jdonovan
Gold Member
Just got a chance to use it this weekend, so I thought I'd post a review:
Pico version- It rocks, buy one.
Long version:
I recently acquired 20ish acres in Virginia, and the access to the property is just passable, but very over grown. Mostly the 3-6" Virginia pine, a few poplar. The main part of the property is fully woods, and I figured I'd need something to deal with all the brush from clearing for house, drain-filed, road etc...
I have a small 3" (self feeding) chipper, but in reality it is manual feed. I didn't want to step up to a big chipper and have to be wrestling large limbs and hand feeding. My local dealer suggested the woods 8100. He said it was made by bearcat, and was identical to the CH9540H, but he had a better discount with woods, so he could sell it to me almost $1000 cheaper.
This weekend I started out with the M59, and grapple and started to push over some of the pines. I figured once I got them over I'd cut the root ball off with the saw, and start feeding.
Well it didn't work well... the pushing over went great, but then I had a twisted, tangled mess that was a real bear to untangle. We finally got enough cut/dragged out of the pile that it was time to chip.
Fired up the M59, threw the PTO lever and the whole tractor shook for a moment and stalled. I did hear the chipper spinning very slowly in the now sudden quiet so I figured I just broke some rust loose and tried again. Restart the tractor, throw the pto, dies. again. Restart, increased RPMS to about 1200, threw the pto, and dead again. But this time it sputtered a bit and there was a lot more spinning out of the chipper. Ok, restart 1800 RPMS, throw the PTO and the tractor was straining, but not stalling yet..... then the RPMs came back up and we were running. Ran the throttle up to the 540 mark and headed back to start feeding.
Put the feed control into reverse and it was turning. Neutral it stopped. Forward.... nothing. Messed with things for 10-15 min, and then discovered than even though the tractor was at 540, it wasn't fast enough for the chipper. When I went up to 550 it started spinning its feed.
This unit has an electronic chipping disk sensor. If the disk is too slow it will stop the feed until the machine has caught up so you don't stall the tractor. Looks like this needs a bit of adjusting.
So time to feed. I adjusted the feed rollers to what looked to be a reasonable feed rate, grabbed a 2" pine and put it into the feed rollers. The pine slowly entered the chipper, the tractor hardly grunted, and there was a nice pile of chips building up 35 feet away from the tractor.... whole tree gone in 5 seconds. Neat! :thumbsup:
So we kept feeding, and feeding, and feeding, got up to a nice 6" that took two of us to put into the chute and this taxed the machine a bit. The speed sensor detected the slowing of the disk, and paused the feed 3-4 times as this limb was fed in.
In 10 minutes a huge pile of brush had been reduced to 1/2x3/4" chips.
I'm thrilled would be an understatement.
So some operating notes...
Power: The chipper is rated for 30-60hp tractor, I'm using an M59, 59hp, 45 at the PTO and unless I run up to about 1800-2000 RPM before engaging the PTO it will kill the tractor. I really wonder if a 30 HP tractor could even spin this chipper up? Once its running I feel I have plenty of power. Pine is easy to chip we'll see what changes when I get down to the poplar and oak.
Loud loud loud. Even with hearing protection on it seems loud. Very hard to communicate with the people who were working with me. Needed to step 30' away from the machine to speak. We used lots of hand signs... fortunately no one was told they were #1.:laughing:
Making friends: It was judged objectionably loud by the neighbor. She came by and asked us to shut down as it was causing her problems with the horses they were trying to work in the ring that was 2000' away. We had just a few limbs left so we waited until they were between lessons, and quickly finished up.
It was a good chance to meet the new neighbor, and both agreed that I should be able to work on clearing my driveway, but she should be able to exercise her horses. We agreed to coordinate future chipping work so as to not cause problems with each other.
Danger: You can set the in feed speed fairly high... IMO high enough that it is borderline scary-fast. We would rather take a bit more time watching it feed, than risk getting sucked in by a fast moving branch.
Bring help. 2 people could not keep this thing fed. It was able to out work us easily. I'd think 1-2 sawyers, and 3 brush draggers is what it would take to keep the machine chipping full time.
This machine wasn't cheap... but for my uses, and the expected future needs I think it was the right choice for what my needs are. I looked at the Wallenstein but it required tractor hydraulics to run the feed system. The option to add rear remotes on the M59 is $2250 in parts + install costs. There is a power pack option for the bx62r but it is almost $2000 also. The Wallenstein bx92r is about the same capacity and price as the unit I got but I had no local dealer for Wallenstein, whereas the woods I've got 4-5 dealers within 20 miles.
