Woodmax 8m pto chipper

[Wojo1034]

Hello thank for letting me join your site. 

I have a Kabota l3901 and am looking at buying a woodmax 8m chipper. We have 5 acres with several  eucalyptus  Trees that we are clearing. 

I was wondering what the experts thought of the Wood max and how it held up to hard wood. How after donthe knives need to be changed and can they be sharpened easily? Any other advice or opinions would be appreciated. 

Tom

[thecfarm]

Wojo1034,welcome to the forum.
How many HP at the PTO you got?
I myself prefer to burn my brush,but where you are you might not be able to do that as easy. When I am out in the woods,I cut my limbs into short pieces. Try for not much more than 2 feet. Does take longer,but so does feeding a chipper. ;D
I am clearing off a grown up pasture here. I haul the tree up the burn pile and limb there and push the brush up the bucket on the tractor. I found out quick,it's a bother to take more than 2 trees at a time. Hard to find all the limbs. I think one at a time is just as quick. Than I pick up any limbs and small bushes when I go back. I haul a tree out on the 3 pt winch and have the loader full of small stuff. Sometimes I lay a chain on the ground and pile the small wood on it and take a bundle,about 2 feet across,to the pile.
Than I weed wack this area for a couple years and once I saw the stumps off again,I start to mow it. Stays A LOT of time to keep it cleared. The grass will come back,but the bushes that will try to come back,must be kept cut off. Not once or twice every few months either.

[nybhh]

I have that exact chipper (in Kubota orange) and use it behind a Kubota L3800.  I've been pretty happy with it.
I was originally leaning towards a manual Wallenstein but eventually decided hydraulic feed was the way to go my budget just couldn't swing the Wallenstein hydraulic.    

Having hydraulic feed is great and I've never looked back from that decision.  We use it a lot during spring clean-up during our burn ban and when the wife needs mulch for her flower beds.  Sometimes burning is faster/better but sometimes not - it is really situational but on 5-acres, you really don't have a lot of area to stack stuff for a year or so to dry out well so I think the chipper is a wonderful tool to help manage properties that size and it isn't overwhelming like a much larger property.  

You can basically drop a tree, buck the logs for firewood, and disappear the top all in a couple of hours and have mulch for the flower beds or compost pile as the only bi-product (besides the stump).  They hydraulic feed with 8" throat allows you to feed in much larger sections of tree top without having to cut each branch to individual pieces which saves a lot of time as well.  I also feed it a lot of 2-4" pine saplings that can be 20 feet + in length and you can basically just send the whole tree through in one shot.

My tractor has about 35 hp at the PTO and I'd say I can handle up to about 5-6" in green pine and 3-4" in green hardwood.  Another benefit with the hydro-feed  is you can stop, pulse or really slow down the feed rate which allows you to send some bigger wood through the machine than you could with a manual feed unit.  The flywheel is big and has a lot of mass so I've found I can push pine about up to the 8" capacity if I feed it a foot or so at a time, pause it when the engine starts to bog down and let the flywheel spin back up to full speed, then feed it another foot or so, pause, repeat, etc. I wouldn't want to do it all the time but you can if you need it gone.

My chipper doesn't have an hour meter on it but I think the new ones do now so I am only estimating here.  Knife longevity varies a lot by how clean of material you are feeding it but I generally flip exchange/sharpen knives once per year and probably get about 30-50ish hours off of that?  I've been pleasantly surprised how long you get off of a set of knives but one stray rock or some dirty wood can lower that estimate substantially.  

As time as gone on, we are using the chipper less and less but that is just part of having less and less mess to cleanup.  It's a useful tool and I'm glad we have it but it's tough work and takes a toll on your back if you aren't careful with how you bend.

EDIT: Scratch that!  Everything I said was referring to the 8H.  For a $500 difference, I think the hydraulic feed is a no brainer.

[scgargoyle]

I have the 8H, on a tired Ford 3000 gasser. I use it a couple times a year on our 7 wooded acres. I find a burn pile to be a major hassle. I had a large burn pile of 1+ year old wood, and it still took all day to burn it. Then, you have to wait for just the right conditions so you don't set the rest of the woods on fire. I cut for a few hours, then chip it all in less than an hour. I can work in hot or cold, wet or dry, windy or calm. I'm chipping everything from fairly hard southern pine to oak to sweet gum to poplar. The tractor (not the chipper) can barely handle a 6" poplar, so I have to feather the feed as mentioned above to give the wheezy old Ford time to recover. I haven't used it enough to dull the blades yet, and I don't know anything about eucalyptus. For some reason, I thought it was abrasive? What amazes me is that I can chuck a whole tree in there it will pull it through. The skinny poplars I just chipped must have been 30' tall.

All in all, one of my best purchases for our property. I like being able to cut and chip all in one day so I don't have a burn pile (and a wife) nagging me. BTW- green wood chips a lot better than dry.

[Brad_S.]

 I also have the 8H and I'm very happy with it. I run it on a Kabota L4600 which has about 38 horse at the PTO. I use it mostly for chipping small slabs and edging's off the sawmill. It produces a small uniform chip that is great to use as mulch. I agree with the previous comments, for the relatively small amount of money  it is worth upgrading from a manual to a hydraulic.