Beast Chipper

So many people asked me to build a wood chipper in addition t o my plastic shredders.  

After a ton of research, which involved watching every video on the things I could find, along with buying blueprints for different designs, I came up with this:

I rolled a piece of 4 inch wide 1/4 inch thick flat bar to 18.5 inch inside diameter.  

Then I fabbed the side plates from 1/8 inch diamond plate steel.

built the frame from 2x3 steel C channel beams,  6 inch wheels and powered by a 7hp liquid cooled diesel.

The secret sauce is a 18 inch Deere mower blade.  

So basically most wood chippers are not much more than a lawn mower turned sideways, or the bigger units have a sort of mandolin veggie chopper blade and some lawn mower blades turning and then the whole mess is tossed out of the machine with a centrifugal blower.

This unit only has the blade as it blows the air just fine, but bigger units really need the blower.  

I have run it for an hour, chipping various things up to 3 inch branches.  It only bogs down on really wet green stuff.  

Diesel engine starts like a model T with a crank, and has a decompression lever to spin up the motor by hand before pulling the crank and letting it fire up.  I also put urethane motor mounts on the motor so it does not vibrate itself to death.  I wish I knew about these mounts years ago.  

Clever, but maybe some light in the photo room so we can see past the 'dark zone' !
well done anyway.