for some magic solution to appear.
Maybe I should start visiting yard sales in the area for someone willing to part with a used trailer.
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Prepping Machines
It seems like it should be simple to just cut down a couple of trees and grind the branches into chips, but there are a lot of little steps to setting up and actually executing the tasks.
After work yesterday, I set about prepping some of the equipment, in hopes of priming this morning’s start on this weekend’s logging project. The chipper attachment was stored a couple levels deep in the shop garage. I needed to do some rearranging before I could get access to it.
The back-blade was still on the big tractor, so the first order of business was to find somewhere out-of-the-way to park that.
Except, that wasn’t actually the first order of business. I decided to move the Grizzly out, to make room for fueling up the New Holland, and in so doing, ended up driving the ATV down to the barn to hook up its trailer.
After that, I was finally ready to back Big Blue out of the garage and get rid of the back-blade.
Once that was done, I hooked up the chipper to the 3-point hitch and parked the rig in the barn.
Next, I started collecting equipment I would want to haul to the work site in the ATV trailer.
Chainsaw. Check.
Chain oil, mixed gas, wedge, face shield, leg protectors, ropes, come-along, chains, pole saw, log holder, hand saw, ax, spare ear muffs/hearing protection, ladder, rake, branch pruner… and if I can find it, a kitchen sink.
Still, there will end up being a need for some item that I forgot to bring. Honestly, one goal of bringing so much down there is so that we won’t need it. I’m not above using a little reverse psychology with the universe.
My hope is to have tedious setup tasks taken care of in advance to get full benefit of volunteer help for cutting limbs of felled sections of trees, feeding branches into the chipper, and cutting trunks into logs. If we are really productive, there will be the added chores of driving loads of woodchips away and dumping them, or hauling logs up to the woodshed.
Most importantly, I’m looking forward to the opportunity for hearty fellowship in the great outdoors and an outcome of safe and healthy success for all bodies involved, particularly the discs of my lower back.
I don’t want to get too greedy, but some time for good-natured banter around a fire with people’s favorite beverage after a day’s physical workout would be a fine outcome, too.
I’m just sayin’.
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Most Satisfying
Every time I use our wood chipper, I grow more enamored with the machine and what it does for us. For me, it has become the most satisfying repeated task of property management that we undertake.
It is relatively easy to set up, makes good use of our otherwise under-utilized diesel tractor, and it makes quick work of the chipping. I love the way it transforms an unsightly nuisance of constantly accumulating dead (or recently pruned) branches into a precious resource of wood chips. We will never have enough.
We use the chips around plants in the gardens and landscaping, as well as a covering for our many trails. That is, we hope to cover the trails. Right now, we have a lot more trails in need than we have wood chips to cover.
If we could find a way to create a few more hours in a day, we certainly have no shortage of branches to chip…
And it would be a most satisfying additional few hours, indeed.
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Soft Ground
Nature didn’t live up to what the forecasters had predicted for us on Sunday. The temperature struggled to approach 50° (F) and the sky never really cleared enough to allow the sun to make much difference. Despite the less-than-inspiring conditions, Cyndie and I rallied our energies to pull out the wood chipper for another round of chewing up brush piles.
Since we are in the wonderful season when the top layer of soil is freezing and thawing daily, I had hoped to park the tractor on the driveway again, near the next largest pile of branches. Unfortunately, that meant the chute would be pointed directly into the wind and everything coming out would blow right back at the tractor.
Plan B had me moving a short distance off the pavement so we could point in a direction where the wind wouldn’t be a problem. Things progressed swimmingly until I apparently tossed in a limb that too closely resembled the petrified oak branches that foiled our efforts last time out.
I instantly realized I had completely forgotten to shop for more robust shear bolts after the previous go-round when the hardware replacement broke as fast as I installed it. Details, details.
I think I’ll remember to buy new bolts this time, especially if I do it on the way home from work today. No time like the present.
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Relative Something 