I bought a Mighty Mac shredder\/chipper about 25 years ago, have used it — heavily at times — all these years and, with a few engine repairs and turning the shredder blades around once (they are 2-sided), it’s worked flawlessly on our 1\/2-acre homestead. This is a “hammermill” chipper with free-swinging hammer blades for the top-feed hopper, as well as a chipper, a side feed where you put in larger branches (it will grind up a 2×4) at a 90-degree angle to the balanced flywheel blade that runs on the same axle as the shredder blades. If you get one of the bigger professional type units you don’t need a separate grinder, but for home-style operation, I wouldn’t fool with any of the lower-cost feed-it-in-the-top units. You don’t really need to shred stuff like oak leaves (they compost nicely as is), and the smaller shredders tend to choke on stuff such as 1-incg diameter branches. This unit has changeable screens so you can adjust from fine to coarse output.<\/p>\n
Be aware: these are dangerous tools. If you get careless and push down on brush in the hopper and get a sleeve caught in the blades, you’ll end up with a mangled (or no) hand. See the simple 2×4 pusher tool below for pushing stuck vegetation into the blades. I also use a Collins machete for chopping up branches for easy feeding and of course — Grandma speaking here — goggles (chips fly), earphones, and gloves.<\/p>\n
Mine (depicted above) has a 7HP Briggs and Stratton motor. The current models have a 10 HP. I wouldn’t bother with the electric starter; the rope pull works fine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Workhorse lumber breaker-upper<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2936"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2936"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8713,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2936\/revisions\/8713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}