Monthly Archives: February 2018

back to work

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For my B-day Mardi and I went to Kauai for a nice 8 day rest and recharge, Got back to snow and a fallen 80′ tree that took out part of the back dog wire fence while we were away.  Good thing we invested in a  STIHL chain saw. Came in handy for Nick to clear the tree from the fence line so the dog wire could be secured to keep Ellie from escaping her area.

On Sunday  Feb. 25  ran the chipper for about 2 hours and almost completely cleared the debris from the Green House pile.  Just in time to start on all the fallen tree branches.  Ordered a new set of chipper blades from Power King. only like $23.00 each. Hopefully will ship so I can run some material this weekend.  The chipper ate a rock and is now is not cutting, basically smokes and nothing gets passed through.  So new blades are the only solution. We see about sharpening this blade.

Went to cut up the fallen tree. Took about  90 minutes with the chain saw to get the trunk and branches cut up so we can get into the area, Now we have room to move and can replace and tightening up that section of dog wire fence. The fence was put in Nov 15th so in less than 4 months needs to be fixed. Go figure.

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Mardi has become very concerned about other trees falling in a wind storm, probably with good reason.  This tree was standing all alone in the leach field, and not sure but it looks like it was trimmed to remove some  branches to keep it from becoming a wind sail. But the job was poorly done and left the branches as torn not cut which might have weakened the tree. This tree had zero roots to stabilize it from the wind direction. The one root was healthy but had termite damage around it.

Thinking of make a totem pole out of the tree. Get a tracked back hoe and drag it down to outside the studio. Make a Chinese new year of all the families animals. on it.  Who knows.

The PWN and this property is different than another we have had in less than 4 months have had 2 trees come down that I needed to  to deal with.  The first was a small birch about 40′ tall then this one, a 80′ pine tree.  Starting a collection of logs from these two.

All in all we have tons of down trees of all shapes and sizes. Some by nature the others by man to clear out the forest so the original owners could have sunlight on the back yard.  We just have a lot of property and forest and blackberries and things to do.

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Sunday Yardwork

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Ran  about 40 minutes on  the chipper and it started smoking and no longer chipping.

Something got into the material and dulled the blades and I think moved the drum away from the feed edge. where the blade on the drum  chomps down on the material. It seems the material runs under the drum and no longer being touched by the blade.

No more wet leaves into the chippers. I think a rock got into that material and now it it not working. I also noticed that chopped materials was loading up on the feed side.

Need to figure out how to flip the blade, And figure out how to align and measure the blade distance.  I like the machine but only an 1+ hour of run time and a dull blade. Need to figure out  a way to keep it running.

Bought a chain saw, Small Stihl  toro do limb and  down tree clean up. Worked great. Felled my first tree in the yard  about 8″ in diameter.  Some kind of birch? Was falling down at about 45 degrees.  Plus cleaned up a small down tree on the leach field, Move all the debris to the  north pile by the studio.

Will need to get the chipper running we are making more debris thank we  processed today.

First Run of the Chipper

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Yard waste is a big issue so having a way to remove it outside of burning the pile we purchased a chipper.

Got a   PowerKing 903,  mainly because of the feed rate and industrial weight power. 6 ft per minute compared to 50 ft per minute.

Observations

  • Need to keep feed material low do not pack the feed chute. Material rides up over the cutting drum and starts blocking new material
  • Gravity is not enough had to push material into the cutting drum with a branch.
  • Does not do well with wet leaves or matted material
  • the kill bar is annoying only about a 1/4 inch  of movement cuts off the engine.
  • pull starting it is awkward and requires a very strong pull.  Electric starter in its future

The output is very fine, which probably means the blade needs to be adjusted to do more material per cut. Will run it a few more days.

I was worried it would be loud and disturb the neighbors, but is a not loud and the cutting sound is not high pitched so we can run this all day long.

We probably have close to  100 square yards of debris to run through so it. If we can do a yard every 15 minutes which reduces it to about a 64 gallon. 0.4 yards.    4 yards  reduced to  .4 yards

Off to do some more chipping.