Chipper for 50 acre wooded swamp

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What chipper would you choose

  • Woodmaxx DC-1260

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Ducar 4" Gas Chipper

    Votes: 1 100.0%

  • DR 11.5 FPT

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Total voters
    1
Michael Weichert

Michael Weichert

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Mar 31, 2019
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Location
Walkerton, ON
Hi there,

First all, thanks for reading. I truly value your time and opinion.

I have a 50 acre woodlot part of the Greenock swamp complex in Ontario, Canada. The forest floor is covered in rotting logs, branches, and debris. It hasn't been cared for at all, with one tree falling on top of the other tree.

I'm thinning the forest and do selective harvesting for firewood. I end up with a lot of brush that I would like to run through a wood chipper. The chips make it easier to get around with the side-by-side. I'd be chipping white ash, tamarack, cedar, and white pine.

Because of the swampy conditions, I'm afraid to take my Kioti DK45 tractor into the bush. So instead of a PTO chipper, I'm looking for a towable gas powered chipper. My budget is around $1500-2000 USD.

I've narrowed it down to the following:

Woodmaxx DC-1260: http://www.woodmaxx.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=DC-1260
Ducar 4" Gas Chipper (made in China) https://www.farmerequipmentsales.com/4-ducar-gas-engine-powered-wood-chipper.html
DR 11.5 FPT: https://www.drpower.com/shop.axd/ProductDetails?edp_no=60418

If anyone could provide their opinion on what unit would work best I'd very much appreciate it.

Thanks,
Mike
 
None of those chippers is going to do what you want. IMO anything under 25hp without in-feed control is not suitable for serious use as a chipper. I have a 2 acre yard and a well sorted 10hp troybilt chipper from back when troybilt made decent stuff. It is painfully slow, easy to stall, and hard to feed. Mostly it just sits in my shed. Every once and a while I forget how disappointing it is to use and I get it out only to put it back in short order.

The 4” claims are way overblown. 4” is the maximum opening size so maybe if you are chipping 2x4s... Anything not perfectly straight is not going in. Automatic feed means automatically pulling branches out of your hands so you have to hold back the branches from getting sucked in and stalling the chipper. If you look at the picture of the DR the way the guy is feeding it is about the max rate that it will handle. Anything bigger would need fed slowly or else it will stall.

I chipped the branches from a medium sized soft maple in my yard. It was about 30’ tall. After 8 hrs, two belts, and half the brush chipped I gave up. Either burning brush or hauling it to the dump is infinitely faster.

So obviously I vote for none of those. My suggestion would be as follows in order of personal preference.

1. Get over your fear of taking your tractor into the bush. A couple people on the site have the woodmax PTO chippers and they seem like decent machines after checking them over and making a few adjustments.

2.Just burn it. You say it’s swampy. Make a couple small piles and light a match. A small fire will be about 100x faster than any of the chippers you are looking at.

3. Rent a small chipper. Your budget could probably get you a month of chipper rental.
 
Just got the troybilt out. It started on the second pull with the fuel from last year. It does have a shut off and I run it dry before I store it. I spent an hour chipping up the branches that fell over the winter around one good sized silver maple. Nothing was over thumb size. It probably would’ve taken 20 minutes to drag it to the burn pile. The only reason I did it was for a little mulch around the base. It was probably a wash time wise vs going out and buying a couple bags of mulch. This is the kind of activity these machines are made for.

On a side note my 10 rear old son sad “dad, isn’t putting that mulch around the tree kind of like sleeping in your nail clippings?”
 
Right now at Bryans Auction the brand new PTO chippers are listed at $825.00 with sale closing tomorrow.

You cannot buy a cheap gas chipper for that.
 

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