Status update...
I've basically put everything back together, my OPE guy has been having trouble getting the parts, so I told him I'd go on-line, and have ordered a new belt and clutch - should be in Monday next week.
In the meantime, I'm running the old tired belt and clutch.
Chipping through the small branch chute is slow and shaky, but it does a little, however it also seems to get stuck if you lean on it even a little bit hard - the drum stops spinning, the clutch slips and starts smoking, so you have to stop the engine and clear it out, general hassle.
The big chute will take small branches and chunks of wood mixed in with my half rotted leaves, but a lot of them tend to get blown through with minimal chomping.
The material I'm most anxious to chop up right now are the leaves from my compost pile that I started last fall - essentially I had a bunch of lawn guys dump their loads into a big pile, and left it sit over the winter, no special effort to turn or do anything to make it "cook" faster. The resulting pile is very mixed in it's composition; some parts are fairly well composted, though there are a lot of leaf fragments still there, other areas are largely dry and seemingly little changed beyond clumping togther.
The unit has a door on the end opposite the chute, that can be set to three different positions - according to the manual, wet leaves should take the middle position. With this kind of mixed quality of leaves, I'm getting a very mixed output, some of the dryer leaves tend to just blow through with little damage, other leaves get chopped up pretty small, but the size varies a lot. I get a certain amount of really fine dirt that comes out through the grates under the machine, but only until that space fills up.
It is a very slow process, as the leaves don't seem to want to flow through the hopper, essentially I have to punch each scoop down into the shredder, using a stick of some sort (which gets slowly consumed as I do find the teeth every once in a while - If I poke too much in at a time, it clogs and either stalls the engine or slips the clutch - either requires openning up the back end of the machine and cleaning it out. I had left the belt guard off knowing that I would need to remove it to change the clutch, but I'm finding it very good that I have as it makes it easier to turn the drum by hand while cleaning it out. However I've now chopped up enough leaves to fill my raised garden beds about 1/2 way (36" wide beds, ~6" deep, a little over 100' total length) Now I have to filter / grind the couple yards of finished compost that my friend gave me - nice stuff, but lots of debris in it - and fill the beds the rest of the way. Should be really good for the garden.
The engine (fortunately) seems to start pretty well, which is a good thing as I'm needing to start it often
It does seem a bit on the tired side though, as it doesn't seem to have much "oomph" when I dump a big load of leaves in it - I'm not sure just how much the new clutch will help, other than making the engine stall more instead of having the clutch slip. Once I cleaned the carb out and gotten it running the only trouble it gave me is the recoil clutch got stuck, which melted center out of the recoil rope pulley - $30 from the local OPE guy for a new clutch and pulley...
I'm not thrilled with the purchase, but it is doing at least some of what I wanted it to do.
Gooserider
