Using a Stumpgrinder
2006.10.28
Nate and I got up early this morning and went to rent a stumpgrinder from Interstate Rentals. About $90 for four hours with a 13-hp machine. The guy who helped us load it into the truck told us it would take maybe half an hour to grind the stump. Yeah right, we said. However, this thing is a powerful beast… with nasty big pointy teeth.
So we wheeled it over to the stump and tried our first pass. That’s the royal we, of course, because Nate was doing this, while I supervised (with appropriate “supervisor” hard hat). A little uneasy at first, kinda tricky, but he soon got the hang of it.
I tried it for a few minutes, and it’s not so bad to rock the thing back and forth. The hard part is repositioning it, you have to get a running start, especially when the top of the stump is relatively high off the ground like this one was.
Things were going well, until Nate got a little too exuberant about pushing the machine forward, and pushed the spinning grinder right into the chainlink fence… ooooops.
Anyway, we kept working at it. It’s really a two-man job, because when you’re operating the thing, you can’t see where the chipper wheel is. So I had to stand towards the front/side and help direct Nate where to go with it. Certainly glad to have the eye protection, because I was getting showered with woodchip shrapnel at times.
It was interesting going through the stump, how some areas were more decayed (or at least more wet), and went down easy, and other areas were really tough. I could see the difference in the color of the wood, and Nate said he could feel it through the machine. Occasionally it got bogged down and almost killed the engine. And it fell down in the pit a few times… When we got pretty far down, especially on one side, the wood was so soft I was actually cutting off chunks of it with a shovel, and we could see the moisture in it.
I think the hardest part of the whole thing (heh, easy for me to say, I didn’t run the machine much) was getting it back into the truck. They didn’t give us any ramps, so we made some out of some old cedar fence boards. We weren’t sure we were gonna make it, but we finally managed to get it back up there.
So I think it took us about two and a half hours, but it was a pretty big stump, and we took it down further than we probably really needed to. In fact I don’t think there’s much left, the grinder was plowing dirt in the bottom of the pit.
Stump, what stump?
Tree Stump