Last week or maybe at the end of the week before, I was finishing up chipping the last of the branches I had cut from trees for now, or at least until fall or next spring. While chipping branches I thought the machine didn't quite sound right and when feeding branches into it some branches where kind of like nibbled on rather then being pulled into the chipper pretty fast.
I did read where your not suppose to put vines in it because they can get wrapped around the drum, at least that what they say. which seems kind of odd being any vine that got wrapped around the drum would get cut up as it got bigger or when other branches were feed into the chipper. Anyways I did put in a lot of vines, so I thinking maybe this is the problem?
After I was done chipping my last pile of branches and turning the machine off, I looked down the feed shute and everything looked fine. After putting the chipper back where I keep it I opened the feed shute and things looked fine, I then opened the output shute and then I seen the problem, a chunk of the blade was missing!
The first picture below shows the damage which was done from the blade breaking.
Starting with the top two arrows, it showing scuffs on the drum. The next two arrows down show one side of a bolt that holds the blade on kind of smashed and where the blade had broken. The arrow to the right shows another chip in the blade, and the bottom arrow shows a hunk of metal sticking up.
I originally thought I could bend that hunk of metal on the bottom back down, so I got an old screwdriver and a hammer to try and get it down flat out of the way. wrong! Turns out it just wasn't a hunk of metal sticking up, it was part of the anvil on the bottom where the blade came into contact with the anvil shown in the picture below.
What I ended up doing was tasking a hacksaw and cut that little piece of steel off. The big question is, how did the blade come into contact with the anvil in the first place? Did the blade move a little, did the whole drum move a little, did the anvil move a little, or being a hot day that day, the the heat cause the drum, blade or anvil to expand which caused the contact? After all the blade only sits 1/16" away from the anvil.
The company did send me new blades and a new anvil. I'll need to replace the blades, no question about that, the anvil I'll still use being it only a small part of the one corner that got damaged. You can be sure I'm going to check the drum, the new blades and the anvil to be sure nothing is lose before running the machine.
As for the 1/16" of an inch between the blade and the anvil, to me that seems pretty close, almost to close. 1/16" is only the thickness of a flat washer. The other thing that seems concerning is the bolts that hold the blades on. There are five bolts that hold the blades in place, the thing is they are to be torqued to only 10 foot pounds?
That doesn't seem like much torque to be holding fast spinning blades that chop up to 6" pieces of wood. Of course I'd probably never run anything that big through the chipper. About the biggest thing I feed into it is about 2" or less. Anything bigger then that I use for firewood in the firepit.
The new blades are to be arriving today, the anvil tomorrow. The plane is to install the new blades and new bolts using Loctite (blue), then check the distance between the new blades and the anvil, and make sure everything is tight which includes the blades, anvil, and drum. When installing the new blades I'll probably tighten the bolts a little tighter then the 10 foot pounds, maybe up to 12-15 foot pounds.
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