Thanks ralanb. I am not looking to go into the mulching business. I am a developer and builder. The property/lots that we are clearing is property that we own. Until recently we were able to clear with 200hp and 300hp excavators with thumbs, pile and burn. Now the burning has been pretty much shut down and we're having to pay to haul off the brush. We build 30-50 houses per year, and some of the lots are just full of dune grasses, but the majority have quite a bit of really dense standing brush.
Nobody close to where we are building is offering mulching, or we would consider hiring it out. Since it will save us 2-3k per lot I am not too worried about a machine paying for itself fairly quickly. What I do want to be sure of is that a machine in the 90hp range with a mulcher will do what we need it to do. Tomorrow I am going to contact the nearest Cat rental place and see if they have a mulcher that can be rented with a machine, just to get a sense of if it will work. If it works, we may consider buying something like the HM315 mulcher and renting a machine when we need it. Since we're only talking about a few days per month of actual work I'm not sure having a depreciating machine setting the majority of the time makes too much sense. Though I think it's probably a good business, at this time I'm not interested in doing mulching for anyone other than ourselves.
Will the carbide type heads, like the HM315 sort of till grass. like dune grass, into the top of the soil? On dune lots in the past we have hired a guy with a tractor and a tiller, but he has since moved out of the area and nobody else is tilling in the area at this time. If a mulching head could turn up the top of the soil, that would be great. This is on the coast. The soil is all sand, no rocks whatsoever.