On 11/08/2019 11:19, Michael Chare wrote:

Anyone got any experience of electric garden shredders that can cut wood
up to 40mm diameter.Â* Are these devices much good?Â* There are a number
of makes any recommendations?

IME the first question to answer is what kind of stuff you need to
shred... many garden shredders are aimed mulching down clippings and
small branches, and are a slightly different style of machine from a
chipper which is aimed mostly at reducing the volume of tree waste.

Initially I had one of the old Bosch "quiet" helix style ones. Which was
ok on woody / dry stuff, but clogged easily on leafy green stuff. The
cog based ones are somewhat better I am told. The "noisy" ones are
usually better on leafy green stuff, but slower on branches. Beware some
expect the branches to be fed into a different chute, where they are
then chipped away somewhat more slowly. That also tends to mean they
need to be straight ish, and free of side branches - so lots of prep work.

For my current requirements (lots of tree pruning and little else), I
found the lekky ones fairly poor in general, and too much like hard work
all round. So I went for a semi-pro 9hp chipper with a 270cc motor
spinning a large drum with a couple of substantial resharpenable blades
on it. That claims to do 80mm branches. In reality it can actually do a
bit more if you let it take bits at the branch - i.e. let it shred a
bit, then pull the branch back before the drum looses too much momentum,
give it a mo to spin up again, and repeat.


--
Cheers,

John.

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