Chippers.. they're so cool!

In situ chipping and mulching. Sell it.

Or haul crap all over hell and tarnation to a huge tub grinder/mulch maker thats the size of of a naval cruiser the chugs gallons of fuel per minute to make mulch which then gets trucked all over hell and tarnation for folks to mulch trees and beds. Less travel, less fuel used.

I have quite literally thousands of trees to prune, remove, or maintain and mulch over many many acres. We're going to chip and mulch right there.
 
And have a planting division to help use up wood chips!

Company here is planting a tree (or donating to municipalities) for every single tree they cut down this year.
 
SomethingWitty said:
I am absolutely serious! I'd like to come work with almost everyone here. Just waiting on a unicorn that can do (even almost all of) my job. As soon as that is covered, I can take off a week here or there and go play.

Learning different approaches is everything. I hope to shift into training/consulting over the next 20 years or so. I'll have to do something besides production when I am old, and I don't want to be a salesman or an owner.
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Once you find that unicorn let me know, we can breed it to mine, and we can start a new business in unicorns
 
Levi.CO said:
The modern fascination with work machines is no different from "the plow brings rain." No, it does not.
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I loaded a lot of brush and logs by hand before I experienced a mini. It's not much faster on most things (it can be on the right day), but I'd be lying if I said I'd rather cut a 4' log into cookies or shovel stump grindings by hand than let him scoop stuff up for me.
I'd also rather run a gas powered saw than use one of those old crosscuts.
 
Levi.CO said:
So, you wear a respirator every time you get to chipping? Sounds fun. Who said anything about 10 trips to the recycle? I agree, that sounds bad...
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No. I rarely wear one. I am good at holding my breath and working quickly. I try to orient myself when climbing to not fight the wind, but sometimes its inevitably a facefull of saw chips and exhaust, but not a lungful.

Couple extra big breaths approaching the chipper (away from dust and exhaust), hold breath, feed, move out.
Stump cutting, a blower on idle can help. A respirator is easy, too.
Stump Grinding, a respirator is easy.

They are readily available to employees, right next to other PPE in the truck.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/3M-Medium-Professional-Multi-Purpose-Respirator-62023HA1-C/202080144


Chipping a mess of dead limbs, maybe.

Chipping London Planetree leaves with irritating trichomes, absolutely. Are Sycamores are similarly irritating?

It helps.

Something I like about my old Chuck and Duck is that it chips on low idle, or high idle, or any speed in between, and the throttle control is right next to the feed tray. Easy to throttle it up, and down, and up and down, saving gas, noise, and wear & tear.
People often expect a lot more noise.

Maybe attaching a garden hose with sprayer nozzle to the discharge chute could cut down on dust from dead tree chipping. If its dead and dry, extra weight wouldn't matter. If you're chipping into piles, which I commonly do, it would cut worksite dust.
They have water trucks for dry soil at construction sites, and those air excavation tools with a water spray.
Sounds sorta crack-pot, but last summer I had a subcontractor with a 60 HP grinder in dry, dry soil grinding 10 big stumps. I pre-watered the area as possible (surface gets wet, but not deep), and tried to make a water-curtain for dust. He was not using a respirator that day. He started, thereafter.
 
Levi.CO said:
Any wood that could be milled or turned to firewood is typically picked up onsite by the wood man. All the brush gets hand loaded into our brush truck, it doesn't even dump! A roll of dumpster is super handy for bigger jobs, though we don't do big ones like that anymore.
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This week we created about 9000 pounds of brush, from 11 small/ medium conifers. Nothing over 80'. If normal conditions, a two day job.

Way safer to chip, IMO.

It would have taken us so many trips to the dump, sometimes way across the county, getting caught in rush hour traffic and such.
 
Levi.CO said:
Somehow, someway I have managed to be part of a firm that wins competitive bids against chipper crews constantly for 4 years. Never had even close to a loss on bids from big removals to small pruning... must be a fluke!
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When you do occasional 'big' removals (you live in arid mountains), you probably have more opportunity to get all the ducks in a row for roll-offs or grapple trucks. When you do a lot of volume of brush creation, you lose out, I think. I'm a micro operation, and I still produce a lot of chips.

My grapple truck availability is "some time, a few weeks from now". I've told the company I will have a pile when they are available. They don't roll that way. No hard feelings.

You should never be having a loss on jobs. The question is really, "how much risk versus how much reward?" Would you be more profitable with a chipper?

How expensive is your dumping fee? You live in an area that is probably happy to have available organic matter, I'd guess, since it mountainous.
How long/ far do you travel to dump?

Low overhead and no maintenance helps keep you LABORing more hours of the day.

Do you find good employee retention with this set-up? In some places, people would love to unload a quiet trailer, with nothing more than eye-pro, with no machines, no exhaust, low risk.
Other places, skilled tree workers would get fed up with it and move on, leaving a skill-gap, forcing the employer to always be the skilled person onsite.
If the owner is always the only highly skilled person on the team, the owner always has to be on the jobs.

Personally, I'd love to have someone skilled and who can run a job safely and effectively, and I can be doing other things. I don't think I'd find a skilled person who I could trust who wants to do things this way.

I can get my mini and chipper way closer to the brush than a brush truck ever could. I have a trailer-chip box that holds 5 yards that can also go places, via the mini, that a brush truck never would.



Point being, soooo much is market- and company-dependent.

I can see that it works for you, with your current set-up, and don't think that it represent the industry overall.
 
Our city chips what they can, and salvages logs. ALL the wood chips are used as mulch around the city. Used within a couple mile radius.


I think that a lot of people could get by with a 7x12" (or 13", whichever) throat, 35 hp Brush Bandit, for a small chipper. That's from my perspective, though, because I don't deal with bendy hardwood much, and mulch and firewood are in demand, close by to the jobsites.


Levi, are you accounting for worker's comp? For every hour saved per employee, its probably about $7/ hour worker's comp, on average (mine's low at around $4.50, some people pay 41%). For a business owner, that easily makes payments on a more efficient way of dealing with low-skill work. People can get hurt chipping, but people can also way get hurt manually unloading a trailer or truck. Dump beds are safer, and faster, clearly. Have you had any WC claims?

Machines don't make poor judgments. Machines that get broken are easy to fix compared to people. They can basically be maintained to be like-new, if one were to want to put $100,000 into a chipper for maintenance over 30 year. $100,000 doesn't go very far for medical bills.
 
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The bottom line is that I can get rid of chips easy, nobody wants branches! If I can compress more material into a smaller space and drive fewer kilometers to get rid of bi product that's a win! Also You will land more jobs when a chipper is on your equipment list. I still prefer no cleanup jobs though... wham bam thank you mam! cheque please?
 
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