How do I remove the flail blades? I
Joshua Bertram wrote:Okay, so I dug a little deeper into the machine today. I pretty much knew the main blade needed to be sharpened. For one, it was hard to push a 1" freshly cut branch through it. The other thing that had me a little worried was that the chipper seemed more like a shredder. I'm sure nesting birds would really appreciate the pasta like long fibers of wood, but from what I've seen, actual chips seem to be what comes out of other machines.
So I figured I'd sharpen the main blade today, and then it would be fine. No. The main blade is a wreck. It's been rounded to the point where I'm just going to toss it in the garbage. I took some pictures of it on a flat surface, and the middle has about an 1/8" depression in it, and is very badly rounded. The 8hp engine has probably been worked a lot harder than it should have been for quite a while. I found a blade on Amazon that I hope will fit it. It's another $40 bucks into the nickel and dime game, but hopefully the blade works and that's the last purchase I'll have to make for a while. Here's the blade I just ordered. It's supposed to get here before the end of the month. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00V7NRZ48/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 The dimensions seem to be exactly the same as my existing blade.
Then I figured I'd inspect the flails. In all honesty I didn't know what a flail was until today. Yeah, those were all rounded off too, but thankfully the other three cutting edges were still good on them.
Oh my gosh, what a pain in the ass to flip them around. I had to contort my arms in all kinds of strange ways to get the bits back together right. I took pictures of each of the "axles" or whatever as I went. I could see getting really confused about how they would go back together if one didn't do that.
