Page 21 - OPE March 2020

chipper from Finland brought in by a Wellington agency.
“Every now and again we’ll do two or three days work with it,” says Roy. “We did a day and a half on the neighbour’s land just recently and two days over at a large winery.
“The Finnish equipment is top-notch and you can go anywhere with this in the bush without requiring a trailer. Whereas most chippers are the trailer-type, for this one I’ve got a hydraulic winch that connects with the three-point linkage on the tractor.
“Wesititonaslidingbaseonasetof tractor forks and use the hydraulics that usually operate the forks to operate the winch. This has proven ideal when doing a lot of stream clearing. On the forks, you can lift the chipper in the air and up over the bank of the stream.”
Roy Leney says the Farmi originally had a pump on it that drove the rollers, “but that played up quite often ... So we put a pump on a spline that drove the big flywheel that did all the cutting. Then we put a ramp on it to push the rollers down.”
What about maintenance? “There are three large blades on it, which we take off individually to sharpen. They’re much
bigger blades than you’ll find on most chippers and the wheel would be at least a metre in diameter.
“And the weight you’ve got in this compared with other chippers makes it
so much easier cutting because you’ve got both momentum and weight on your side. It’s like the difference between wielding a two-pound and a five-pound axe. It’ll go through branches a hell of a lot bigger, and does so more quickly.”
spindly stuff that was wrapping around the rollers because it didn’t have the strength to push straight ahead. But you just reverse the rollers a few times and put something bigger through so it grips it and pulls it off.”
Staying with the bigger-is-better outlook, regular chipper units have a motor which drives the chipper, and the motors are usually not that big, suggests Roy.
“We’ve either got it on an 85hp tractor
worker will start to trim it out, and I will then start picking up the branches with the forks and start the chipper going.
“We did a job recently where the branches were virtually 10m long but not that thick, only about 15cm in diameter at one end. I can pick them up and feed the whole thing through without having to cut the branches into short lengths. I can also drive up with a massive branch and feed it into the chipper off the tractor, directing the end of the branch into the mouth of the chipper and away it goes.
“Sometimes you get odd branches sticking out or a twist in the branch, but generally a huge branch is fed through and is gone in a minute. This was certainly the advantage when we tried it out originally with a tall piece of tea tree.”
Roy Leney also operates two log splitters, one with two splitting heads and two massive rams (hence its ability to split trunks that are nearly a metre in diameter) which operates in a vertical movement as opposed to many that operate sideways.
Having pushed the timber off the back, an elevator takes it up and drops it into
a special trailer or a truck, thus totally removing the need for manual handling. n
Chief maintenance considerations? “Make sure you’re keeping your bearings greased on either side of the rollers and on the main shaft! I don’t recall changing the bearings on that shaft in the past few years. And I find chippers basically keep themselves clean.
“When you’re doing smallish, stringy stuff, what can happen is vegetation
like honeysuckle will wind around the roller. At a recent winery job, we tackled a macrocarpa hedge with a lot of long,
or a 100hp tractor, whereas most chippers are probably a fraction of that. Also, many chippers have only got one roller to feed in. Ours has got two so it grabs branches much more easily. If you’ve only got one roller and a flat deck on the bottom side, the ability to grip is quite inferior.”
Roy and his team are “pretty geared up” with their tractors, which adds functionality to many jobs. “When we go to a job we take two tractors, and one’s got a set of forks with a thumb on it. We’ll drop a tree, my
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MARCH 2020 NZ OUTDOOR POWER EQUIPMENT 021
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