sawmill waste woodchipper

[aussie380]

wanting to hear experiences with wood chippers chipping sawmill waste, preferably electrically driven chippers . Are they worth the trouble? Do you have trouble feeding them? worth sharpening your own knives/ is it hard to do?

[Kbeitz]

I have a friend that works at a wood prepossessing factory.
He said they use a electrically driven chipper that will eat
any hard wood chunks that you can put into it. He said they
dump dumpster loads of hard wood into it all at once. Big
12x12" chunks.

[Ron Wenrich]

How much do you plan to chip?  I've been around the electric driven chippers, and as long as you have a market for material, you'll do okay.  Markets revolve around species, barked or unbarked, and screening  the chips.

We run ours with a 75 hp electric.  It took very little tending unless you had something that was too wide, or poorly trimmed.  We also sent our knives out to be sharpened.  We had barked slabs and did about 3 loads a week.  Ours went for mulch, and there was no need to screen.  Unbarked slabs will mean a lot more sharpening.  Metal will kill your blades, and sometimes the counterknives.  The unit we ran was built in 1962 and was a 3 knife chipper.

You can also run a chipper with a diesel motor. 

[paul case]

Will the chippers that tree trimmers use make mulch?

PC

[Gundog]

Will the chippers that tree trimmers use make mulch?

PC

I have a small Vermeer BC625 chipper it does not make mulch but it does make nice wood chips I use around my place. The sharper the blades the better the chips. The chips start getting longer and more ragged as the blade dulls. I can run a 6" limb through it but slowly at that size. When I get my mill I will feed some of the scrap through it but i burn a lot of firewood so anything firewood worthy doesn't go through the chipper. I generally chip limbs under 4". This maybe of no help but I thought i would share.

Mike

[Gearbox]

Every dollar you get after expences is one more in the profit stream. My friends company put in a vertical band set up . First question I asked was Chipper . He said no . It took one month and they were putting in a chipper .

[longtime lurker]

Depends on scale.

Here at least there's no money in chip: by the time you pay the maintenance bill on the chipper line and the power bill to run it the income generated is still a loss.
But
given the labour involved in materials handling of sawmill waste without a chipper line it can be less of a loss then burning the stuff.

So it all depends on scale: if your waste ties up one man hour a day that's $30 in wages + 1 match and a chipper won't pay. We get $45 a ton for chip and $100 a ton for bulk firewood: I send my heavy edgings & pith cores to the docker guy and he's got a firewood bin and scrap chute to a trailer for the burn heap. By the time any firewood is removed what's left definitely makes a chipper uneconomical. If I doubled my output he'd be that busy on the docker handling boards that I'd need to do it differently but as things stand he's got enough time to manage it.

[aussie380]

the chipper we were look at is a 48'', has 6 knives and is directly coupled to an approx. 150hp electric motor. it also comes with a screen and is supposed to make export quality chip. we make about 10 ton of waste per day and the mill runs solely on a generator that still has plenty of room to run this chipper line. Most of our logs are barked. hey longtime lurker is that $45 delivered or pick up, we have been offered $8 to $18 pick up and $37 to $55 delivered. still trying to find out about export chip seeing it is supposed to be worth a fair bit.

[longtime lurker]

$45 ex mill for clean chip/ sawdust : There's a co-gen plant up the road and they like my stuff because it raises their calorific so they'll take the sawdust happily.

If Steggles or Ingham etc have a farm near you they're worth investigating. They don't take chip but they'll pay real well for shavings or real coarse sawdust if you can meet their specs regarding screening and species.

I dunno much about export chip beyond the fact that hardwood chip demand is strong and likely to remain good while the AUD is where it is. Its a tonnage game but if you're close enough to an export port it'd be worth looking at for sure.