Close look at a wood chipper

klugesmith, Sat Aug 27 2016, 06:51AM

Last week we heard a scary noise in the middle of the night. Next morning we saw that pine tree next door had lost its main trunk.


Nobody was hurt, and secondary damage was just a crushed mailbox.


It took a crew several days to clean it up and remove the rest of the tree.


Those rounds on the driveway were sawed into blocks & run through the big white chipper, which also directly ate 12-inch-diameter branches.

For that, the operator ran the hydraulic feeder in bursts of 2 or 3 inches, letting flywheel inertia do the work, then waited for engine to get back up to speed. Note rectangular tanks for hydraulic fluid and engine fuel.

Who knows why blue ink fades more slowly than red and yellow?

I was surprised to see a turbocharger on the four-cylinder engine.

I released those draw hasps, hoping to get a better picture of the engine, but something else was holding the service door shut.