In article ,
Koz wrote:

Any ideas that don' involve the joys of blowing stuff up or pyromania?

Well, if you were not trying to be done by the end of the summer:

Method 1 - find a horse owner (city - try mounted police unit), get
enough horse food that has been processed through the horse to cover the
stump a foot or two deep, wait. Holes are optional.

Method 2 is perhaps more suitable for a citified stump - buy some 45-0-0
urea fertilizer, drill holes in the stump, pour in fertilizer, water it,
repeat, eventually mulch over it. In either case the nitrogen and
retained moisture helps promote decay of the wood. But it still takes
time.

You can buy "stump removing chemicals" applied much as method 2, but
they don't work any faster, and they cost more, IME. Anything nasty
enough to "work fast" is probably too nasty (and expensive) to actually
use.

A backhoe or excavator of suitable size is the fastest non-blowing-up
method to remove a stump, but if you can get one of those in there, you
can get in a grinder and just lower the thing without removing it all.

Perhaps you could try a jackhammer with a chisel-point on it? Some of
the tips used to cut a neat hole in an asphalt road look like they might
chisel wood pretty well.

--
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