Wood Chipper Improvements

[RoamingGnome]

On the theme of "Puttering..." I've been working on some improvements to my cheap Chinese Wood Chipper (Princess Auto / Powerfist brand)

and thought I would share the progress now that the project is pretty much complete. A Stihl weedwhacker and the WoodChipper were the first major purchases we made once the ink was dry on our purchase of the property up north...

Of course it became a never ending circle of one improvement leading to another...

a couple of weeks after taking the chipper to the property I realized it needed some sort of secure, covered storage, and that led to building the chipper shed...

Finally I could do some clean up work and start tidying up old piles of slash and branches left from the previous owner removing some of the trees before he sold the property.

It's spent a couple of winters up north bundled up in a tarp and secured in the shed. This spring I decided to bring it home to the city for some upgrades and improvements.

Once it was home I started off with an oil change...

What a stupid place to put a drain plug, short of making a duct tape channel to direct the draining oil It's impossible not to make a mess
Of course it got better It's a Chinese engine so of course they wouldn't use an NPT plug or something simple to fangle an extension or elbow with a drain valve... the fitting was a straight thread metric M10x1.25 plug - and almost flush with the bottom of the engine mounting surface.

Off to Amazon I went, and overnight delivery of a Fumoto M10 x 1.25 drain valve. These work really slick, and it's nice to be able to attach a hose and drain your oil with no fuss or muss...

but wait, the fun isn't over yet... the body of the valve goes lower than the base of the engine...
some gentle grinding of the mounting plate below the engine and I can find enough wiggle room for the valve, the plastic safety clip and room for the hose when it's time for the next oil change.

It was handy having a selection of copper washers to be able to "clock" the valve and drain lever in the best spot...

[RoamingGnome]

Puttering - Part 2 - Get some bigger tires and stop trying to push it everywhere...

As a woodchipper out of the crate it was ok, and would be ok if it lived in a corner of your garage and only came out to roll across your manicured lawn to grind up the occasional bunch of branches... In real life use in the forest it didn't roll very easily and required a bit of to get it moving - especially up any sort of grade - just ask about the 45 minutes we spent pushing / dragging it up the killer hill to the clearing where we are going to build our house...

(It came up the hill, and then because I didn't want to repeat the exercise we moved the chipper shed up the hill the following weekend )

So... Bigger tires, wider track and make it towable by our growing collection of Case Garden Tractors.

Amazon to the rescue again with some generic lawn tractor tire assemblies ($ 100 Cdn for the pair - overnight delivery)

The original tires were 4.10/3.50-4 and the new replacements are 15x6.00-6

And a new axle was made from 1.5" square tube (This photo is just from mocking up track width - originally it was 20" now it's been stretched out to 36"
Once the new axle and wheels were mounted I started on the trailer tongue.

Welded up some receiver tube and re-used the original front support with a small extension, and also made it possible to move it up and out of the way when towing the chipper.

Finished everything on the weekend and couldn't wait to snap some photos of it this evening...

I wasn't sure about tongue length and left it at 3' (I didn't want to get poked in the back by the outlet chute when bouncing through the woods )

Looking at it tonight, I'm tempted to shorten it up - I think bringing it a foot closer would still work ok...

And a test run of tractor + chipper + trailer in the backyard - can't wait to get it all back up to the property and make some woodchips fly

...and that's the of my "Puttering around" with the woodchipper...

[JSinMO]

@RoamingGnome Great write up, thanks for talking the time to put it together!

You made some really nice upgrades. Even though it’s made of Chineseium hopefully you’ll get a good service life out of it.
I think you might try the 3 foot tongue. That length might be about right in rough terrain.

[DavidBarkey]

Great improvements Gerry . One word of caution . Always turn the gas valve off when transporting around the yard and anytime the engine is not running . Those are Honda knock off engines , and like all Gravity feed fuel systems especially the Honda style carbs the bouncing will drive the float up and down over filling the carb and draining into the engine . The shut off valves in them fail after a few years and leak, at that point just replace the carb don't try to rebuild it . I have replace a number of these engines on equipment for people because the crankcase was full of gas and seized it up . But if you stay ahead of that they seem to hold up ok .

[RoamingGnome]

Thanks for the feedback @JSinMO and @DavidBarkey

- Good reminder Dave - it actually mentions that in the engine and chipper manuals, but really doesn't go into the details of what can happen when things go wrong. I have been making a habit of turning fuel off and letting the engine run until the carb is dry and it finally stops.

- Jeff, I'll probably go with it at the 3' length for now, its not that much trouble to cut it shorter and drill new holes for hitch pin. The idea of making it removable is so it can be used on different trailers / implements as I build / modify them (and save money by buying less 2" tube and fewer hitch couplers) When I moved the Case trailer around in the yard last night I was reminded of the limitations of the simple pin and tab hitch on little garden trailers (our yard really is that bumpy lumpy and uneven that it was bound up when I tried to pull the pin ) I think everything is eventually going to be "upgraded" to a 2" hitch ball.

[Harry]

Yes Gerry the chipper shredder looks terrific especially with the larger tires. I have a Brave hydraulic drive chipper shredder that I used twice with the 646. Fabricated a bracket to attach to sleeve hitch to move it around. It’s been awhile since I’ve used to. Also thanks for the story and the pics. Harry

[RoamingGnome]

@Harry - Thanks!
It is actually sort of a "real" chipper - No flywheel here - it uses a great big heavy "S" cam with 2 blades and works great with material from 1/2" up to about 3.5" It was advertised as a 4" chipper but I think that is more of a theoretical size - It makes funny noises when you feed it 4" branches. If you feed anything smaller than 1/2" it tends to spit out the other end in an unchipped 4" long chunk... don't even think of dropping a handful of leaves in the chute


I've been tossing around the idea of making a dedicated leaf shredder using a mower deck on one of the Case tractors. Park the tractor and bring the leaves to it - no grass to use a hydrovac (if I could ever be lucky enough to find one for sale) Fabricate a feed chute dumping into the top of the deck right at the blades - and let it spit out the discharge chute in the direction of the compost pile.

Anyone ever seen anything like this? Thoughts? Ideas?

In the City I use the bag on my cordless mower and shred leaves that way - it works really good for what it is - But I'd need something bigger for up at the 'Roost and something that burns good old gasoline - I'm not going to fire up the generator so I can charge my cordless lawnmower battery

[Toolslinger]

Running through a deck would be nice, but just running through a blower does a pretty goot job on my leaves. My franken-vac is a 1971 EZ-Rake blower from my father's JD 140 setup, grafted on a big Trac-Vac trailer that lost it's motor and blower, pulled by the 444. I just blow all the leaves in piles, then suck them in through a long 6" feed hose. Between passing through the blower, and getting packed in the trailer, they get reduced probably 25-30%. The compost pile takes care of the rest. If the leaves are wet and have been sitting a while, it's even better reduction, but the pickup sucks more.

I toyed with the idea of running a blower's output in to the feed hopper of my MacKissic shredder, and then a second blower on the output of the shredder in to a trailer. That would do a whole lot of reduction, but it would be a monsterous contraption to work with. With the amount of space I have, there's just no need to get in to that when I can have any size pile of leaves rotting down in a field, and not even be able to see it from my side of the street...

[Eugen]

Great write up Gerry!