Feeling Chipper

“Oooh, those big silver maples...” said the burly man who appeared at the front door.  He pointed out what I have known for at least 3 years...the very mature trees were growing over the house, and it was well past time to get them trimmed.  The asking price seemed reasonable, so I said yes.

A little later, he returned with the crew.  It was immediately apparent that his business has no dental plan.  The boss went up into the trees and the others dragged the wood away.  The debris was going out back, but since the golf course has recently changed owners, Mary was concerned that we’d get off on the wrong foot if we deposited a massive quantity of brush in the 30 yard buffer zone between us and the third fairway, so almost all of it got dragged out front.  

It was late in the day, so they got a little bit done and then left, promising to return the next day.  When they had not showed by 9, I called the number on the card left behind, to hear what I expected.  “Not a good day to be in the trees with the rain and the wind.  We’ll be back on Monday.”

The fleet of beat-up vehicles parked in front of the house on the designated afternoon.  A new guy got his gear on and started ascending.  “What’s up?” I asked the boss.  “Decided you were too old to be up there after all?”

“No, I just had a little mishap this weekend.”  As he turned his gaze to the left, I could see the raw rope burn on his neck.  “I was helping a friend remove a stump, and when it let go...well, you can see.”

“Nasty.”

“Yeah.  I asked Glenn to help me out.  He owes me.”

I watched Glenn strut his stuff.  His safety line was secured through a notch high above, and he swung from trunk to trunk, fluidly bouncing from one to another.  Once in position, he swung his chainsaw from suspension on his belt to the angle of attack with a minimum of effort.  Small limbs fell swiftly.  The larger ones were first secured with the knotted end of a second rope suspended through the notch.  When they fell, the ground crew kept them above ground long enough that they could be laid down without damaging the house or gardens.

Who's that swinging through the trees?

In a serendipitous bit of timing, the streets of Rochester were cordoned off for filming a Spiderman movie, but the real deal was swinging through my trees.  It was a pleasure to watch him work.

The real deal

When the job was finished and the rest of the crew was gone, I paid the boss and asked him if he’d like a beer.

“I’d love to, but I can’t.  I’m allergic to alcohol.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, every time I drink alcohol, I break out in handcuffs.”

Fine work.  Thank God no one was hurt.

The following day, I looked up the date for the next brush pickup by the town.  Spidey should have been in my trees last week, about the same time Mary put the fertilizer down on the lawn.  Mulling the situation over,  it soon became apparent that by the time the town trucks made their monthly appearance, I’d be enjoying a large dead spot where the branches rested and a wheatfield where they kept me from mowing.  Additionally, some of the brush had been deposited on my neighbor’s lawn, and it just didn’t seem right to leave a pile there.  

A very small portion of the pile.

What I needed was a wood chipper.  It just so happened that one was sitting long unused in the shed behind my parent’s house.  That it still sits on that property in my mother’s possession over three years after she moved out is another long story you don’t want to hear...don’t ask.  

I drove over with a compressor full of air to inflate the flat tires and insert the chipper into my small SUV.  The chute for chopping had to come off so that it would fit in on it’s side, but I found the appropriate wrench in the house and removed it.  Then I laid it against the tarp in the car and tried to hoist the beast up and in with the bumper supporting some of the weight.

Evan, the young man who takes care of mowing the lawn, saw the old man struggling and came across the street and helped me out.  We got the thing up and almost in, but my reckoning on the size of the machine was half an inch off.  There was no way to get the chipper in without also disassembling part of the engine.  And in retrospect, even though it seemed unusually well sealed, there was a pretty good chance oil would have spilled out onto the tarp in any case.  What are the odds that the oil would have stayed on the tarp?

“Let me help,” called out Evan’s Dad from across the street.  “Let’s put it in my truck.”  A truly fabulous idea.  He is a brilliant man.  Shortly afterward, the chipper was in my garage.   

The next day, after only 45 minutes of minor spark plug cleaning, fresh gas, and a fuel-to-air mixture adjustment,  the motor was running far better than expected for a machine that hadn’t been used in at least five years.  And only 20 of those minutes were spent in frustration because the run/stop switch was not in the proper position.  I engaged the belt driving the chipping mechanism and promptly stalled the motor.  I had forgotten that the inertia of the chipping mechanism was far too great for the motor to set in motion all at once.  A series of “bumps” by the drive belt against the drivewheel was needed to get things moving a little at a time.

Wood “chipper” is a misnomer.  Yes, it has a chipping mechanism with a rotating blade for whittling down larger branches, but if that was the only mechanism for creating mulch,  it would take weeks to dispatch a small pile.  So the main attraction is a heavy metal contraption that resembles a Ferris Wheel with swinging metal mayhem makers.  Rotating at a high rate of speed, it sucks branches in, smashing sticks into a woody pulp.  

Uuuuh...Danger.

I said, "DANGER !!!"

There is a line on the entry chute that is labeled, “No hands below this line.”  I wondered if it meant that you should not put your hands below the line, or if you'd have no hands if you did.  And you’d be lucky if you only had no hands.  This is one scary machine.  Not quite as scary as running a chainsaw on a wet roof, but still not a machine to trifle with.  One does not need a vivid imagination to envision the potential consequences.

"Look, Ma!  No hands!"

So I set to chipping with a tarp under the oft-clogged exit chute to create mulch for Mary’s garden.  And Mary’s garden is located, you guessed it, around the trees in the back yard from which all the branches had been cut, so the tarp was employed to drag the mulch back to the locations where the branches had fallen.  For portions of three days I chipped and chopped, hacking smaller limbs of branches too big for the chipper with my hatchet, fully respecting the ancient safety rules supplied by the Boy Scouts for such a device.  Then I dragged the mulch to the back yard and shoveled it off the tarp with a snow shovel, carefully placing it so as not to impede the emergence of the hosta.  I didn’t need to run for exercise on any of those days.  

Though it wasn’t easy work, it was very nice be amid the falling petals from the crabapple tree.  And there was ample opportunity for staving off mental decline with continued learning about mechanical devices.  I learned how to disassemble the machine when overly large sticks jam the safety screen on the exit chute.  I became aware that the screen is not hard to bend back into shape even though it is made from heavy gauge steel.  And I received a refresher on the transfer of inertia.  The point was driven home when the tip of a long, flexible fresh-cut branch whipped unexpectedly as it was sucked into the machine.  Such a stick can raise a really nice welt right next to where the safety glasses end.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Just before I finished, the wind came up and blew a dead branch off one of the front yard maples.  It fell directly into the chute and was mulch in no time.  I had to take it as a sign of approval from the trees.

This technique is not recommended.

Good to have the job done.  But a word of warning to residents of Rochester, NY.  You may think that correlation is not causation, but both other times I had the trees trimmed, an ice storm followed.  Beware the winter of 2014!