Today we set up my Christmas present to myself: the chipper shredder! What fun! The Amazon customer reviews warned that it ws hard to put together, and they weren't kidding. But we finally got it set up, with only 2 casualties: first, Georg got a small cut on his hand. We think probably not from the blade because the cut would have been worse, but from the spinny thing above the blade. He must have scraped his hand against it while we were trying to attach the legs to the motor. Second, my favorite pair of sunglasses got crushed beyond repair. My stupid fault for leaving them on the ground right in the work area. I confess I was pretty upset about it at the time, but later on we went to Target and I found a new pair that, I feel a little disloyal to my old sunglasses for saying this, because I loved them, but the new pair are more stylish and I'm looking forward to wearing them tomorrow.
Anyway we finally got the chipper shredder set up, and then set to work on a big pile of sticks and bamboo. Oh man that was fun. The shredder is fairly small, and electric, and it tended to jam up on leafy stuff like the tops of the bamboo. Clearing it is easy, but time-consuming: go inside and unplug it, come back out and unscrew the top part to reveal the blades, clear off the chopped up leaves and twigs, screw the assembly back together, go back inside and plug it in again. Kind of tedious. But it happened less and less often as we got a feel for the machine and how much it could handle. Later in the afternoon I saved a good sturdy stick, and after a bunch of leafy stuff went through I would put the stick up into the out-take (what is that called? the opening that the chips and shreds come out of) and make sure it was clear. That helped a lot. (I should add that the out-take had a sharp bend which prevented the stick from getting up near the blade, so this was a safe maneuver.)
Anyway, while it had some trouble with leafy material, it was great on sticks. It chopped sticks of up to about 1" diameter, and never backed up the way it did with leafy bamboo. It was much noisier on sticks, though perfectly tolerable with earplugs in. And best of all, the noise scared the dogs away so I didn't have to worry about them getting too close to the machine and getting hurt with a chunk of sawdust in the eye or something.
A couple of times we put a stick in that was too big, and it blew the surge protector in the house that we had plugged it into. The chipper shredder is supposed to have a circuit breaker inside it, but apparently the surge protector in the power strip is more sensitive. We thought about plugging it right into the wall outlet but we were afraid it would blow the circuit at the breaker box, and then we'd have to reset all our clocks. Next time maybe we could try plugging it in inside the shed. The shed has its own breaker box and used to be a woodshop, so the power looks pretty good.
We got through most of the brush pile, taking turns with one stripping off the side branches and the other shoving them into the chipper. We were at it for a couple of hours, and by the end of it we were both exhausted! I thought it would be easy, just picking up sticks and feeding them into the machine. Actually it was kind of hard work. Not as hard as digging out stumps, but not trivial either. We rewarded ourselves with a big barbecue dinner at the Q Shack -- best post-yardwork meal ever -- and then a stop at Target for my replacement sunglasses and a few other things.
Now I'm curled up on the couch and I think Georg is asleep already. What a great way to spend a freakishly warm December afternoon.
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