Thank you for the video. I do believe your chunker eats smaller splits just as well as longer pieces of lumber. That is a thing of beauty. My tractor is a Kubota B2630 with a 3 cyliner diesel and either 26 or 30 HP (not sure which one). Do you think it would have enough muscle to power your chunker?
Hey John,
The little tractor I’m pulling the chunker with is two cyl and rated 20 HP but I doubt I am using but about 5 of the horses.
What really helps the chunking is the fly wheel action. I am running the motor at 800 rpm and the PTO is turning 400 rpm and if you can hear in the video it doesn’t seem to notice this pine wood.
When I’m chucking long material I can run the rpms on up and get something done but just too dangerous working fast with the short wood.
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looks like you might have to stop once in a while and count your fingers to see if they are all there.
Chunker design…
Many years ago I worked at a scrap yard where we shredded cars… It was a huge boulder crusher that would take large rocks and turn them into gravel.
With respect to cars… You would feed one in and out would come chunks.
It had a huge feeder that entered into a steel chamber with a rotating concrete cyclinder thing… It has ear lobe like sections of concrete that would hang off a pin. As it spun, the offset earlobes of concrete would hammer away at whatever was fed in there.
If one would take a similar design and feed wood into it… The same results should occur. However it would never require sharpening since there are no blades.
If I find a design… I will post one.
++Todd
Hey Jim,
Any one that hand feeds alligators on the day to day basis and are comfortable with it, should also be comfortable around this thang.
Hey Todd May
History Channel just put up a good segment of the “worlds Largest scrap shredder” in IL I think. Needed a constant speed 5000 hp input. Showed your swinging hammer mill lobs very well. These will first crush compact, then tear into sreds the feed material - just want you want for smelting input stocks.
Prepped wood for gasification you do not want to hammer crush or even carbide tooth grind size reduce. Too much wood sizing deferentials with long stringy material flow clogging shreds. Worse, this will crush and close off the end grain cuts. For good gasification gases exchanging flows you want to either blade or shear cut, not crush, or minimal crush the wood cells. Ask any Good salad maker or ER/wound Doc about theses differences. Crush the wood cells then might as well fine grind and pelletize or briquette the woodfuel stocks and gasifiy that. Whole different gasifier beast needed then to be able to eat well these kinds of densified fuel stocks.
Regards
Steve Unruh
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i have one of those wood chunken alligaters on the list, just have to get the time to build it have all the junk to build with and plenty of wood to chunk. have a band mill that produces about 10,000 lb of slabs a day,prenstly sale them to royal oak. ill have plenty of wood for anyone that comes this way.
i love that wood chunken alligater but if i was going to feed it small wood i think i make a adapter tube so i can just push the wood in to the tube and use the next log to push the first one in to the chunkier 
i like my hands and i dont need my pets eating them off haha… thanks for the video i also was wondering how well it wud do with the short wood now i know not to bad!!
Good Morning Ryan and Jim,
I was implying that I am never comfortable feeding the last piece of wood to this contraption. Only someone that lives very dangerous might be. (Example hand feeding gators)
I have never been very close to a gator but for one exception in the mid 60s on a very HOT and HUMID field in Gainesville Florida. I had the opportunity to bust a few of their heads and vice versa.
Often with that last piece I can push it on in with the next.
I think I see a way to automate your chunker…or at least make it hands free. Your sheer is only about half of the circumference of the wheel it’s mounted to. The rest of the rotation is open space to feed the wood in, correct? What if you extended the metal from the sheer to extend all the way around the wheel but have the metal spiral inwards toward the center. The knife now becomes a back stop and sets the depth of the cut automatically. If the feeding hopper is placed on the top of the machine rather than the side, gravity would feed the wood. This could be set up for a particular cut depth or could be made adjustable pretty easily.
I wish I could add pictures in here…I’m not sure I’m doing a good job describing this.
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Hey Matthew,
Sorry to be so long with a reply. I had to make a trip into B’ham for Christmas items for the youngun. Very heavy traffic lined up on both sides of the truck but no one knew I was DOW.
I was going back through and hunting for some old photos but I couldn’t find them but below are some showing the wood chunker when I had it as a chipper. I had a 70 HP tractor running the chip blade at 300-400 rpm. I only use small strips and let them gravity feed. I quit using it this way because wood chunks seem to work best with the gasifier and also the strips where just a portion of the waste wood I needed to utilize. I tried to put big timber in it but it didn’t work out so well.
I don’t use a stop on the chucker because if I am chucking strips I may want them 4-5 inches long ( I may have a hand full at a time 6 or 8 ) If I am feeding it a 2-3 inch piece of wood I may cut those 2 inches long. If I get on up to 4 inch material I may cut those at 1 inch.
The reason I removed my gravity shoot was because some of the slabs over 16 feet long and the area of a 2x6 or a 2x8 and heavy. but buy holding from one end and guiding not so bad. Just getting a 50 pound slab up in the gravity shoot would be tough.
As long as I am chucking green soft wood and even hard wood if not too big I can use every cycle of the blade rotation. If I feed it a big piece of hickory or oak I may have to skip a cycle to let the fly wheel catch up. With 4 inch hickory cutting every cycle I can stall it but no problem if I skip a cycle .
You are correct, there are a lot of issues on that thing that could be improved but as it is makes more wood blocks in a hour than I can drive up in a month.
http://jamclasses.drbanjo.com/static/dimages/IMG_6546.jpg
Nice photos, Mr.Keith.
I am planning to try a chute similar to this when I get around to making my mini chunker to process rip waste from a hardwood flooring mill. Those scraps are about the size of a bean pole - about 1.5"x3/4" … much smaller than the 1.5"x3-4.25" pieces I have seen you run through your machine. You can make the pile quick if you are feeding 3-4 wet slabs at once like you do in demo mode !
My brother sent me this video.
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Nice!!!
leaves into wood pellets that will work how?? I have a lot of things that I might be able to feed to a pellet machine if I new they would go in
I am going to get started into this and see there is a lot of knowledge and advice here. We have a sawmill, dry kiln metal fabrication set up in one place. I log with my horses and farm as well and have managed to get the fuel guys to stay away this past year. I see where I can pelletize almost anything and am looking for advice as to how to do some of these things
Good Morning and welcome aboard sir.
Nice looking team in your picture.
Why would you need to pelletize ? Small material can be mixed in to be used in a gasifier also.
im the new guy stop me before I royally screw up lol
this is only a portion as to what I have for wood there are 6 tractor trailerloads down right now that we are trying to get at least buched before the snow comes back
Wayne Keith, because many of us cannot find 4" chunks of wood…We have only the
weeds and leaves. Pellets makes it work even for us.
You haul your dead fall trees and chunk and chunk them into fuel…
Raking the leaves and pellitizing them allows use to partisipate in this
The same energy that you put into chopping your wood, is the same
energy to pellitize grass clippings.
And I don’t have to lift a 50# limb into the chompper.
The time and effort is the same. and the pellets flows so well.
And they dry so much more effectivly .and quickly
Why would you pellitize your fuel; Because it makes it
doable for everyone
Just a thought, Daucie