Keywords to help for people searching this thread
woods 8000 woods 8100 bearcat CH9540H
Pico version- It rocks, buy one.
Long version:
I recently acquired 20ish acres in Virginia, and the access to the property is just passable, but very over grown. Mostly the 3-6" Virginia pine, a few poplar. The main part of the property is fully woods, and I figured I'd need something to deal with all the brush from clearing for house, drain-filed, road etc...
I have a small 3" (self feeding) chipper, but in reality it is manual feed. I didn't want to step up to a big chipper and have to be wrestling large limbs and hand feeding. My local dealer suggested the woods 8100. He said it was made by bearcat, and was identical to the CH9540H, but he had a better discount with woods, so he could sell it to me almost $1000 cheaper.
This weekend I started out with the M59, and grapple and started to push over some of the pines. I figured once I got them over I'd cut the root ball off with the saw, and start feeding.
Well it didn't work well... the pushing over went great, but then I had a twisted, tangled mess that was a real bear to untangle. We finally got enough cut/dragged out of the pile that it was time to chip.
Fired up the M59, threw the PTO lever and the whole tractor shook for a moment and stalled. I did hear the chipper spinning very slowly in the now sudden quiet so I figured I just broke some rust loose and tried again. Restart the tractor, throw the pto, dies. again. Restart, increased RPMS to about 1200, threw the pto, and dead again. But this time it sputtered a bit and there was a lot more spinning out of the chipper. Ok, restart 1800 RPMS, throw the PTO and the tractor was straining, but not stalling yet..... then the RPMs came back up and we were running. Ran the throttle up to the 540 mark and headed back to start feeding.
Put the feed control into reverse and it was turning. Neutral it stopped. Forward.... nothing. Messed with things for 10-15 min, and then discovered than even though the tractor was at 540, it wasn't fast enough for the chipper. When I went up to 550 it started spinning its feed.
This unit has an electronic chipping disk sensor. If the disk is too slow it will stop the feed until the machine has caught up so you don't stall the tractor. Looks like this needs a bit of adjusting.
So time to feed. I adjusted the feed rollers to what looked to be a reasonable feed rate, grabbed a 2" pine and put it into the feed rollers. The pine slowly entered the chipper, the tractor hardly grunted, and there was a nice pile of chips building up 35 feet away from the tractor.... whole tree gone in 5 seconds. Neat! :thumbsup:
So we kept feeding, and feeding, and feeding, got up to a nice 6" that took two of us to put into the chute and this taxed the machine a bit. The speed sensor detected the slowing of the disk, and paused the feed 3-4 times as this limb was fed in.
In 10 minutes a huge pile of brush had been reduced to 1/2x3/4" chips.
I'm thrilled would be an understatement.
So some operating notes...
Power: The chipper is rated for 30-60hp tractor, I'm using an M59, 59hp, 45 at the PTO and unless I run up to about 1800-2000 RPM before engaging the PTO it will kill the tractor. I really wonder if a 30 HP tractor could even spin this chipper up? Once its running I feel I have plenty of power. Pine is easy to chip we'll see what changes when I get down to the poplar and oak.
Loud loud loud. Even with hearing protection on it seems loud. Very hard to communicate with the people who were working with me. Needed to step 30' away from the machine to speak. We used lots of hand signs... fortunately no one was told they were #1.:laughing:
Making friends: It was judged objectionably loud by the neighbor. She came by and asked us to shut down as it was causing her problems with the horses they were trying to work in the ring that was 2000' away. We had just a few limbs left so we waited until they were between lessons, and quickly finished up.
It was a good chance to meet the new neighbor, and both agreed that I should be able to work on clearing my driveway, but she should be able to exercise her horses. We agreed to coordinate future chipping work so as to not cause problems with each other.
Danger: You can set the in feed speed fairly high... IMO high enough that it is borderline scary-fast. We would rather take a bit more time watching it feed, than risk getting sucked in by a fast moving branch.
Bring help. 2 people could not keep this thing fed. It was able to out work us easily. I'd think 1-2 sawyers, and 3 brush draggers is what it would take to keep the machine chipping full time.
This machine wasn't cheap... but for my uses, and the expected future needs I think it was the right choice for what my needs are. I looked at the Wallenstein but it required tractor hydraulics to run the feed system. The option to add rear remotes on the M59 is $2250 in parts + install costs. There is a power pack option for the bx62r but it is almost $2000 also. The Wallenstein bx92r is about the same capacity and price as the unit I got but I had no local dealer for Wallenstein, whereas the woods I've got 4-5 dealers within 20 miles.
Keywords to help for people searching this thread
woods 8000 woods 8100 bearcat CH9540H
Glad shes not mine:thumbsup: