Jan,s little chunker

I have redone the chunker a bit as JO said, have put ball bearings behind the disc as support, and a support on both sides of the knife.
It cuts the wood better now, but makes very small pieces, it looks like it breaks the pieces, the wood is dry so I do not know if I can make it cut better?

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How thick is the blade metal? I’ve wondered if I could use part of a propane tank for my blade or if that’s too thin.

Beautiful! I like it very much! Happy chunking! :smiley:

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I made a blade out of a 4mm (0.16 ") sheet, I think Wayne had it in his chunker.
When you cut dry boards, do they look like mine too, look like it is crushing the wood?

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That’s how my dry wood looks most of the time, but if you rotated it 90° some of it will shear better. The grain direction seems to make a big difference on how my chunker cuts

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Thanks for the answer Marcus, yes I also noticed that they cut better sometimes when I turned the piece 90 degrees

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Sing a little song to yourself:
Dry wood I will saw.
Wet and sap filled wood I can shear.

Proof?
Take a good pair of long handled pruning loppers. Go out and do brush and trees thinning pruning. Much, much harder to lop the dry, dead branches versus the live green branches.
Break/bend your lopper handles. Ruin your lopper jaws alignments.
Cuss and swear at yourself a lot.
Mutter, " I am so stupid." Down buying a new set of loppers.
Do: Living and Learning.
Steve Unruh

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Thanks Steve, I could not help but laugh a little to myself. :+1: :+1:

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Jan, l think you will see this is the best possible wood you can have!

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I chunked last night and left the wood outside to get some moisture on it. Yes chunked a lot easier, I can’t wait to get some actual green wood to try. I have found my chunker can lop a pine 2x4 that is dry, I think I’ll be able to chunk some pretty large green stuff. I think a lot of my slivers/small chunks are from being dry the wood fractures so much it can fall apart. So with damp wood yesterday I chunked everything a little bigger and got a lot less slivers. I screen it all as well and less then half a bag of the fines from 12 bags of chunks. Where before I filled a trashcan probably close to 6 bags of fines from 16 bags of chunks

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I like that your design required you to have the angle iron frame over the top of the cutter. Something to grab if you slipped forward. I worry about Marcus every time I see his chunking videos.

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Haha thanks for the concern Tom, it’s going to get some safety’s and some other changes soon, just need to fix my ammo box first

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I hope so, but wondering if it will not be a bridge

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Marcus, I have always used a big scoop shovel and tried not to shovel to the bottom very hard to do ,and ending up with fines in my wood mix.
Jakob told me to use a 5 or 6 prong hay fork to shovel the wood up with. The fines fall through. Watch Wayne’s video on this when he is chunking wood and moving the wood into a pile. It is now my new way to do it. Any smaller wood that falls out becomes charcoal in my retort.
If us northerns do this we are consider lazy by skipping some steps, but when the southerns do it, it’s being efficient. Lol
Bob

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Very satisfying chunking video Jan. As always with chunking videos, I just had to watch it over and over again. There’s nothing like wood porn.

Haha! Bob, that’s funny :smile:

Oh, and @KristijanL ! I saw your mustache pop up. You’ve been quiet for a while. How’s the covid situation progressing at your house?

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Just chunk them a little longer for some bigger pieces mixed in.
Bob

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Back a decade ago I was at APL in Berkeley CA to work on their Olathe disk chipper. Once I got i running, we put a 2"x10" pine plank into it. Out put was small and a lot of tooth pick like splinters. The dried lumber would break into many pieces even though I sharpened the hard knives and shimmed the anvil to be very close to the knives.
Chipping wood that had more moisture in it worked better. Green wood worked very nice. The green wood cut so much nicer that it was what was desired to be used.

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